Category: Genealogy

The officer in this story was Louis Basquill. I can’t recall off the top of my head which family he belongs to. He was born in County Mayo and emigrated to the US and lived the rest of his life in St. Louis, Missouri. He never married.

(ETA: He’s Louis F. Basquill, son of James Basquill and Mary Walsh, baptized 15 Feb 1854 in Killawalla, Ballintober Parish, County Mayo, Ireland. Baptismal sponsors James Jennings and Bridget Kelly.)

You have to admire someone who has the brass ovaries to lob pancakes at the first lady.

From: Decatur Daily Republican (Decatur IL) 10 Oct 1887

An Over-Zealous Prosecution.
Mrs. Annie Sax, the Pancake-Thrower, Fined Fifty Dollars.

St. Louis, Oct. 19.–The case of Mrs. Annie Sax, she of the griddle-cake-hurling propensity, came up in due course before Judge White in the Second District Police Court yesterday morning. The habitues of the police court were there in the usual proportion, but the great rank and file who manifested a temporary interest in the foolish caper were conspicuous by their absence, and had doubtless forgotten the existence of a woman who could throw a piece of fried dough fifty feet. The offense, as chronicled at the time, consisted in the eccentric manner in which Mrs. Annie Sax presented her last pancake to Mrs. Cleveland on Tuesday afternoon of Fair week, while the presidential party were driving by the “house of Comfort.” The greasy dodger struck Mrs. Cleveland on the sleeve, making a slight stain. Mayor Francis, without waiting for a fork, dropped the dyspeptic compound in the road. Meanwhile the heroic Annie had fled into the seclusion of a neighboring booth, whence Officer Basquill, a minion of the law, dragged her forth a few minutes later.

P.S. Lanham, Officer Basquill and Charles Klotter were examined, in turn. The fair defendant was given a hearing, and entered a general denial that she had intended to throw the morsel at any one. Mr. Lanham was recalled at this point and testified that Mrs. Sax had remarked that she wanted Mrs. Cleveland to know what St. Louis pancakes were made of, or words of similar import. The defendant here lost her naturally sweet temper, and was only prevented from giving vent to her indignation by the deputy marshal.

After the customary brilliant legal pyrotechnics on the part of Prosecuting Attorney Adams and Mr. Watson, defendant’s counsel, Judge White participated in the catechizing sufficiently to satisfy himself that Mrs. Sax had been guilty of “violent, tumultuous, offensive or obstreperous” conduct, as well as of a display of supreme disregard for the eternal fitness of things, in making the first lady of the land a target for her unerring aim. He accordingly fined her $50, from which decision Mr. Watson will take an appeal.

From: Daily Inter Ocean, Chicago IL, 22 Nov 1880, page 8, column 7

“BASQUILL — William Basquill, aged 64 years. Funeral from his son-n-law’s, Thomas Raycraft, residence 20 Courtland street, to-day, at 10 o’clock, to the Church of the Annunciation, thence by cars to Calvary Cemetery.
San Francisco papers please copy.”

Here’s another puzzle. I had a vague recollection that, while every person with an Ancestry tree for the family I’ve been working on thinks the daughter, Bridget, married a man named Thomas Raycraft and moved to Chicago, I had doubts. But I couldn’t remember why.

This is why. I suspect, but cannot and may not ever be able to prove, that the William mentioned below is the brother of Patrick (who married Ellen Cannon and settled in Hamilton, Ontario), Nicholas (who married Eliza Hawkshaw and settled in Jackson, Ohio), and John (who married Margaret Daughan and settled in Jackson, Ohio). William and his wife, Ann, showed up in the US at about the same time that Patrick and Ellen appeared in Ontario. They appear and disappear and reappear then drop off the radar until William dies in 1880.

According to this death notice, Thomas Raycraft was William’s son-in-law. That means that the Bridget who married him cannot be the daughter of Patrick Basquill and Ellen Cannon, right? I have no idea what happened to Patrick’s Bridget. I haven’t even started digging into this mess.

