Born in Ireland - by Joel Henderson

It all started with an innocent-enough suggestion from my friend Zac, “You should get a hurling jersey from your ancestral county.” You see, over the last few months Zac and I have been playing hurley together on our lunch breaks, a sort of field game played almost exclusively in Ireland. It is generally held as the most fast-paced field sport in the world, and each county in Ireland has a team that competes at the national level. The loyalty and pride each county feels for its team can be closely compared to the feelings people have for the teams representing their college alma mater. Zac has a jersey from Cork, the county his family was from in Ireland. His suggestion to get a jersey of my own appealed to my deeper yearnings on a variety of levels.

First, I love to shop. I love buying things, then waiting for them to come in the mail (which I, coincidentally, also love to check everyday). Second, his suggestion came right around the time of my birthday, so I was already in a festive mood and ready to treat myself to something special. And thirdly, it was a very sensible suggestion, the sort of natural thing you do when you’ve been hurling with a friend for some time. There was just one problem: I had no idea what my ancestral county is.

I’ve known for some time now that I have Irish ancestors. In fact, rather ironically, I first learned of my Irish ancestry while studying abroad in Ireland. The green blood in my family comes from a chap named Joseph Austin, my great, great, great, great grandfather, and his wife, Maggie (Megaw) Austin. I even did a little digging into the Austin family when I got back to the states, enough to at least satisfy my need for solid proof that I did have Irish roots.

But Zac’s suggestion took the situation to a whole new level. Not only did I need proof they came from Ireland, I needed proof of where in Ireland they came from. Up to the present time I hadn’t found any such facts, so the hunt was on. I wanted that jersey, and more than that I wanted it to be legit.

I started where I had originally left off several years ago: the internet. I had been using the Ancestry.com subscription we had at work, but it’s amazing what you can find just by typing a few words like “Joseph Austin 1850” into Google. Genealogy research has been made astronomically easier by the internet. Within minutes I had found a random page by some anonymous person that listed the whole Austin family history back through Joseph’s parents and down through his grandchildren. But everywhere I looked the phrase “born in Ireland” disappointing me with its lack of specificity. Yes, I know he was born in Ireland. It’s a big island. The answer I’m looking for is where in Ireland.

Then I remembered I had been sent several scans of some family letters that were addressed to Maggie (Megaw) Austin from her sisters who lived in Ireland. I went through and transcribed these letters, and through the process got my first real taste of the most rewarding part of genealogy research: glimpses into the real lives of the people that made our family who and what it is today. It was a blast transcribing these letters. So often you read about huge events in history like WWI and the flu pandemic that followed, but it wasn’t until I read about one of my ancestors’ sons getting killed instantly by a mortar shell to the head that the macrocosm and the microcosm connected.

But mortars and the price of potatoes circ. 1919 aside, these letters revealed the first legitimate lead in my hunt. Each letter had the address of the sender at the beginning, and returning to Google I found two very tiny villages bordering two counties. Literally, the villages were no more than 10 miles apart, and right down the center was the county line between Monaghan and Armaugh. I was faced with a difficult decision, since I had two equally legitimate connections to these counties, so I did the sensible thing: I compared the jersey colors of each county, and finding that Armaugh’s jersey is orange and Monaghan’s is blue I easily decided my ancestral county as far as the Megaw side was concerned was Monaghan (blue happens to be my favorite color).

But I was still left with the mystery of the Austin side, and thus the hunt continued. I returned to the website I had found listing the whole Austin family history, and found that Joseph and Maggie were buried at Bennett Cemetery in Chester Township, Ottawa County, Michigan (sound familiar). Several Google searches later I found the Township Clerk responsible for the cemetery. I also found the genealogy society for Western Michigan and the vital records office for Michigan, so I barraged the western half of the Wolverine state with an onslaught of emails and sat patiently waiting for replies. And when I say patiently, I mean checking my email every 20 minutes for three straight days.

