John Fagan / Mary McFarland -- Needle in a haystack?

[aghadowey]

Won't help you getting back to John's parents & an Irish connection but seeing Mamaroneck- have you searched for your family in Fulton Postcards newspaper site yet?

[shellyesq]

Do you have an obituary for John?  If it mentions siblings' names, that could be helpful.

There is a possible match for his will in the indexes on the Westchester Co. Archives site.  http://archives.westchestergov.com/browse-all-online-indexes-main/surrogates-index

[kfagan]

aghadowey -- Thanks!  I was not aware of that website previously.  It's a bit clunky, but a wonderful (free) resource.  I scoured the newspapers from around Mamaroneck for some time after his date of death and unfortunately didn't find an obituary.  It looks like there were some other newspapers in the area that I haven't been able to find digitally so it looks like I may need to make a trip to the library in Mamaroneck and/or the New York State library in Albany to see if I can track something down.

shellyesq -- Thanks for the tip-off!  The match for a will for John H. Fagan in 1933 seems to be a good fit.  He died in August of 1932, but I imagine it could very well be that his will was not resolved until the following year.  I'm sending in a request for the docs in the morning... I will keep my fingers crossed that there is some helpful information contained therein.

[shellyesq]

You're welcome!

This might be a helpful list of old Westchester Co. newspapers & where they are held - http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nywcgs/wcgsrs10.htm 

I live in Westchester Co. & have Fagans in my husband's line (although his are Russians who changed their name), so if I can give any further guidance, feel free to ask.

[kfagan]

Just a quick update...

I obtained a copy of John Henry Fagan's will, but unfortunately he simply leaves everything to his wife with no mention of any other relatives whatsoever.

I also was able to track down a death announcement from the New York Times.  It is quite short and only lists the date of his death and the names of his wife and children. 

So... I'm still stuck.  My next steps are:

#1 - Dig into newspaper archives to see if there is a more substantial obituary published in one of the local papers where he died in Westchester County. 

#2 - I'm also coming to grips with the fact that I'm going to have to brute-force lookup microfilm death certificates in NYC for the dozens and dozens of John and Mary Fagans (of an appropriate age) to see if I get lucky somehow.

[shellyesq]

www.italiangen.org has a death index for New York City, if that's where they definitely died. 

[kfagan]

I'm back looking for some advice...

In an attempt to get past my brick wall, I started building "test" trees of families showing up in the 1870 Census that seemed like they could contain my G-G-Grandfather John H. Fagan (b. 1859).  I believe I may be onto something, but would love anyone's thoughts on whether I have enough evidence to feel confident about this?

The death certificate for my G-G-GF listed his parents as John Fagan and Mary McFarland.

From the 1870 census I was able to identify a family of parents John and Mary Fagan with children Catherine, John, Michael, and James.  The birth year of John matched up with my G-G-GF and so I've been digging around on the rest of the siblings to see what I could find.

In that process, I was able to find two marriage certificates for Michael -- both list his father as "John H. Fagan".  The first marriage cert. lists his mother as "Mary E. Partland" and the second lists his mother as "Mary McPartland".  I also found a Social Security application listing his mother as a "McPartland'.

Am I crazy to think that this Mary McFarland/Partland/McPartland could be all be one and the same?  I've seen some references on the web saying that these names are related and I figure it would be an easy error to be made on my G-G-GF's death certificate to put "McFarland"?

Anyway -- I've got some more digging to do to find more documents on Michael as well as the other siblings, but I wanted to get an idea if anyone thinks I'm on the right track?