Leonard/Mills

James Mills married Elizabeth Leonard on 13.6.1861. The marriage was registered in Irvinestown (wife?s surname is indexed as Lenard). If you don?t already have a copy of the certificate, you can view it on-line, on the GRONI site for ?2. https://geni.nidirect.gov.uk  (If you have obtained the marriage information from one of the commercial sites which provide transcripts, be aware of the possibility of there being transcription errors. Those are quite common. It?s often best to double check by looking at the original record).

The marriage certificate should give you the couples townlands (addresses) together with the father?s occupations. That information may enable you to trace them in Griffiths Valuation and other records.  If you let me know that information, I?ll help you search those records.

Irish marriage certificates don?t contain the mothers names.

Birth registration only started in Ireland in 1864, so if the daughter Elizabeth was born in 1863 you won?t find a birth certificate for her. I searched 1864 ? 1866 but did not see one in the statutory records. Your only option then is to search for her baptism. If you think the family were Church of Ireland and lived in Derryvullan, then there are 3 Church of Ireland churches in the parish. The church at Castle Archdale has baptisms from 1842, the one for Derryvullan itself has no records earlier than 1877 (earlier records were lost in the 1922 fire), and the church at Derryvullen North has records from 1803. Copies of these do not appear to be on-line, and so you would need to look them up in PRONI, Belfast.

I have no suggestions for the forename Sisly ?which could be a transcription error -  but if you get the address from the marriage certificate, we may be able to trace the family by other means.

I've done what you advised (thanks for the advice!) and you were right. 'Sisly' actually looks more like 'Lesly'. Elizabeth's address is 'Banagh' and James' is very illegible - something like 'Aughably' ??? I'm not sure what you can do with this info. Both James and his father Robert were shoemakers. Hopefully you can figure something out with this. 

It actually could be 'Aughnacloy'. 

Katelyn,

What?s the church name and denomination that the marriage took place in? (Tradition was generally to marry in the bride?s church, and hence my curiosity). I suspect it was Irvinestown RC. Is that right?).

I think the address for the Leonard family may be Baragh, which is a townland near Ballinamallard and in the RC parish of Irvinestown. The modern Baragh Rd runs through it. I searched Griffiths Valuation for Baragh to see if there was any Leonard household listed there in the 1860s. There is not.  However that doesn?t mean the family didn?t live there. It just means that either they were lodging with someone else or they had a cabin of too low a value to merit including in Griffiths.

No Leonards in Baragh in the 1901 census. However I did notice 4 shoemaking Leonard households in the county. A trade like shoemaking often ran in families, so some of these might be relations:

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Fermanagh/Churchill/Aghamellan/1360409/

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Fermanagh/Rahalton/Derrygormelly/1363370/

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Fermanagh/Enniskillen_Urban/Queen/1364714/

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Fermanagh/Castle_Coole/Garvery/1363860/

For the households where the head is a widow, you would probably need to try and find the births of the children (post 1864) on the GRONI site, to see if any had Leslie L as the father.

There?s a death for a Leslie Leonard that looks encouraging. Died 28.12.1894, death registered in Irvinestown. Estimated year of birth 1810. You might want to view a copy of that. (If it shows a different townland for his death let me know). Also worth noting the identity, address and relationship of the informant.

With the other townland (ie the Mills address), if it was a different parish, and especially a different county, the Minister would often put that eg ?Ballygobackwards, Parish of Puckoon.? If it was a local townland, then they just put the townland name. So I?d expect the townland to be near the church. One possibility is Aughey but again I can?t trace the Mills family in the relevant records.

I assume this is your James & Elizabeth in 1901 &1911 (I note they had just 1 child, who was still alive in 1911):

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Fermanagh/Brookhill/Letter/1353691/

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1911/Fermanagh/Brookhill/Brookhill/519766/

The revaluation records show James arriving in Letter in 1889. He had a house and outbuildings on plot 3 (which was a farm owned by the Irvine family). So that points to him having a fairly low value property. It had a rental value of ?3 10/- a year so was lucky to be in Griffiths. The records indicate he left in 1906 (presumably to Brookhill).

Elwyn

Thank you so much for all your help! I really appreciate it. I've had a look at that death record for Leslie and sadly, it appears that he was in the Irvinestown workhouse! Obviously he was struggling financially. His daughter Elizabeth and her husband James Mills as you confirmed, were not doing well financially either. There is no church registered for their marriage because they got married at a registry office. I assume this is because Elizabeth was Catholic and James Protestant. On the Census they appear to have remained their respective religions throughout their marriage. 

Elizabeth and James' only child - a girl - Elizabeth Mills is my 3x great grandmother and she was married in 1901 and 1911 with nine children of their own so obviously they couldn't help out her parents or grandfather, which is sad. 

If you have any other advice on how to further my search I would be glad to hear it. Again, thank you so much for all your help, it's really appreciated.

Regarding the death in the workhouse, it may well be the case that Leslie was struggling financially. However you should also be aware that the workhouse hospitals were the only state hospitals (ie free) available at that time, and so many people went there for treatment, rather than because they were totally destitute. So lots of elderly people died in the workhouse hospitals (and were consequently listed as workhouse inmates) when otherwise they didn?t need the workhouse?s support. After the workhouse system was closed down in 1947, many of the hospitals attached to them carried on operating, and became the first in the new National Health Service.

