Verifying What is Written in Stone Part IX - Winifred Coughlin

Part nine of this series to verify the information on this headstone brings us to Winifred Coughlin Barry, Donald's 2nd great-grandmother.

In other posts, I have demonstrated the relationships between Winifred and her children, husband and siblings, but there was one piece of evidence of the relationship between Winifred and Ann that I left out, something I found before I started this series. Winifred appears in four censuses after the death of her husband; two state and two Federal. In 1910 she is living with her son Richard, who is single. After his marriage, in the 1915 NY census, Winifred is living with her widowed sister, Ann Tucker. The only things left to verify are her date of death and her age.

There is an entry for Winifred Barry in the death index for New York City and the date of death matches the headstone; September 23, 1928. I'm still looking for a death notice or obituary but I do have another lead or clue. Winifred had a will. Because she died less than 100 years ago, the images are not online and I will have to investigate further to see if family can obtain a copy now, but the index card in the collection on FamilySearch does have a matching date of death.

This 100-year rule may also present an issue in obtaining a burial record, but first I will have to figure out where to go for that. Although Immaculate Conception, the church where Winifred and William were married, where they baptized some of their children and where William's funeral was held is in Manhattan, part of the Archdiocese of New York, and has baptism and marriage records on Find My Past, burial records are still held by each church. At the time of the 1925 New York State census, Winifred and her son Richard and his family lived in the outer borough of Queens. Catholic churches in Queens belong to the Archdiocese of Brooklyn and are not part of any current Find My Past projects. I learned that this weekend watching Jen Baldwin's session at the New York Family History Conference and was a little crushed, I must admit, since a big branch of Donald's paternal side settled in the Corona neighborhood of Queens.

What about Winifred's age, can I verify that she was 91 when she died? The index entry for her death certificate doesn't provide the name of an informant, but I do know that this person did not provide Winifred's mother's name and did not provide her father's name correctly, calling their knowledge of Winifred's early life into question.

Some other sources we could use to verify Winifred's birth and therefore her age, are either unavailable or will take more time to uncover. The baptismal records from Winifred's home parish in Ireland are incomplete and the baptismal entries from March 1836 to May 1840 are lost. If Winifred was 91 at the time of her death, her baptism would most likely have fallen in that time period.

So far, I have not found Winifred on passenger lists or in the 1870 census, although I believe she came to America in the late 1860s.

• In 1880, her age is recorded as 37 (1843)
• In 1900, she is recorded as being born February of 1837
• In 1905, her age is recorded as 66 (1838)
• In 1910, her age is recorded as 73 (1837)
• In 1915, her age is recorded as 78 (1837)
• In 1920, her age is recorded as 83 (1837)
• In 1925, her age is recorded as 88 (1837)

It certainly appears that Winifred believed she was born in 1837 and that does match the gap in the baptismal registers of her home parish in Ireland. I feel pretty comfortable that Winifred was born in 1837 and was therefore 91 when she died, but unless I can uncover something further about her birth when I do more research in Irish records, we won't ever know "for sure."