Using Ancestry: An Immigration Story

by Juliana Smith

Last week as I wrote about enhancing record images, I chose the 1910 census image of my second great-grandmother, Catherine (Huggins) Dennis. As I enhanced the faded record, I found something that made me go back and reassess conclusions I had drawn regarding the family’s immigration.

The 1910 Census
The census image listed Catherine Dennis, age 66, living in the same dwelling as her son Francis and his family, but as the head of her household, which included her step-son William and daughter Margaret. The item that caught my eye as I worked to make the image more legible was her year of immigration. Although still tough to make out, it looked like 1849.

I had been unable to locate the family coming to the U.S. in passenger arrival records, despite some pretty long nights looking through the Immigration Collection at Ancestry.com. Thinking that perhaps they had come in through Canada as some of my other ancestors did, I had set aside that search to focus on other things. With this find, my curiosity got the best of me and I tossed aside my photo editing article for a bit to explore.

The first thing I did was to pull up the timeline I created for Catherine. The 1849 date didn’t match with what I had previously thought. We had estimated that the family had immigrated to the U.S. somewhere around 1843 or 1844, based on the dates and places of birth of Catherine and her younger sister Anne. Since that date was given to the enumerator more than sixty years after the event, it wouldn’t be surprising for her to have remembered that date incorrectly, but a thought struck me. What if they didn’t all travel together?

As a mom who has a hard time leaving my daughter behind for even a short weekend trip or on business, it’s tough for me to imagine putting an ocean between us. Yet many families did. The story of Annie Moore of Ellis Island fame is a good example of this.  When Annie became the first person to be processed at the newly opened Ellis Island, she and her brothers were on their way to New York to meet their parents who had immigrated several years prior. And there are more stories like that. In the book “Five Points,” by Tyler Anbinder, the author cites several examples of chain migration with parents leaving children behind and even widows who left children behind, sending for them later to travel together, or sometimes a few at a time.

I have been experimenting with the new search beta at Ancestry and I thought this would be a good case to take advantage of the advanced search features, which allow you to specify some fields to be exact matches, while allowing others to be off a bit.

After playing around for a while looking for Catherine with no luck, I decided to try a search for her older brother Robert. I entered the immigration year, his birthplace of Ireland, and his first name, checking the box below those fields to request exact matches.  I also specified exact for his birth date of 1837, but allowed +/- two years. (This keeps it within a reasonable range, but still allows a little leeway.) I let the search for his last name of Huggins to be fuzzy since we’ve often found it listed as Higgins and other variants.

That search retrieved one result for a Robert Higgans arriving in 1849 that looks really promising. He is age eleven and just below his name is Judith, age nine, and Cathe (the abbreviation for Catherine, which was why I had been unable to locate this entry before) age seven. The ages fit well with all the Huggins children who were born in Ireland, although Judith would actually be Julia. Interestingly, Robert at age eleven is listed as a “laborer.”

I decided to try to find the parents, William and Ann (Wier) Huggins, in earlier years to see if this was indeed a case of chain migration. While I didn’t find an exact match, I did find a William and Mary Ann Huggins, who look to be close to the ages of Catherine’s parents. This is going to be a tough one to prove or disprove though. This is a couple who was very “flexible” when it came to listing their age. Only Ann actually gave an age consistent with an 1817 birth year in two separate enumerations–the 1850 and 1880 censuses. Since she seemed very determined to leave me as confusing a trail as possible, I’m sure this was just an oversight on her part. 😉

There is another conflict too. We have a copy of the original baptism record from Ireland for Catherine giving her date of birth as 30 November 1843. Her younger sister Anne’s baptism, which we found in St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church, Brooklyn, N.Y., Baptisms and Marriage Registers (Salt Lake City, UT: Redmond Press, 1996.), gave her birth date as 28 April 1844. It was through these dates that we originally estimated their arrival date. The problem there is that there are only five months between the two birth dates. Again, either Ann has it in for me and rushed her pregnancy (not likely) or one of the dates is wrong.

What Next?
As far as the birth date conflict, because the St. Paul’s index is a secondary source, it’s quite possible that the year is wrong on that record. I need to write to St. Paul’s to get the actual record to find out for sure.

Proving that the family on either or both passenger arrivals is mine will be more difficult. Since both arrivals were before the 1850 census, that enumeration doesn’t help much. The family was together in 1850 (with the exception of Julia, who I may have found working as a servant in another household in the same ward of Brooklyn where her parents lived). But here are some other ideas I want to pursue:

  • Check city directories for Brooklyn and surrounding areas, particularly Manhattan, for William Huggins. Tracking all of the men with that name, particularly those who list masonry related occupations may help me to better pinpoint when William arrived in the area.  
  • Browse through the names on the passenger list on which the three children are listed to see if I recognize other family names, or those of witnesses, sponsors, or other family associates. It may be that the children traveled with other family members or neighbors from West Meath, Ireland, where the family originated.
  • Check to make sure there are no other William and Ann Huggins (or Higgins, or Huggans, etc.) in the area with similarly named children. We’ve done quite a bit of research on this family in the area and right now it seems unlikely, but a thorough search of all close matches is a must.
  • Continue searching passenger arrivals for New York, as well as other ports. I may eventually find the family arriving on a different ship.

While I may or may not ever be able to definitively prove whether either of the passenger arrivals is our Huggins family, the experience has opened my mind to new possibilities. While I had seen other immigration stories like this one, I didn’t think to apply that possibility to my own family.

We should take time to go back and review estimations and conclusions we have drawn in our research. We can expand our knowledge of social and immigration conditions through books, magazines, and through networking with others whose ancestors shared similar experiences. As we learn more about these conditions we may find the answers to those brick wall questions.

Do you have an immigrant ancestor’s story you’d like to share with us? Please tell us how you found your immigrant ancestor in the comments section below.

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Juliana Smith has been an editor of Ancestry newsletters for ten years and is author of “The Ancestry Family Historian’s Address Book.” She has written for “Ancestry” Magazine and wrote the Computers and Technology chapter in “The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy,” rev. 3rd edition. Juliana can be reached by e- mail at [email protected], but she regrets that her schedule does not allow her to assist with personal research.

2 thoughts on “Using Ancestry: An Immigration Story

  1. “Check city directories for Brooklyn and surrounding areas, particularly Manhattan, for William Huggins. Tracking all of the men with that name, particularly those who list masonry related occupations may help me to better pinpoint when William arrived in the area.”
    The quote above from your write up as prompted me to comment that I found men often had very different occupations after leaving their home country – taking whatever work they could get, I suppose…..e.g: painter to blacksmith, chemist to bookkeeper.

  2. My father’s ancestry traces from northern NYS in the Adirondack Mts. (small towns & virtually NO written records kept) back into Quebec… I finally matched my great-grandmother thru the possibility that she was a sister to two local brothers of same name as her maiden name, and tracked all three back into Quebec by a reference in an old newspaper article which gave a place in Quebec for family members of the WIFE of one of the brothers… Whew! A lot of side tracks, but a BIG pay-off: found baptisms for my Great-Grandmother, her brothers, other siblings, parents, marriages… Don’t give up when you hit a wall – go around it. Take a side branch.

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