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Susannah Cornwall - birth location in Ireland and date of birth

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Hi,

 

My great grandmother, Susannah Cornwall (married name, Susannah Rockwood) was born in Ireland. I am trying to document her birth location and date of birth.

 

I have what purports to be her birth location and date of birth (discussed below). However, I have can't document either the place of birth or the date of birth with information that is very solid, and some of the information I have is either contradictory or doesn't quite make sense. The only thing that seems fairly certain at this point is that she was born in Ireland, possibly somewhere in the Northern half of the Island, with a date of birth somewhere between1837 and 1842.

 

The information I have (which comes from familysearch.com, as well as some other genealogical websites) lists her birth place as Marlsblack, Foley, Leigh, Down, Ireland. However, I can find no information that such a place name even exists, and searches of part of that word string also yield nothing. I presume that “Down” means County Down in Ireland. However, the rest of the place name is a mystery. Perhaps “Marlsblack, Foley, Leigh” might refer someone's residence or name of a farm or something. I just don't know, and I have no information as to how “Marlsblack, Foley, Leigh” even became associated with Susannah as a place of birth. (Another source just lists her birthplace as Marlsblack Down.)

 

Several of her relatives (including her father and at least one of her siblings) are listed as having been born in County Armagh in some genealogy websites. Other relatives (including her mother and at least one of her siblings) are listed as having been born in County Down. A marriage certificate of my grandfather on that side of my family lists her birth place as Dublin. By the way, if I do a Google search on Marlsblack Down the only hits that might be even remotely possible all point to biographical information for Susannah Cornwall, so Google seems unhelpful.

 

Her birthdate is listed at 14 April 1841 at FamilySearch.org and several other genealogy sites. However, there is no primary source for either the year or month and day, and what information I have is contradictory. For example, by at least as early as 1851 the family had moved to Scotland (Glasgow), and family members were working in a textile mill. The 1851 census of England, Scotland, and Wales lists her age as 14 and occupation as preparer in a flax mill, which would put her birth year as ~1837. However, this is not consistent with some other information on her birth year. Possibly her age as listed on the Census was faked so as to allow her to work long hours at the flax mill. British child labor laws of the time would not have allowed her to work long hours at the mill if she were younger than 14. In the 1861 British census she is listed as age 20, which would have put her birth year as ~1841. The family sailed for America in 1864 on the ship General McClellen. The ship's passenger list has her age as 26, which would have made her birth year as ~1838. The US census of 1870 (under her married name of Susannah Rockwood) lists her age as 29 (as of August 8 of that year), which would make her birth year as ~1841. The 1880 US census lists her age as 38 (as of June 16 if that year), which would put her birth year as ~1842. Her death record (5 January 1897) lists her age as 58 years 10 months, which would put her birth year as 1838 (Possibly around March 5, but April 14 might be within range given the likely uncertainties in the exact age listed in the death record).

 

Some sources list a brother as having been born in March of 1841 and dying the same year. If that is true then a birth date for Susannah of April 14 of the same year makes no sense. Another source (a biography of her husband, Albert Perry Rockwood) lists her date of birth as October 14, 1841, but that is also not a primary source, and no pirmary source is referenced. That source lists her birthplace as Marlsblack Down.

 

So it seems likely that her birth year was either in the 1837-1838 time frame or the 1841-1842 time frame, but in what specific year? I don't know.

 

I have absolutely no direct information on the month or day of month of her birth, other than undocumented information listing it as 14 April and another undocumented source that lists her birthday as 14 October.

 

Also, I have been able to find no documentation about her life from Ireland itself. All of the information I have been able to find comes from sources outside of Ireland, specifically Scotland, a ship's passenger manifest, and the US.

 

To summarize, she might have been born on the 14 day of the month, the month might have been March or April or October or perhaps some other month, and she might have been born in County Down, or maybe County Armagh, or possibly even Dublin, though Dublin is least likely of the three locations.

 

Anyway. Can anyone help me unravel this mystery, either with hints on how to go about solving the mystery or even direct information if any of you have it? I wonder if this search for definitive information might even be hopeless.

 

Thanks.

 

Alan Rockwood

 

P.S. It seems that my situation is not unique. Apparently it is very hard to find Irish sources of genealogical information from this historical period.

 

 

alanrockwood20…

3 replies

Alan,

The variations you have encountered with Susannah’s age are extremely common. In the 1800s Irish people generally didn’t celebrate birthdays and often had no idea of exactly how old they were. If officialdom later asked for an age or date of birth, it was common just to make one up. So normal advice is to search 5 years either side of any apparent birth date. 

Birth registration didn’t start in Ireland till 1864. Prior to that you are reliant on church records. Not all have survived and of those that do still exist, many are not on-line.

Cornwall is not a very common name in Ireland. Looking at the Rosdavies site for Co. Down, there was only 1 listed in the parish of Donaghcloney. He and his bride lived in Corcreeny townland.  If you get no other leads you might want to get a researcher to explore that parish’s records. 

http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~rosdavies/genealogy/SURNAMES/C/Cor.htm

https://civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/images/marriage_returns/marriages_1850/09393/5402475.pdf

Griffiths Valuation for c 1860 doesn’t list a single Cornwall household anywhere in Co. Down.

