In my last blog entry, I wrote about John Van Hagan. His father was John A. Hagan, who was our
Irish immigrant.
How do we know he was
from Ireland? We know this from several
sources:
- The 1875 Kansas census indicates John’s place of birth as Ireland. (this info could have come from Hannah, John, or even a neighbor).
- The 1880 federal census indicates John’s place of birth as Ireland. Parent’s place of birth indicated as Scotland. (Again, this info could have come from anyone, not necessarily John).
- The 1882 obituary of John. Clues in the article:
1.
He was a native of Ireland;
2.
Emigrated to this country when quite young;
3.
Has a mother and sister yet in Ireland;
4.
Has a brother in New York;
- The 1882 death record of John indicates his place of birth as Ireland and the place of birth of his parents as Ireland.
All these records are possibly secondary (versus
primary). It’s possible that John
himself gave the information about his nativity, but the census records do not
name the informant. So I was at a dead end.
An important genealogical research tool is that when you are at a dead
end for your own ancestor, always do research on their siblings. So I looked more carefully at some letters that my Grandad had. One in particular was from 1898 (before John Van married Mabel) and talks about a trip that John Van Hagan took to Brooklyn New York to see his cousins Daisy, Lulu and Annie Hagan. When you take this in consideration of the earlier newspaper article that speaks about John A Hagan's brother in New York, I now had some information to do some research. The results of that research will be in my next blog post.
But for now, here's a family tree of John A Hagan's family:
