Verifying What is Written in Stone IV - John Coughlin

 

Part four of this series verifying the information on the Coughlin headstone brings us to John Coughlin, brother of Donald's 2nd great-grandmother, Winifred. This turned out to be a much longer process than I had imagined, but if you're new to Catholic parish registers in Ireland, this may be helpful to you.

According to the stone, it was erected by Winifred and her sister Ann in memory of John. When he died in 1884, Winifred had already buried two children in this plot and Ann had buried a son. Of course, records from the cemetery would likely tell us more, but they are expensive as I mentioned in a previous post, and not in my genealogy budget at this time.

Finding a record of John's date of death was fairly simple. He is listed in the municipal death records index for New York City and the date there matches the headstone, so would appear to be correct. But this record also gave us something very exciting; the names of his parents, Edward Coughlin and Bridget Kelly. I felt like Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Finding Your Roots, introducing Donald and his family to his 3rd great-grandparents. It never gets old!

To verify John's age and home parish in Ireland, we moved into a whole new record set, Catholic parish registers in Ireland on Find My Past. Like a kid in a candy shop, I still get excited when I can "try" something new, so I dug right in. In my excitement, though, I breezed past something very important; learning about the records first, so it wasn't long before I had to come to an abrupt stop and do just that.

It turns out that what I was actually looking at on Find My Past was a transcription of the original entries. After some poking around, I found the same images on the National Library of Ireland's (NLI) website where they also had digitized microfilm of the original book, which led to even more questions, of course, but honestly, the whole thing was so absorbing and interesting, I didn't mind at all. I learned so much from this research.

Above is the registry page* from the transcription, with John's information on the last row of my screen clip. As you may have noticed the record is in Latin, as are most of these records. The FamilySearch Wiki was a great help here in translating the column headers, especially where the end of the page was cut off or out of focus. A discrepancy with the father's name is what made me stop to learn more about these records, especially once I realized I was looking at a transcription and not the original register.

Back on the Find My Past website, in their transcription of John's transcripted record, there was a link to the NLI website and there I found the original book and drew a sigh of relief, because guessing about the accuracy of a transcription is not my favorite use of genealogy time.

Here is John's entry from the original register and it is easy to see why I am grateful that a transcription, done by a parish priest familiar with these records, exists. There is some information I would not have been able to understand or guess at without it.

Here is my best guess at a straight transcription of this record:

13th Natus A 17th [Baptizmus] Joannes Coghlin filius Edmundi et Bridiga Kelly [Conjunxti] Patrini Michalis Et Maria Concannon.'

My best guess at the English is: 

Born on 13 April Baptized on the 17th (May is implied from the top of the page) John Coghlin son of Edmund and Bridget Kelly, joined together in marriage. Sponsors Michael and Mary Concannon. 

I put the words Baptizmus and Conjunxti in brackets because they are abbreviated in the record, but I'm not at all sure what that abbreviation is. I learned the meaning of conjunxti from the NLI's Getting Started Guide, a PDF which you can download. Without the transcription by someone familiar with these entries, I would never have guessed that the A after Natus, stood for April. The only thing I'm not sure about is where the transcriber came up with the Coghlin/Coughlin's village of residence, but that is for another day.

The last thing I needed to clear up was the discrepancy with John's father's name. In all four records that I found that appear to be for this family, the father's name is Edmundus, rather than Eduardus. The names are close and I wondered if the Latin translation was the issue, but I decided to put it to the hive mind of Facebook again and asked the question in The Genealogy Squad. What I came away with is that Edward and Edmund were basically interchangeable. I also came away with a great new resource, which you can download from Internet Archive, a book called, Varieties and synonymes of surnames and Christian names in Ireland : for the guidance of registration officers and the public in searching the indexes of births, deaths, and marriages. Which you can find at this link.

So, how accurate was our headstone here? I'm going to give the engraver a pass on this one and say it was the information he was given that was incorrect and not his mistake. John's death record records his age and approximate year of birth. To me that means the informant was asked his age and not the year he was born. If the informant gave his age as 50 for the death certificate, then they probably gave that information to the engraver as well. We'll never know for sure, but it seems logical.

Unlike his niece and nephews, John lived well into adulthood, so there is much more to research and uncover. But for now, I believe that we have John's likely dates of birth and death, his age at death and his home parish in Ireland and that is all the information on the stone.

Next up is Donald's 2nd great-grandfather, William Barry.

*If I have interpreted the Terms of Use at the National Library of Ireland correctly, I am using these images from their records according to those terms. A link to their website is here, and the terms of use are available as a pdf for download.