Verifying What is Written in Stone V - William Barry (abt. 1832-1902)

 

Part five of my series where I try to verify the information on this headstone from Donald's family brings us to his 2nd great-grandfather, William Barry.

The headstone provides us with William's date of death, age at death and tells us that he was a veteran of the Civil War, but this information has been much harder to verify than anything up to this point.

The New York City municipal deaths index contains a record for William and the date of death matches the headstone. This entry also says in the notes that William lived in the United States and NYC for 43 years and gave us the name of one more ancestor, William's father, Patrick.

Was William 50-years-old when he died? In order to verify William's age, I need a date of birth, but William was born in Ireland and one of the first things I learned about Irish research is that without a hometown or parish, it will likely be very difficult to get that information from parish records. We also don't have a mother's name, or that of any siblings, to help narrow the search or verify any finds.

Verifying William's Civil War service isn't going to be easy either. I'm going to have to spend some time educating myself in this area, and this week I was catching up on recorded lectures from the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa's conference, since access ends soon.

Of course, I didn't write this post just to tell you about what I haven't found. Yesterday, hoping to find an obituary or death notice for William that might have some of the information that I need, I found something wild about his funeral from the New York Tribune.

James E. North, a veteran who was in William's funeral procession, collapsed as they reached the church and died soon after in an undertaker's across the street.

It's a terrible story and something that I can imagine would have been traumatic for all involved, but it does give us information we might not have otherwise. It documents the funeral and verifies the date as well as the church where the services took place and it tells us that William was likely a Civil War veteran. This is the kind of find that makes newspapers my favorite source of genealogical information.

My research on William will continue and I will keep getting an education while I verify the varied information on this headstone. Next, I'll be posting about John Tucker, husband of Ann Coughlin.