I know very little about my Irish ancestors in general - in regards to my 2x great-grandmother, Mary Agnes Enright, I know she was born in Ballingarry, County Limerick before immigrating to New York, and that her parents, John Enright and Bridget Collins, also immigrated late in life, dying in New York at the start of the 20th century. John and Bridget are buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn, where I have visited their grave. That visit helped me pinpoint death dates for the two of them - Bridget died in 1906, and John died just a year later in 1907.
I had some information on them from Irish Catholic church records but very little on them, besides the 1905 New York census and death records, once they arrived in New York. I moved on to other branches on my tree that were providing more fruitful research results and gave the Enrights a break. That’s the cycle of it all - hit a brick wall, move on, come back at a later time. I decided to go back over all the records I had for John - now that I have “just the facts” on a lot of people, I’m trying to glean whatever I can to discover something more about who they are besides when they were born and when they died. I took another look at a transcription of his death record on Ancestry:
Parents’ names? Check. Already had that. Age and place of birth? Already had that. Took a look at his years in the US and was actually able to use that to find him in a passenger list manifest from 1898. A good rule of thumb is to not connect one person to another when it comes to immigration - just because two people were married doesn’t mean they immigrated together. And John and Bridget didn’t - he came over by himself in 1898 to join his wife and children. So that was new, if not helpful, information. I knew Bridget had died at their home at 377 Warren Street in Brooklyn, and I wondered what had happened to John after her death - did he move in with one of his kids? But the death address on the transcription said “New York City, workhouse.” Workhouse? I was intrigued. I decided to check FamilySearch’s transcription, which gave me even more specifics:
My 3x great-grandfather had died in the Bronx—specifically at a workhouse on Hart Island.
I belong to a New York City Facebook genealogy group and people talk about Hart Island all the time. Hart Island is the City’s public cemetery and is the final (for the lucky ones, temporary) resting place of over one million souls. When people in my group talk about Hart Island, they’re usually looking for a family member who was too poor to have been buried by their family, or someone who may have died alone, unclaimed by family. But Hart Island has been used for many things, including a quarantine station, a psychiatric hospital, a tuberculosis ward, a reform school, a homeless shelter, a rehabilitation facility, a military base, and a jail. I believe some of these things were collectively referred to as the workhouse, which housed almost two thousand aged and infirm men, narcotics addicts, and short-term inmates from the penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island. I believe my John Enright was one of those aged and infirm men.
It strikes me as strange that he would end up there, since he had multiple grown children living in New York at the time. But perhaps they were not in a situation, financially or space-wise, to take him in. His obituary says he died at his daughter Catherine’s home in Brooklyn, but his death record definitely says he died in the Bronx, which is the borough Hart Island is located in. I went to go look at his actual death record to see if there were any clues in it, and couldn’t find it, which makes me think I never actually had it—was it possible I had requested a death record for him, thinking he died in Brooklyn, and received a “not found” letter from the Municipal Archives—because he actually died in the Bronx??
It makes me wonder what the last year of his life must have been like. According to his immigration record, he was suffering from senility in 1898 - after the passing of his wife, did a lack of money and mental acuity land him on Hart Island?
So that’s my next step on this journey into my Enrights - find out more about Hart Island, about what life might have been like there, see if any records exist, find out what I can about John’s last days. It’s important to me to not just discover an ancestor existed, but to use that person as an opportunity to learn about the history of that time and place, and to place my person within that context. It’s all intertwined - the who, when, where - into a story, one of billions that are part of one grand story, and that’s all genealogy really is.
Websites I used for this research: