Five letters are already in Brooklyn ahead of me, each sent to a different Catholic office with the same basic question: do you have my family in your parish records?
On September 8, I’ll return to Brooklyn, where I was born and where generations of my paternal Irish ancestors lived beginning in the 1850s. I’ll be there through September 17, gathering parish records and family photographs, searching for family treasures in the house my family has owned since 1905 (see: “One Address, Eight Census Records, 45 Years of Family Survival“) visiting the churches where my ancestors worshipped, and paying my respects at Holy Cross Cemetery, where almost all of them are buried.
Two families are behind those letters. The Dowlings and Plunketts became one family when Thomas F. Dowling married Mary A. Plunkett around 1896, although I haven’t found the exact date. Each family left behind a tangle of Brooklyn addresses stretching back to the 1850s.
I used to think finding a family’s church meant finding one church. I was wrong. I need parish records from five.
Parish boundaries in nineteenth-century Brooklyn weren’t permanent. They shifted as the city grew, new parishes formed, and families moved from one neighborhood to another in search of work and cheaper rent. The Plunketts lived in Vinegar Hill in 1850 and had moved to Red Hook later in the decade, where they remained through at least 1901. The Dowlings appear in Prospect Heights from the 1860s through the 1890s, then in Kensington beginning in 1905.
Four neighborhoods led me to four active Catholic parishes and their parish records, plus the Diocese of Brooklyn Archives, which holds the surviving records of a fifth, now-closed parish.
Where the Five Searches Lead
Here’s where the five searches lead:
- St. James Cathedral-Basilica, Brooklyn’s oldest Catholic parish, for the marriage of Peter Plunkett and Julia Smith, probably between 1848 and 1850, and the baptisms of their earliest children.
- Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Red Hook, for nine Plunkett-Smith baptisms and a second search for the couple’s marriage, in case the earlier event was later recorded in the parish register.
- The Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph–St. Teresa of Avila, whose parish records have already confirmed the baptisms of the three youngest Dowling-McAuliffe children. The marriage of William Dowling and Ellen McAuliffe and the baptisms of their four oldest children remain missing.
- Immaculate Heart of Mary in Kensington, for four Dowling baptisms recorded between 1905 and 1915, and, because I can’t resist including it, my own baptismal entry from September 1969.
- The Diocese of Brooklyn Archives, which holds whatever survived from the closed Our Lady of Mercy parish. That is where the Dowling-McAuliffe marriage and the four earliest baptisms may be, if they survive anywhere at all.
Every baptism in these parish records matters. But the marriages matter more.
A Catholic marriage entry from this era can name each party’s parish or place of baptism. For an immigrant, that information may point directly to a parish in Ireland. Both missing marriages carry that possibility.
The William Dowling and Ellen McAuliffe entry could contain the clue that tells me where both William and Ellen’s families came from in Ireland. I’ve been chasing that answer for years alongside an Australian cousin who is searching for it from her side of the world. The Peter Plunkett and Julia Smith entry could do the same for that couple, whose Irish origins remain just as much of a blank.
I made the same request in each letter: please send a photocopy of the original register page, if possible, rather than a typed certificate.
A certificate may preserve the basic names and dates, but it can omit the details I actually need: baptismal sponsors, marriage witnesses, marginal notes, and any place-name scrawled in a corner, Cork, Clare, Mayo, that might point me toward Ireland. The original page is where a nineteenth-century pastor, writing in whatever hand he had that day, might have left the one clue that unravels everything.
What Comes Next
I don’t know yet what these five parish records requests will produce. Some may turn up nothing. Some may result in a certificate instead of the register page I requested. One office might tell me that the records burned in a fire decades ago, which happens more often than any genealogist wants to admit.
But the letters are sent, and the visits are tentatively being arranged for my time in Brooklyn. Between September 8 and 17, I’ll be standing in front of the first of five doors, hoping one of them opens onto an answer that has been waiting 160 years to be found.
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