In the 1901 census there was only 1 Cornwall family living in the county and they lived in Belfast.

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Down/Ormeau/Ravenhill_…

I can’t help with the place name(s). I can confirm that there’s nowhere called Marlsblack, Foley or Leigh in Co Down. Probably it’s a corruption of an Irish name or two but I couldn’t begin to suggest what it might be.

Was the family RC? I searched the on-line baptism records for Cornwall and & Co Down and did not find a single one. Possibly they were another denomination, in which case the records may not be on-line.  The majority of Cornwalls in Ireland in the 1901 census appear to have been Church of Ireland (ie Episcopalian) or Methodist, though there were some RC families. For non RC church records you would need to get a researcher to go to PRONI (the public record office) in Belfast to look them up. But you would need to have some idea of where in Co Down they lived, as well as knowing their exact denomination.

Elwyn, IrelandXO Volunteer ☘IrelandXO Volunteer

Thanks Elwyn. I think the information and advice you gave will be very helpful. I will try following some of the links you gave.

I did find out that there is a location in Ireland called Foley. I found that in a site for looking up Irish place names, https://www.logainm.ie/en/. It turns out that Foley is in County Armagh, which is a location mentioned in the genealogy of several of the Cornwall family members. County Down is also mentioned in the genealogy of several family members.

I don't know if the family was Roman Catholic. I suspect not because, at least according to my theory, the family (at least the male line of the family) probably originated in England. However, the Cornwall family was in Ireland for at least a few generations prior to Susannah's birth. If the family did originate in England then they were probably Protestant, although this is not a sure thing. For example, the Rockwood line (my surname) was at one point known as Rookwood in England. The Rookwood family was Catholic at the time of Elizabeth I, and some of them paid dearly for remaining Catholic in the face of severe persecution. Anyway, back to my Cornwall family ancestor, at some point before 1860 the Cornwall family joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, probably sometime in the late 1840s and eventually they came to America.

I mentioned that they lived in Scotland for a while. I don't know why they moved there. Most likely it was either economic reasons or possibly even to avoid starvation. It might have also had something to do with their change of religion. I think the family was probably not economically prosperous. Otherwise I doubt that most of the family would have been working in a flax mill before coming to America.

As an aside, other than my parents, at each generation I have at least one ancestor who came to America from somewhere else going back several generations, and as a result my recent ancestry is 1/8 Irish, 1/8 Scottish, and 1/4 German. Most of my other ancestors lived in the US for many generations, in some cases hundreds of years, with most of them having originated in England before that, but with a smattering of Scottish and possibly French ancestors thrown into the mix as well. There was even an unconfirmed assertion of an American Indian ancestor from the early 1600s in Virginia, but that is somewhat doubtful. I guess that ancestry mix makes me a typical American in some ways. These days I am trying to get more in touch with places where my ancestors originated such as Ireland.

alanrockwood20…

You are curious as to why they went to Scotland. Ireland lacks natural resources. No coal, oil, iron ore etc, and so apart from a modest amount of shipbuilding in Belfast and the Belfast linen mills (which mostly only employed women or teenagers as they were cheaper & nimbler), it did not really get the industrial revolution that benefited England and Scotland where mills, steelworks, ship building, coal mining and all their support industries were major employers creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Much better paid than subsistence farming or weaving. (Labourers usually did weaving in the winter months when there wasn’t much farm work needed). Added to that you had the effects of a massive population explosion in Ireland – up from 3 million in 1750 to 8 million in 1841 (no-one is really sure of the reasons why but reduced neo-natal deaths seem to be a factor) and the famine. So some push factors and some pull factors saw huge numbers of people leave Ireland. Something like 8 million people emigrated from Ireland between 1801 & 1921.

https://www.irish-genealogy-toolkit.com/emigration-Ireland-19th-century.html

If you look at the Scottish censuses for the Glasgow area in the late 1800s, you will see that about every fifth person recorded there was born in Ireland. Scotland was a particularly popular place to go to work because it was easy and very cheap to get to. Several sailings every day from Belfast. The shipping companies main business was cargo and the passengers were just top-up revenue. Competition was fierce and passenger fares very low. People working in Scotland could come home for weddings or the harvest, as well as holidays (Glasgow used to shut down for 2 weeks every July, known as the Glasgow Fair holiday and there would then be a huge exodus to Ireland).  You could also send children back to stay with their grandparents, thereby leaving the wife free to work. You couldn’t do all those things so easily from Australia, America or Canada. 

The move to Scotland is unlikely to have anything to do with religion because equal numbers of Protestants & Catholics went. Economic improvement was the main driver then, just as it is today. Going first to Scotland and then on to the US or elsewhere was common too. It was called stepped migration.

 

 

Elwyn, IrelandXO Volunteer ☘IrelandXO Volunteer

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