Is Meets Was

Family Reunion at the old family farm in Andover, NH, July 13, 2013 Who knew we were canoeing on top of our families' great investment of 1866? Not me, at least not until last week. Also last week,  my perception of my great-great-grandfather, James Fitzgerald, was radically changed by just a little bit of new information. In 2002, 2003, and 2007, I visited the offices where the property records for Merrimack County are housed in Concord, New Hampshire. During these visits, I went through all the Grantee Books and Grantor Books, looking for property records pertaining to my great-grandfather, James E. Fitzgerald, and to his father, James Fitzgerald. I had copies made of the forty-three property records which I thought were relevant to their stories. These included mostly deeds and mortgages. As you can imagine, this was a fairly large stack of paper with lots of legalese. In 2007, I spent painstaking hours extracting pertinent information from all this paperwork...

Bradley Lake in Andover, New Hampshire     2002 by Cathy H Paris Little Mary may have been the price the Fitzgeralds paid for coming to America.  By the fall of 1852, James, Betsey (Graney) Fitzgerald, and their 3 sons had joined James.  What happened to little Mary?  Was she with her sister, Joanna, on the other side of the pearly gates?   In June of 1853, James and Betsey welcomed a new Mary into the world, the first of five children to be born in Andover, New Hampshire.  Mary was followed by Lizzie (1854), Annie (1856), James E. (1857), and Nellie (1861).   Meanwhile, back in Ireland, the family of Henry Webster and Agnes (Low) was growing too.  Like James and Betsey, they had 10 children.  Their first four children were born in Scotland:  Jessie (1845), John (1847), Henry (1848), and James (1850).  I don’t know where their fifth child, Margaret (1852), was born.  Their last five children were all born in Ir...

James, a tailor by trade, arrived in Boston aboard the Catharine on November 13, 1848, having left behind his wife, Betsey, a little tyke (Thomas), a challenging toddler (Mary), the baby (John), a son just forming in the womb (Patrick), and the memory of the infant daughter (Joanna) who had died a few years before. James Fitzgerald was about the same age as one of my husband's ancestors, Henry Webster, whom I have previously introduced. James relocated from Ireland to America about the same time Henry immigrated from Scotland to Ireland. Both men were in their mid-thirties when they made these significant changes.  James Fitzgerald struggled to find a way for his wife and family to join him in America, whereas the transition was less arduous for Henry. James and his wife, Betsey, were both from county Kerry.   I believe Betsey was a Graney from Killelton, a townland on the north shore of the Dingle peninsula in the civil parish of Kilgobban. I suspect that James also wa...