“By their affiliations, you shall know them” to restate a
familiar biblical quote. Many genealogical experts urge us to look at the
groups our ancestors joined to learn more about them. One of the potentially
richest sources of information for genealogists is the church where our
ancestor worshipped. The records created by churches sometimes include, and may
go beyond, the sacramental records of baptism, communion, confirmation and
marriage.
As I have mentioned before in this blog, serendipity along
with the steady mining of information from a variety of sources can sometimes
result in unexpected and amazing finds. Last year I became aware of the Chicago Genealogical Society On the CGS website, I clicked the
publications tab and found the listing of the contents of copies of the
quarterly journal of the Society, The
Chicago Genealogist, going all the way back to 1969. But the best news of
all is that the Newberry Library in Chicago has digitized all the copies of
this journal.
It is a two-step process to find articles of interest in The Chicago Genealogist. First, you look
at the list of articles on the CGS website. When you find an article of
interest (be sure to note the date, volume, number), you search for it on the
Newberry’s digitized collection. From this page, you can click on “Advanced Search” at the top and search for
the exact volume.
I made a list of several articles I wanted to read,
including “Some Early Irish Residents of Chicago’s West Side” in vol. XI #3
Spring 1979. When I located the article in the Newberry Library's collection, I
was astonished to see what it actually was: “A list of contributors to the
building of the main altar at Holy Family Catholic Church during the years 1863-65.”
As I looked down the list of names of parishioners, I saw
some of my target surnames (J. Carney, Patrick Kearney, J. Duffy), as well as
names from their collateral families (Anthony Dinan, Bernard Cosgrove, John
Cosgrove, T. Cosgrove).
This find was exciting because I had been stuck in my Irish
paternal great great grandparents’generation: my great great grandfather John
Carney/Kearney and my great great grandmother Mary Duffy. I had found little
information about them. They are identified as my great grandmother’s (Mary
Carney/Kearney Kries Lauer) parents only on her second marriage application.
I have found mention of people in John’s and Mary’s close social circle (collateral families) on
baptism records. Julia Mercer Cosgrove is listed as a baptismal sponsor for
Patrick William Kearney, the son of John Kearney and Mary Duffy. In the next
generation, Catherine Sweeney Brookins Dinan and her son, Charles Dinan, were
baptismal sponsors for Henrietta Kries, the daughter of Mary Carney/Kearney
Kries and Henry Kries.
With this list of altar contributors, I had moved back a
generation. But there was more to be found in this journal article. At the very
top of the first page, the transcriber, Thomas M. Cook, gave the source of this
list: “…originally published in Holy Family Parish, by Bro. Thomas Mulkerins
S.J., Universal Press, Chicago, 1923.” And Cook even tells his reader where to
find the book: “A copy of this book can be found in the collection of the
University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Library.”
Another caveat to researchers that genealogy experts put
forward is that if at all possible, a researcher should always go back to the
original source. You never know if mistakes were made by an indexer or
transcriber or if information was left out. So I needed to consult Brother
Mulkerins’ book on the first parish of my Chicago ancestors.
As I looked through the history of Holy Family Parish, I found several items of great interest to me that did not appear in the altar contributors’ list; in fact, although that list was crucial for me to identify ancestral surnames and to tie them to later generations, there was so much more to learn about the church and the community it served:
- What the land around Holy Family Parish looked like when the church was built in 1857.
- Why so many parishioners were included as contributors to the altar society drive.
- What the neighborhood was like – what kinds of commercial establishments lined the streets.
When Father Arnold Damen began work on building Holy Family
Church in 1857, this is what the area looked like, according to Father
Mulkerins:
“…the territory allotted to the parish was a prairie during
part of the year and a swamp during another with scarcely a structure worthy of
the name of house in the entire parish, and only a few scattered cabins here
and there.”1
But it seems that things certainly changed once the church
was built:
“Even in those early days it had already become a matter of
quite general knowledge that the establishment of a Catholic Church…generally
had the effect of drawing people to the vicinity….In an incredibly short time
there were numerous families living near the site of the church, and there were
numerous additions to the industrial plants.” 2 And why was this?
“…wise business men knew well that amongst the Catholic
population…there would be many who would make suitable employees.”3
The second fact that I learned from reading Holy Family Parish was about the altar
society contributors’ list itself. There were about 800 names on the list but
most of the donations were only $1.00. What was this all about? Well, it seems
that Father Damen preferred to make sure everyone in the parish could enjoy the
blessings that came from contributing to the building of the new altar. He and
his assistants went door-to-door to see that no one was overlooked. And in
addition to the heavenly blessing that a donor would receive, Father Damen
added as a further inducement that “each donor was to have his or her name
engrossed on parchment and placed under the altar.”4
The third piece of information I gleaned from Mulkerins’ history
of Holy Family Parish is perhaps the most important. The book actually could
serve as a “Fodor’s Guide” to Chicago’s Near West Side in the nineteenth
century. We learn first about one of the hallmarks of poverty that still exists
today: stores that sell alcohol abound in poor neighborhoods:
“Many of the grocery stores in the early days and up to the
eighties (1880s), were a sort of combination of saloon and grocery….The grocery
stores were very numerous everywhere in those times, and there were no department
stores then as now….They were very numerous, sometimes two, three or even four
on the corners of intersecting streets and possibly a few more within the
block.”5
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Yes, Holy Family Parish was a magnificent
discovery. I learned that before my great grandparents attended St. Patrick’s
Church, their parents were members of Holy Family Parish. I had the
opportunity, one that is so often out of reach to genealogists, to “tour” the
neighborhood where my people lived, shopped, worked and worshipped.
Notes:
- Thomas M. Mulkerins, Brother, Holy Family Parish, Chicago: Priests and People (Chicago, IL: Universal Press, 1923), 718.
- Ibid., 719
- Ibid., 719.
- Ibid., 58.
- Ibid., 720.
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