Also notice that there is a request for San Francisco papers to please copy. I think this means that the John Basquill registered to vote in San Francisco in 1877 is the son of William and Anne, NOT Patrick and Ellen. It would make sense, if William’s son were in San Francisco in 1880, that the family would want to get word to him of his father’s death, and this might be the quickest method of doing so.

I thought I’d spend the next few days working on Bridget, but maybe not, if she’s not the droid I’m looking for.

screen shot from Ancestry

This is just a screenshot from a stubby little branch I uploaded to Ancestry[1]. It’s public, but I think you have to have an Ancestry membership to view trees. Hmf. I wanted to share it here, though, and this seemed the best work around.

Some very kind soul left a comment with a link to a page on the Canadian Headstones website. It was a couple of months ago, and I did look at it at the time and filed it away mentally. But I didn’t look carefully. For shame!

Well today I finally took a closer look, and it solved several little mysteries surrounding this family of Basquills in Canada I’d been fussing with on and off for ages.  It is not only the grave marker for Patrick and Ellen and their three sons, but the transcription of the inscription includes Ellen’s maiden name. So now I have death dates for the parents and three sons, plus a hope of finding the marriage entry in the Irish Catholic parish registers (for now I’m assuming they married before emigrating).

And for context, this family was in Canada by the time of the 1851 census. They are most likely famine emigrants.

——————————————–
1. I’m doing my work in Legacy Family Tree, and I’m being pretty obsessive about how I source things. Unfortunately, the only way to get my info into an Ancestry tree is to export a gedcom, and that does goofy things with some of the data. For a start, event addresses. If you handle them “properly” in Legacy, they’re entered in their own screen, not in the event description field. But when you do it properly, those addresses are lost when creating a gedcom. That means the tree at Ancestry is missing street addresses and burial locations. That information is there, in my master tree, but there’s not an easy way to automatically export it to Ancestry.

Secondly, some of the Legacy source citation information is mapped to funky fields when exported to a gedcom. It’s mostly there (some fields are truncated), but it may not make much sense when you look at the sources on the Ancestry tree.

Basically, exporting a gedcom from Legacy and importing it to an Ancestry tree is an exercise in frustration. I need to find a better way to share information.

1884 Hamilton, Ontario Directory

You might be forgiven for not realizing that the second entry is for Ellen, widow of Patrick Basquill. I mean, how could you even guess such a thing might be possible?

I’ve spent (or maybe wasted) the entire day tracking this family through the Hamilton directories. Manually. City directories are awesome for tracking people. It’s tedious to do so, though, because the image quality is not great and the OCR is therefore really, really, really bad. Relying on even a smartypants search of the index only returned five entries for Ellen. By looking at each year’s directory, I was able to find a bunch more entries for her. Why would a sane person do such a thing? Because it gives me an idea of when her husband, Patrick, died. He was present in the 1853 Hamilton directory (under the name Patrick Bassfield), but by 1858 Ellen was being described as his widow. So now I know he died sometime between 1853-1858.

This family group had a daughter, Bridget, who allegedly moved to Chicago and married a man named Thomas Raycroft (I have doubts about that). But the exciting thing to me is that one of the sons was described in a Jackson County, Ohio newspaper entry as a visiting nephew to one of the two Basquill families living there (brothers Nicholas and John). And? I am pretty sure, when I take a closer look, that one of those brothers’ children went to the east coast to visit a Basquill relative that I have proved is one of “my” Basquills. So by fitting all these weird pieces together, I think I can finally connect the Hamilton Basquills with my own family.

But holy crap is it ever tedious.

Anne Baskwill born 19 November 1876, Lackaun, District of Westport No.1, Union of Westport, County of Mayo, Ireland
Father John Baskvill
Mother Mary Kerrigan
from: Irish Civil Registers (births)

Anne of John Basquille {and} Mary Kerrigan
[sponsors] John Kerrigan [and] Ellen Shanly
from: Catholic Parish Baptismal Register, Aughagower Parish 1876

Anne was baptized on the 18 Oct 1876, but that doesn’t fit with the civil register entry, which lists her birth date as 19 Nov 1876. I think we can all agree that it’s impossible to be baptized before one’s birth, so we have some ‘splaining to do.

