Starting Out

I was notorious in school for how much I loved research, and how very reluctant I was to write the damn paper! So I’ve been collecting genealogical information on and off for decades now, and sharing only via conversation. Due to some little tidbits I posted on Facebook recently, I’ve become aware of how many of my relatives might like to know some of these stories. Hence, the great experiment!

I was 15 when I made my first foray into collecting family data. You can see that I didn’t really comprehend how much room 9 children and their families would take up! It’s a good thing so many of Grandpa Gahagan’s siblings never married. The occasion was a visit to the old family farm, still inhabited at that time by Aunt Kate, Uncle Leo and Uncle Ray Gahagan. Uncle Leo told me the family history as he knew it and my mother dusted off her shorthand and took it all down. I have her transcription of it somewhere around here; it only took her a decade to accomplish.

One of the important things that I knew even as a young ‘un was that people remembered the same things differently. I also knew that the Gahagans would never let a fact get in the way of a good story! Hyperbole is an excellent word to describe it. So I always took what Uncle Leo said with a large grain of salt. I’ve been astonished, frankly, by how much he got right.

So it starts with the three brothers Gahagan, Peter, James and Patrick who came over from Ireland probably sometime before 1860. I’ve found Peter, his wife Katie, and his 3 oldest children in the 1860 US census. Patrick and James are in Bloomington, Illinois by July 1863 when they were listed in the Civil War Draft Registration records.

Did Peter come first? He seems to have been the oldest. Did he arrive in this country as a married man, or did he meet his bride somewhere in Pennsylvania where his two oldest children, Mary and John were born? Where in Pennsylvania were they born? That the first brother here worked and sent the tickets back to Ireland to bring the others here seems certain – and it’s what Uncle Leo said. But I haven’t found any sign of them on Passenger List records. Of course, given the general difficulty with spelling Gahagan that anyone who bears the name is familiar with, that’s not saying much. Also, a lot of the Irish coffin ships went to Canada, which was still part of Great Britain at that time, so required no information about arriving passengers from other parts of the country. And the border between Canada and the United States was long and undefended, so that’s a possibility. One of the unanswered questions is why Bloomington, Illinois? The most logical answer is that they knew someone there, someone maybe from the home place in Ireland. If I could see the baptismal record of James Francis Gahagan, the first child born in Illinois- and the man at the top of the family chart above – it might answer the question. Godfather, perhaps?

Anyone who has any knowledge or inspired guesses, feel free to comment.