Verifying What is Written in Stone - Annie Barry - Updated

 

This is part ten of verifying the information on the Coughlin headstone in Calvary Cemetery. William Barry and Winifred Coughlin were my partner Donald's 2nd-great-grandparents.

This is a rewrite of a post that I published yesterday and took down a couple of hours ago because I missed something glaringly obvious in my analysis and decided it was best to start from scratch.

Annie Barry, as her name appears on the headstone, was the wife of Donald's great grand uncle, Richard Barry. Annie was born in New York City to German immigrants August Miller (Muller, Müller, Mueller) and Elizabeth Fleck (Flecke, Fleek, Flege, Fleger,) sometime before 1880. This does not match the date on the headstone for which there is other documentation, but since Annie appears on the 1880 census, she could not have been born on December 10, 1882. This is the obvious bit that I missed for over a week, probably because I was already leaning toward an earlier birth year and because the 1880 census was not among the first documents that I found, but still, wow!

So far, I have not discovered a civil birth record for Annie and it does not appear that a record of her baptism in the Lutheran church is available online. Her first appearance in found records is that 1880 census where her age is listed as 6. The next record I have found is the 1900 census which says she was born in December of 1876 and she is 24. The math here is actually incorrect, she would have been 23 on her last birthday, which is the information requested. In the 1905 New York State census, Annie is 28. These three census records are, so far, the only documents that I have found for Annie between her birth and her marriage.

The next time that Annie is found in available records is when she marries Richard in 1906. The entry in Catholic church marriage records does not capture age or date of birth, but the civil record does and that is the first time Annie is recorded as being much younger, her age is listed as 23 and her birth year (possibly implied) is 1883. Three years later, Annie converts to Catholicism and appears in a baptismal register where her date of birth is recorded as December 10, 1882. Annie appears in six more available United States and New York State censuses before her death in 1956, and they all line up with her "new" date of birth.

Before the implication of the 1880 census dawned on me this morning, I compared all of the birth, marriage and death records for Annie's family members to the census records and found that the birth information in those census records was very consistent with the vital records.

So, why this discrepancy? Why did Annie live her entire married life as a "younger" person? I doubt very much that it was simply vanity. I don't think that nine siblings and two parents carry this secret for you for that. I think that Annie and her family were trying to keep her marriageable. In a city packed with young, single women and with at least one younger sister marrying before her, Annie needed to present herself as younger than her actual age. Even today, many people tie a woman's entire worth to her ability to marry and have a family. There must have been even more pressure in the early 1900s, so if the world wants you to be young, you give the world what it wants.

As for verifying Annie's date of death as recorded on the headstone, I haven't been able to do so with online research at this point. It looks like Ancestry may have something, but that will have to wait until I rotate my memberships again and I will update you when I do.