Month: March 2016

I have spent the evening looking at lateral parts of my tree. Specifically the family of John Bourke and Mary Jennings. Their daughter, Bridget, was Walter Basquill’s second wife and my great-great grandmother.

Some folks just follow their tree up and ignore the sideways growth. I think that’s a huge mistake. Looking at siblings and even cousins gives important context and can help solve mysteries. Like the mystery I like to call the Myles Basquill Problem.

I can find no trace of any such person. My grandma said that her mother talked about a sibling named Myles, who had drowned in a pond. And that is literally all I know. I don’t know when he was born or how old he was when he died. I don’t even where he fell in the order of children or which of Walter’s wives was his mother.

I have two clues, though. Looking at Bridget Bourke’s family, she had a brother named Myles, as well as uncles named Myles on both her mother’s and father’s sides. It’s possible that Walter’s first wife, Mary McHugh, also had relatives named Myles, but as yet I have no way of tracking that because I don’t know who her parents were. I think, though, that it would make a certain amount of sense if Myles were my great grandma Nell’s younger brother. That sort of thing would haunt you for life, right? I get the impression that she didn’t talk much about her life in Ireland, but she did mention Myles. And she did so in a way that made an impression on my grandma.

I wouldn’t have put those two clues into the same context, if I hadn’t been researching laterally, looking at my great-great grandmother’s family.

But that all leads me to a new problem.

I can find baptismal records for a bunch of Bridget’s siblings, but not one for her. I had a baptismal date for her, but the source for that was Pat Deese’s transcripts. Those are all hosted on Rootsweb, which is down right now and will be for at least another week. Normally that wouldn’t be a big deal, but the baptismal date I have for Bridget is in conflict with the baptism of one of her siblings. Both dates cannot be true. Something fishy is going on, but I can’t figure out what.

Castlebar | Microfilm 04214 / 03 page 79

“[20 Feb 1871] Walter Basquill to Mary M Hugh
P[resent] Michael Basquill & Mary Cannon J.R.”

I was telling my mom about some of the information packed into these Irish Catholic parish registers. It doesn’t look like much, but you have the date, the who, the witnesses (including Walter’s father, Michael), the initials of the priest who married them, and over in the right margin the amount they paid to be married.

And then every so often you will find a notation that everything was settled up to date, meaning that all fees had been collected. So these registers functioned as part of the parish bookkeeping system, as well as a record of who was baptized and married.

If you go through them page by page, instead of relying on the indexes, you will also find that each priest would make entries for his own records, then settle up, and then the next priest would have his turn with the register to enter his information. The handwriting varies section by section, as well as (sometimes) the geographical area covered. So the J. R. who married Walter and Mary will likely be identifiable, if I look more closely at this volume of the marriage register.

I mention all of this because it seems like a goldmine to me, after the dearth of records available for pre-civil registration Ireland (1864). Yet someone in one of my genealogy groups took a look at the registers and declared that they were useless, because they’re just a bunch of names and dates. Wellokaythen.

(This is Walter’s marriage to his first wife, by the way. I can’t find an entry in the parish registers for his second marriage, the one to my great-great grandmother Bridget Bourke. That was after civil registration began, though, so there should be a marriage certificate available.)