The workhouse records mostly still survive and are kept in PRONI in Belfast, so you would be able to check out when Leslie was admitted and why (if admitted for medical reasons, the admission notes usually say: ?to the infirmary?). They?ll also give you some information re dependants & next of kin etc. The Poor Law records are not on-line. You can ask PRONI to search them for you (for a fee) or get a researcher to look them up. Irvinestown workhouse no longer exists and has been replaced by modern housing but its records survive:

http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Lowtherstown/

You could also search the Fermanagh Gold site to see if there are any mentions of your two families:

http://www.fermanagh-gold.com

Well I hope that's all it was - the workhouse being a hospital. I will have to go up there and check it out. I found a marriage record for Leslie and an Isabell Gallagher, married 1840 in Tubrid Church, Kesh - which is strange since I found their daughter Elizabeth being born in August 1837! Born out of wedlock surely would have been a bad thing back then?

I also found a death cert for Isabell. She died in April 1892 in the Irvinestown workhouse. 

The baptismal records are full of illegitimate births throughout the 1800s, so there was no shortage of children born outside of marriage then. The main factor in deciding whether to marry was to do with the husband?s ability to support his bride financially. So if the parents were teenagers, and the father living at home with his parents, say still learning his trade as a shoemaker, then the scope for marrying was pretty limited. They couldn?t have afforded to support each other. However when he had completed his apprenticeship, and had greater earning power then they were probably better able to marry.

So my guess would be that Leonard wasn?t able to support Isabell in 1837 but that by 1840 things had improved and so that?s why they married then.  I can see that her year of birth is estimated as 1815 (and his was 1810). Those could well be out by quite a few years (being no more than the informant?s best guess).  So if in fact they were both still in their teens in 1837, that might explain the position.

Thank you so much for all your help.

Leslie's granddaughter Elizabeth Mills married a man named John Monaghan from the Brookhill/Irvinestown area (they married in 1883 in Scotland but came back home to live after). John's parents were John Monaghan and Ellen/Helen Murray. On John jnr's scottish marriage cert it says that his mother Ellen/Helen was deceased by the time of their marriage in 1883. I have no more info on his parents than that and can't find them on the census because I don't know their ages and can't find their wedding information. Have you any idea on where I could go from there?

Thanks Elwyn. Best of luck with your research Katelyn

Regards

Clare Doyle

Genealogy Support 

I searched for deaths of an Ellen Monaghan/Monahan in Irvinestown 1864 to 1883 and found 4 possibles. One lived 1839 ? 25^th Feb1864, the others were much older. You might want to look that up 1864 event up to see if it helps. (If it happened to be the right one, he husband might have been the informant).

I assume the marriage between John Monaghan and Ellen Murray was RC. If so, if it was before 1864 (as seems likely) it won?t be in the stat records. Irvinestown RC baptism & marriage records start in 1851. There?s a copy in PRONI in Belfast but I don?t think they are on-line anywhere. You might need to search them for the marriage and for John Monaghan?s baptism. I don?t see any John Monaghan listed in the parish in Griffiths which probably suggests John was a labourer or in a property not listed in Griffiths. Makes it hard to trace him. There?s about 10 John M deaths in Irvinestown, 1864 onwards, of men who would be about the right age, so that makes tracing him tricky.

I've had a look at the death record for the young Ellen Monaghan and it does state that she is married, 25 years old and died from 'decline'. The informer was her father Bernard - but he was named as Bernard Monaghan (although it was just an 'x' as he couldn't write. This is weird because her married name is supposed to be Monaghan. 

Also, on Leslie's death record it states that he was a baillif. That was his occupation. I understand that means probably evicting people and collecting taxes but do you know of any baillif records that could help me track him down? Also, would it have been almost unheard of to be a Catholic baillif because I believe he was Catholic? 

Ellen?s maiden name may have been Monaghan as well as her married name. It was quite common for cousins to marry.

Re Leslie?s occupation as bailiff, he might have been a water bailiff, responsible for checking on fishing on Lough Erne which is near where he lived and which has a lot of fishing. Legal and illegal. Not sure about any other work as a bailiff. They tended to be privately or self ?employed and once you got your court order you engaged them to seize the goods etc. Not sure how you would trace any records for the 1800s. (I have never heard of any). Bailiffs were abolished in Northern Ireland around 1970 and a Government Department does the work these days (The Enforcement of Judgments Office).

No I don?t think it would have been unusual for a Catholic to have been a bailiff. The main penal laws had all been repealed 50 years before Leslie was born, and Catholics were often in positions of authority in the 1800s. Three quarters of the RIC (the police force) were RC at that time.

If Leslie was a water bailiff, he probably worked for one of the big estates around where he lived ie the Lowthers or later their successors the Irvines. Some of their family records are deposited in PRONI but whether they would contain water bailiff records I wouldn?t like to say. If Leslie gave evidence in court in a prosecution, then that might have been reported in one of the local papers but that could involve quite a bit of research. Otherwise I?d doubt he?d be easily traceable through employment records.