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Ireland / 1851 Irish Census Search Confusion
« on: Monday 05 June 17 20:50 BST (UK) »
I've hit a snag in my genealogy work, in that I seem to have stumbled across a relative that was either in two places at once, or I've been completely wrong about a branch of my family tree.
My second great-grandfather, Charles McCahill, was from a townland called Drimalost (formerly Drumnalost) in Co. Donegal. I was very fortunate in that I have his family's information from 1851, because his brother, Peter, submitted a search request for the 1851 census return, in which he named his parents as William and Catherine, and scribbled the names and rough ages for all of his siblings in the margin. According to the National Archives, these census searches were usually carried out by people who wanted to collect a pension in Ireland, as the census records were considered to be a reliable proof of age.
Now I'd taken some of those siblings' names and traced them - I thought reliably - to a town in Lancaster Co., Pennsylvania, in the United States. The problem began when I realized that, among those McCahills, now McCalls, in Pennsylvania, there was a Peter too.
This Peter has a death certificate that seems to match what I know about my family in some respects, but not in others:
tl;dr What reason would someone have had to do a search of the 1851 Irish census if they weren't collecting an Irish pension, or even living in Ireland?
My second great-grandfather, Charles McCahill, was from a townland called Drimalost (formerly Drumnalost) in Co. Donegal. I was very fortunate in that I have his family's information from 1851, because his brother, Peter, submitted a search request for the 1851 census return, in which he named his parents as William and Catherine, and scribbled the names and rough ages for all of his siblings in the margin. According to the National Archives, these census searches were usually carried out by people who wanted to collect a pension in Ireland, as the census records were considered to be a reliable proof of age.
Now I'd taken some of those siblings' names and traced them - I thought reliably - to a town in Lancaster Co., Pennsylvania, in the United States. The problem began when I realized that, among those McCahills, now McCalls, in Pennsylvania, there was a Peter too.
This Peter has a death certificate that seems to match what I know about my family in some respects, but not in others:
- Pennsylvanian Peter also had a father named William, but his mother is given as Mary Thomas. (Some of the other McCalls in the same town listed their parents as William McCall and Catherine Thomas).
- The birthplace of his parents is given as "Drimloost," but his own birthplace is given as "County Mead."
- His birth year is given as 1852. US censuses seems to suggest that he may have even thought he was younger, as his birth year was typically listed as anywhere from 1854-8.
tl;dr What reason would someone have had to do a search of the 1851 Irish census if they weren't collecting an Irish pension, or even living in Ireland?