Working Class Men

Occupations often give a clue to what type of life and what talents our ancestors had. My own tree has a lot of laborers and farmers. But a few have interesting labels: scythe  sharpener, scholar, as well as occupations common years ago such as blacksmith and teamster. The immigrants from both sides of my family came from rural areas where farmer or farm hand was the most common occupation but with some exceptions they did not turn to farming in the US. James Leary (right) and his family lived as tenant farmers, as can be seen in the excerpt from tax records. His father worked 133 acres of farm land with two other tenants. They lived in what was a simple cottage based on the amount of tax charged for it. The property still has the remants of a stone cottage with one room, a loft and a couple of windows.

The railroad system in the US was expanding in the mid 19th century when most my Leary family arrived. John may have come over with his two eldest daughters as the Irish potato famine reached its peak in 1848. He is found in the 1850 census on a railroad building crew. His wages enabled him to return for the rest of the family, his wife Abbie, my great grandfather James and children Catherine and John Jr. in 1853. John and his son James, my great grandfather stayed with the railroad. James was a switchman all his life working well into his 70's. As a young immigrant to Concord NH in 1853 he had shaken the hand of President Franklin Pierce and he was on the voting rolls as soon as he was able to be naturalized. Another ancestor, Michael Shea, a tenant farmer in Ireland,  also worked for the railroad and it probably enabled him to buy a farm just outside St. Johnsbury, VT. But he lived on the farm only briefly and became a landlord, renting it for years. Was this the fulfillment of a dream?

Most of my French Canadian side stayed with farming or worked as blacksmiths, farriers (who shod horses) or teamsters (wagon drivers). On my Chicoine side I come from a long line of blacksmiths. My grandfather was a scythe sharpener who traveled from farm to farm making sure a farmer's tools were ready for harvest as well as farming his own land. 

My great grandfather Dominick Corbett was a skilled carpenter and owned his own tools. He may have gotten a start with  a set of ship building brothers, the Duanes, from his hometown of Turkstown, Co. Kilkenny who had a nearby shipyard on the Suir river. In the US he became a ship's carpenter and served in that capacity in the US Navy during the Civil War. After the war he worked on construction projects in his hometown such as the  local Athenaeum. Family tradition was that he worked on installing the frames of the many paintings displayed in this building.

Atheneaum built 1873

He worked at the Fairbanks scale factory where his carpentry skills were probably employed in producing made-to-order cases for some of the smaller and more delicate scales sold by this company. He also made furniture that found its way to the governor's mansion.

Some of my family who lived in Concord NH were employed making the "Concord Coaches" which were the main transportation out west before the advent of the railroad. Wells Fargo used the coaches to deliver passengers, mail and freight.

On the French Canadian side there were voyagers who traveled west in the fur trade. Some did a little exploring such as Nicholas Perrot. He served as an apprentice but quickly became an explorer, trader and interpreter. He was one of the first explorers to study the Potawatomi peoples and served as mediator between them and other tribal nations as well as the French. He wrote a book about his experiences.

The first generation born in the US tried to move up to more skilled occupations and my tree includes a yardmaster for the railroad, a barber, a tailor, cook, machinist and saloon keeper. Some of these owned their own businesses.

When the census makes no sense

Over the course of many years of researching lost ancestors I have found help in the U.S. census. I have also found problems and errors. Names are often not spelled correctly complicating an Internet search.  It would be rare not to find such anomalies - census takers often were dealing with immigrants with heavy accents and who themselves did not know how to read or write. Sometimes the information was given by a child or a neighbor who did not always have the correct information on ages or places of birth.  In the 1860 census my great grandfather Joseph Moreau dit Desrosiers appears as Joseph Morrow. For some reason in 1870 he drops Morrow and goes to his French nickname Desrosiers which leads to even more creative spellings: Derosia, Derusha, Dero and Deso.

Another example is my great-great grandmother Virginia Raymond Chicoine's census in 1880. I had found her in every census in US census from 1860 to her death after 1930 but the 1880 one had eluded me. I knew she lived in Highgate, Vermont and was twice widowed - with two children from her first marriage to Antoine Bouvier and four from her second to Paul Chicoine. She appears as Vergine Reymo with 6 children all with the surname Reymo. As a French woman, if she was the one speaking with the census taker she would have used her maiden name to identify herself - did the census taker assume that all the children shared the same last name? Or was the informant one of the older children who identified her mother this way and just gave the first names of her siblings? I certainly didn't search the indices for Raymond/Reymo. It is obvious that the census taker wrote down what he heard for the last name. This is true of many of both my French and Irish ancestors where Leary becomes Lary and Shea becomes Shay or even Chay.

Other errors may be deliberate. In researching a friend's family I discovered two sisters one older and one 2 years younger with ages correctly noted in all census until 1900 when the elder had gotten married. The newly weds were living with the younger single sister. The married sister had recorded her age as 2 years younger so her sister had to adjust her own birth date as to not give away her sister's fudged birth date. Since the husband would have been 2 years younger than his wife if the real date had been recorded I assume that was why she had adjusted her age.

Birth places can be in error - one granduncle who is listed as born in Vermont and by family tradition was born there was really born in Ireland A baptism record from Limerick proved that. In census where he probably gave the information he is listed as from Ireland but in others where his family probably were the informants it is Vermont. Why?

In a Kansas 1870 census a boarding school with about 1/2 Indian students and 1/2 white has the column denoting race with Ind crossed out. Why did the census taker or a later official do this? A native woman in the same town married to a white man is correctly identified in all the census but her children, originally designated as MB or mixed blood appear to get whiter with the passing decades. In another case the opposite is true. A man named George Washington, born in Virginia in 1841,  one of the few persons listed as "colored" in the census in Swanton, VT in 1870 appears with his white wife and white children. By 1880 his children have all become mulatto.

In the census for the 1860 census in Fall River, MA my Corbett ancestors and all Irish in the town appear in one index as from Idaho. Since that state was not yet in existence in 1860 it appears the census taker got creative and wrote Id for place of birth Ireland instead of the usual abbreviation IR or IRE.

It is very possible the census taker missed some people. Thanks to ancestry.com's census search I have been looking for a family who should be in the 1860 census. My great grandaunt Mary Leary Bresnahan and her child Cornelius Andrew Bresnahan appear in the 1870 and later census without her husband Andrew Bresnahan. They had married in 1854 in Manchester, NH and Cornelius was born in Fishville, near Concord NH in 1856.  I have searched  the US census nationwide for a child of that age and found none that match. Have even tried searching for child by just age and place of birth or first name only. Where was he? Where was his mother? What happened to his father? (disappeared? lost in war? civil war records doesn't turn up an Andrew that matches) He was probably deceased at least by 1872 when his wife remarried but no death record has yet to surface.  A mystery!