Family record
1845–1900: Famine, Migration & New Lives
The middle decades of the nineteenth century changed the course of millions of Irish families.
1845–1900
The Great Famine, economic pressure and migration separated families from communities in Ireland and established new branches throughout the United States and elsewhere.
For the McManus family, this is also the period in which the documentary record becomes much richer.
Michael McManus and Mary Spellman
A key surviving record is the marriage of Michael McManus and Mary Spellman at St. Vincent de Paul in Manhattan on 24 July 1859.
The marriage record identifies Michael’s parents as Thomas McManus and Mary Hopkins. Mary’s parents are recorded as Patrick Spellman and Mary Walsh.
The record provides an important link between the immigrant generation in New York and the search for earlier family origins in Ireland.
Rebuilding community
Irish immigrants often rebuilt family and community networks through:
- churches,
- neighborhoods,
- marriages,
- baptismal sponsorship,
- employment,
- mutual aid,
- and shared burial plots.
These associations can reveal relatives who are not explicitly identified as such in census or civil records.
Records for this era
Important sources include:
- passenger and immigration records,
- naturalization papers,
- parish registers,
- civil birth, marriage and death records,
- federal and state censuses,
- city directories,
- cemetery records,
- newspapers and obituaries.
From Ireland to America
The research challenge is not merely to find a McManus family in Ireland, but to identify the correct family through overlapping evidence: names, ages, relatives, places, occupations, witnesses, DNA and migration patterns.