My first response was from the Western Michigan Genealogy Society, which advised me of their obituary database for the Grand Rapids Herald and Press dating back through the late 1800s. “Perfect,” I said to myself, “maybe I can find an obituary for Joseph that says what county he was born in.” Mercy of mercies I found a reference to one, but I did not want to pay the $5 per article fee the WMGS charges for their time and effort to send me a copy. The genealogy world is fraught with organizations that will charge you for easy access to historical records. Do not be lulled into submission; information can usually be found for free, you just have to be creative and know where to look. I opted to go straight to the source and phoned up the Grand Rapids Public Library where the microfilm reels of the Herald and Press are housed. A very helpful girl in the local history department found the obit straight away, and was even so kind as to scan and email me a copy for free. However, I was again confronted by the “born in Ireland” tag line, which at this point was becoming my mortal enemy.

But I pressed on. When embarking on the adventure of genealogy research, you have to keep pressing your advantage whenever you find even the slightest new clue. The obit mentioned the funeral home Joseph had been interred at (they’re still around in Sparta, just a different name), so I Googled them too and was quickly on the line with a lady who was bursting with the helpful attitude. She said she would go “down to the basement” to see what she could find in their files, which struck me as about as sound an idea as there ever was one. Leaving my address with her, I waited patiently for her to mail me anything she could find.

I also heard back from the Township Clerk, who emailed me a copy of the burial license for Joseph. This document gave me an exact date of death for Joseph, as well as a place of death and the cause of death: hypostatic congestion of the lungs (pneumonia for us lay people). But again, just a “born in Ireland” mention. I was beginning to feel like a homicide detective in reverse. The circumstances of Joseph’s death were quite clear and well-known, but I was trying to figure out the circumstances that lead to his birth.

After all this effort, however, I started to realize my search for Joseph Austin’s birthplace in Ireland might be hindered by the fact that he was born in Ireland but then quickly whisked off to America at the age of 6 months. Not much time to leave his mark on the Emerald Isle. So I started hunting up information on his older siblings that were also born in Ireland.

Thus I returned once again to that Austin family history webpage and acquired the name Henry Austin, born 1847 in Ireland. By this time I had found another website called Seeking Michigan, where one can find death certificates for people who died before 1920. Luckily, the source said Henry had died in 1919, so I typed in his name and hit search, not prepared for what I would find.

You see, apparently there were a lot of Henry Austin’s running around those parts of Michigan back then, and here I learned another valuable genealogy research lesson: take anonymous online sources with a grain (or two or twenty) of salt. This original source had listed Joseph’s brother as Henry J Austin, but that was actually Joseph’s cousin, also born in 1847, only he was born in Michigan. Joseph’s brother’s name was Henry F Austin, and he actually died in 1914. Henry J Austin was the one who died in 1919. Their uncle’s name was also Henry Austin. And they all lived in Chester Township, Ottawa County, Michigan. Seriously?

And, while wading through that mess, I ran across another shocking fact. On Henry F Austin’s death certificate it listed his parent’s names, Thomas and Sarah. I knew that already from the research I had done on Joseph. But what I didn’t know was Sarah’s maiden name, which happened to be Megaw (sound familiar?). The same maiden name of Joseph’s wife Maggie, my great, great, great, great, grandmother! Perhaps that explains how two random people from Ireland who immigrated to America 20-someodd years apart from each other ended up meeting and getting married in C.T., Ottawa, MI. It’s speculation, of course, but without any hard facts it’s a plausible story that Maggie came over to visit her relative Sarah (possibly a distant aunt) and met Joseph, all young and strapping and totally sunburned from being a farmer out in the field with the sun beating down on his fair Irish skin.

Unfortunately, all of these leads dead-ended (literally and figuratively). To this day the Austin connection to Ireland remains a mystery. But while my original goal was a definitive answer, the journey turned out to be way better. How else would I have figured out the Sarah/Maggie Megaw connection, or laughed at the endless iterations of Henry Austin, or just recently (in an article sent to me by the funeral home in Sparta) learned that on their way over to America, amidst the hustle and bustle of traveling internationally in 1850, Thomas and Sarah accidentally forgot one of their children in Ireland and had to wait 2 months for the next boat to arrive with the missing youngster on it. How can a Monaghan jersey compare to a juicy tidbit of family history like that!

If you’re interested in any additional information on these our Irish ancestors, please let me know and I’ll be happy to send you what I have (for a nominal fee, of course…just kidding). Or, if you yourself have some clue or piece of information you think might help me locate an answer to my question, please let me know. Any little bit helps when questing for genealogical treasure.