What I think must have happened is that she was born in October, but the birth was registered late (6 Dec 1876). That lapse in time was either by chance or design. Possibly the mother, who registered the birth, forgot the date, or she could have deliberately given an incorrect date. This sometimes happened when a family did not have enough money to pay the birth registration fee. The registration was put off, until the funds were acquired, and then the birth was registered with a fudged, later date, in order to prevent paying a late registration fine.

We can never know what exactly happened, but I find it more likely that the delayed registration is incorrect than that the Church got the baptismal date incorrect.

In cases like this, where there is a conflict between an earlier baptismal date and a later birth date, I think it’s best to use the baptism date as a birth date. In this part of Ireland, at this time, folks baptized their children pretty soon after birth, so I feel this is a reasonable solution to the problem.

In addition to my own family genealogy, I’ve been working on a One Name Study of the Basquill family. In sort, I’m collecting all the Basquills and trying to fit them together. Sometimes it’s easy going, but other times there just isn’t enough information to hold two threads together.

This is the situation I found myself in with the family of John Basquille and Mary Kerrigan. They aren’t “my” Basquills (as far as I know, at this point), so when I hit a brick wall with them, I wrote up some brief notes and let it go.

Today, as I was looking through some of the entries in the Irish death registry, I came across this record for a John Basquill of Lackaun who died in 1898 of influenza. He had been married, with his wife preceding him in death. Do you have any idea how many John Basquills there are in my one name study database? Even just looking at the ones in the Lackaun area with daughters named Bridget, it was impossible for me to figure out where he belonged.

But then I found that note I’d made.

I’d wondered why the four youngest children had emigrated to the US when they did. I didn’t know for sure that their parents had died, but I couldn’t find anyone that fit their description in the 1901 or 1911 censuses. Emigrating seemed like an ill-advised venture, though, given that the kids did not fair especially well once they got here. One son ended up spending time in Willard State Hospital. (Yes, that Willard State Hospital.)

I would need more confirmation before I’d want to unequivocally state that this John Basquill is that John Basquille, but as a working theory, I’m going to go with it.

I don’t think I mentioned that the Irish birth, marriage, and death index images are now online and available for free. You can search them at IrishGenealogy.ie. These are just the registry entries, but they have most of the information you’d find in the official certificates. They’re a goldmine, if you have Irish ancestors.

The page above is from the death register and contains the entry for my great-great grandfather, Walter Basquill. If I’m deciphering the handwriting properly, he died of infirmity and cardiac weakness.

This is a really good deal, for those who want to try out Findmypast.  They’re offering a 50% off flash sale on their monthly world subscription.  So for US$9.98 you can check out their worldwide collections, including the 1939 Register.

Just be aware that 1) the sale ends at midnight this Sunday and 2) your subscription will auto-renew at the regular monthly rate if you don’t turn off that option in your account settings.

(Via Irish Genealogy News. Follow the appropriate link at the bottom of the post to navigate to the sale page for your geographic area.)

Ireland, electoral registers 1885-1886
Constituency in full: Parliamentary County of Mayo, West Division
Constituency: P C of Mayo, West Division
Year: 1885
Register type: Parliamentary County
Polling district or place: Castlebar
County: Mayo
Country: Ireland
Archive: The British Library
Archive reference: SPR.Mic.P.112/BL.I.E.16/4
Image number: 14
Record set: Ireland, electoral registers 1885-1886

As far as I can tell, there is no way to actually find this source at Findmypast, besides locating it in the titles list. It does not appear to be indexed in any way. It’s possible I’m missing something obvious, of course. The locations do seem to be indexed, though, and within each location, you can page through the alphabetized list of names.

Great-great grandfather Walter can be found in the Castlebar register, on line 29. And look! His name is spelled here with an -e. His father, Michael, died in 1884, so he won’t be found in the 1885 electoral register.