George & Henrietta Ketchley & William E Murphy in Boston - Help with US records

[AlanBoyd]

There is another tenuous connection between the Quinn family identified in #5 (living in Crown Street) and the marriage of Henrietta Quinn.

Henrietta gives her address in 1878 as Prince Edwin Street.

In 1877 a man called Thomas Briscoe Price was found guilty of (accidentally) shooting Barbara Jane Quinn who is a Quinn daughter in the 1871 census. In the same year Barbara Jane Quinn's younger brother Joseph Alto Columba Quinn (also listed in the 1871 census record) was imprisoned for writing threatening letters to Mr Justice Henry Hawkins, the judge in the Price case. The details are all rather confusing but it emerges that at the time of the offence he was living in his mother's house at 93 Prince Edwin Street.

In the 1871 census, 93 Prince Edwin Street is recorded as 'shops' with no occupiers recorded. In 1861 the address is simply not recorded.

[jorose]

The records for the Massachusetts Infant Asylum, if someone can find young Henrietta in them, may be your best source of info.
The last link has an email to contact the archives; if they can't help directly you can probably get someone locally to go on your behalf.

https://search.worldcat.org/title/massachusetts-infant-asylum-case-histories-1871-1879/oclc/319632752
https://www.jphs.org/jphs-archives#gsc.tab=0
https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/collection/p15774coll8/id/239/rec/2

[ValCharlie]

Hello and thank you for all your help with this.

I will dig around for those Quinn's in Liverpool as mentioned by Alan Boyd.

My instinct is that Henrietta's marriage certificate contains a few untruths (including maybe her age) but I need to prove it! There is a record of a marriage licence applied for by George, presumably on the grounds that he was a mariner and headed out of town but it contains no further info unless I am missing something.

George also seems to be with his parents in the 1871 census but if he was serving in the RN in Portsmouth and they lived there then maybe he went home often? His Naval record is also online but it is blank. George appears to have signed up for 10 years in the navy in 1870 but his record is blank. His 1878 marriage in Liverpool is within this 10 year period. Would a marriage certificate differentiate between a Naval rating and a merchant seaman? How would the wife of either a navy sailor or a merchant seaman also get to the USA? I am asking so that I know where to look.
 
I also suspect that she and George abandoned their daughter. Are the Boston death records for this period online? It appears not. As with the Infant Asylum, would I need to ask for someone in Boston to kindly go and look for this information? If so, how do I go about this?

So..... I will check out Liverpool and wait to hear more about Boston. Thank you.

[shellyesq]

Yes, Massachusetts death records are online for 1841-1915 and 1921-1924.  https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/1463156  There is a searchable index for 1841-1910 here - https://www.sec.state.ma.us/vitalrecordssearch/VitalRecordsSearch.aspx

[ValCharlie]

So, thanks to his eagle eyes and that census record found by Alan Boyd, I have found the UK (and Irish) end of Henrietta's story.
Barbara Jane Quinn (sometimes with Adeline thrown in) was Henrietta's oldest sister and James Alto was her brother. The family were Irish Roman Catholics and, on their mother's admission in court after Barbara Jane's death, sometimes their confirmation names were used. The Margaret on the 1871 record is Henrietta, so she was born around 1855 in Ireland.
The inquest into Barbara Jane's death was reported at length in the English press at the time and is summarised here, although there are some inaccuracies in this summary. https://victorian-supersleuth.com/the-final-words-of-adeline-quinn/

I have found further records of the father, Felix James, who is variously an engineer and a land surveyor in addition to Henrietta's marriage description of him as an architect.
Barbara Jane was killed (the verdict was manslaughter) on 13 June 1877. Henrietta married George on 23 Feb 1878 and gave birth in Boston on 4 November 1878.
I can't find her daughter's birth in those links, her daughter was Henrietta Mary, but will look again as I am not familiar with their use. i also still don''t know what happened to George Ketchley and Henrietta after November 1878.
Any help appreciated!