Researching your family history: Civil Records

Last week’s blog showed that Catherine McCormack gave birth to a baby boy, Patrick, on the 31 May 1916.  The birth record stated that James, the father, was deceased at the time of his birth.  This week we are attempting to find out what happened to James Senior.

My search begins as always by accessing www.irishgenealogy.ie   Scroll down to Search online records and fill in first and last name and location and year then press search. You will be offered a list of sources to choose from.  Choose Civil Records, you will then be asked to solve this captch (tick box).  The last step is to fill in your own name and tick box, this will allow you to search the indexes to the Births, Deaths and Marriages registers.  You will then need to revise the Search Criteria.  My search would look like this:

James McCormack Dublin 1916 and tick Death box Press search.

My search returned three results.  Three men all named James McCormack who had all died by gunfire. Two were married men aged 40 and 36 years respectively and another whom the only personal detail was that he had been a labourer.  Which James were we researching?  A quick glance at all three records shows that only one of them has a wife named Catherine.  We are lucky from a research point of view that Catherine was with her husband when he was shot.

We can see from the Death Certificate that James was killed by gunfire on 27th. April 1916.  He was killed at home and his wife was present at the time. He was forty years of age. There is a discrepancy between his age on 1911 Census, where he was recorded as being 30 years old, and five years later at the time of his death when he listed as 40 years of age.  This could be explained by the confusion surrounding the events of the 1916 rising.   More research would need to be done to clarify his age.  The sad fact remains that his wife, Catherine, who was eight months pregnant at the time of his death was left a widow with two small children, James, aged 10 years and Charles who was just 5 year old.  James and Catherine, who were married in 1903, had only thirteen years as a married couple before he died of gunshot wounds during the 1916 rebellion.