The Problem of Morgan Cronin

The Evidence

The provable facts -- as they were before this re-analysis project -- are limited:

1. The proper name of the Monon is the "Chicago, Indianapolis & Louis Railroad" and it opened its main route from Chicago to the Ohio River in 1853, five years before Morgan' s earliest documented appearance in Indiana. So his supposed motivation for moving north is perfectly feasible.
2. A marriage license was issued in Lafayette, Tippecanoe County, Indiana on 22 October 1858 for "Morgan Cronin" and "Johannah Hayes." It's not known whether either of them was actually living there at the time, or merely passing through. (See below for comments on the Catholic Church and its records at this time and place.)
3. In the 1860 census of Francesville, Salem Township, Pulaski County, there is a listing for "Morgan Cronan," age 38 years, born in Ireland, his wife "Johannah," age 19 years, also born in Ireland, and their son Michael, age 3 months, born in Indiana. Morgan was an illiterate day laborer possessing real estate worth $450 and personal property worth $75 -- not much, even in 1860. On the other hand, he apparently owned a house and was not merely a renter.
4. In the 1870 census of Francesville, Morgan appears at age 47, a "R.R. Repairer," the value of whose estate had decreased to only $330. But he was now a U.S. citizen. He and his wife (listed this time as "Hannah," age 30) now had six children, ranging in age from Michael at 10 years to "Cattie" (Catherine), aged 8 months. But now they also had Johannah's mother, Ellen Hayes, living with them. She was listed as 70 years old, born in Ireland, and was a "Retired Nurse" (and probably a widow).

   (Given the family's apparent complete lack of social standing, by the way, I think it unlikely Ellen would have been the sort of professional nurse we would expect today. More likely, she was simply a caregiver of either the sick, the elderly, or of children.)

5. In the 1880 census, "Morgan Cronen" was 56 years old, still illiterate, and a "Laborer." Johannah was 39 years old and her mother, Ellen, was 82. They had ten children, of whom the youngest, John, was one year old (actually, he had been born in September 1877). Their last child, Adelaide, would be born in October 1880. One son, Timothy, born in 1867, had died late in 1870, after the enumeration of that year.
6. Sometime after the 1880 census, Morgan died, date and place not recorded in Pulaski County.
7. Soon after her husband's death, Johannah moved the family to Indianapolis and acquired a family home near the intersection of State and Market Streets. There she died in 1891 and was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery.
8. Five of Morgan's and Johannah's daughters never married. As was not uncommon among large Irish families, they kept the house in Indianapolis and looked after their three brothers, two of whom likewise never married. (All of them were railroad men, too. My mother remembers that her great-uncle Mike Cronin's brakeman's lantern was displayed as an heirloom.) Thus, there were not many second-generation descendants to pass on family papers or history.

The Deductions

Some reasonable deductions may be made from the above, together with additional evidence I have recently acquired. Since Morgan's listed ages in all three censuses are consistent, we may be confident that he was born 1822-1824. The Cronin family in Ireland is most numerous in southwest Cork and southeast Kerry, so it's entirely reasonable that he would have been born there. His port of embarkation, therefore, probably was Cork City.

Johannah Hayes, whose age in the census also is consistent, was born c1840, and was 17 or 18 when she married Morgan. Morgan was about fifteen years older, which was common enough among working-class Irish couples in the 19th century. She seems to have immigrated through Boston, and I found the following passenger list entry:

20 August 1853 -- Hays, Johanna. Accompanied by ____________. Age: 11 yrs. Nationality: Irish. Last permanent residence: Ireland. Port of Entry: Boston, Mass. Vessel: NORTH AMERICA. [B2298, p. 1]

This immigrant Johannah would have been born in 1842, which is a very close fit. At such a young age, she almost certainly was not traveling alone, but no parent's name is listed. But where were Johannah and her mother between 1853 in Boston and 1858 in Indiana? Also, what led them to journey to the midwest in the first place? Did Ellen already have family there -- perhaps an older son or daughter who had immigrated earlier and who helped bring over the remainder of the family from Ireland to America?

Also, Ellen Hayes apparently was not living with her daughter and son-in-law in 1860; where was she before the 1870 census? (She does not appear anywhere in Pulaski County or in the state of Indiana, nor in the published Indiana census index of 1860, nor in the every-name index to the 1860 census at Ancestry.com. I can only assume she was skipped by the enumerator.)

There is no indication that Ellen moved to Indianpolis with the family. Since she was born c1800, she would have been quite elderly after the 1880 census, the last in which she appears. (It may also be that her health already was deteriorating and that Johannah waited until after her mother's death before leaving Francesville.) My mother remembers nothing ever being said by any of her great-aunts regarding their grandmother.

On a research trip to nothern Indiana in 1998, I made a thorough search of the only Catholic cemetery in Pulaski County (about a mile south of Francesville) and found no Cronin grave markers at all. However, I was told that the cemetery had been in use for a number of years before stone markers began to be generally used, and also that the poorer families had to make do with wooden crosses, all of which are now gone. Nor does the county newspaper have complete files going back to the 1880s.

Moreover, there seems not to be a full-time Catholic Church in Francesville these days. St. Francis Solano Church was established there in 1867 and was presumably the Cronin family's parish church -- but the present building is quite new, quite small, and nowadays is served (administered, actually) by a priest from St. Joseph's College in Rensselaer. Pulaski County is presently under the Archdiocese of Lafayette-in-Indiana, but that has only been the case since 1944. Before that, the Diocese of Fort Wayne, established in 1857, had jurisdiction. Inquiries to the diocesan archives in Fort Wayne have not yet produced any information or guidance regarding the survival of sacramental records. Obviously, I very much want details on baptisms of Morgan's and Johannah's children, and on the deaths of Ellen Hayes and of the infant Timothy Cronin. (Even though I'm not Catholic, I have considerable experience with the archdiocesan archives here in Baton Rouge, and trying to obtain copies of records from what is not, legally, a public agency can be frustrating. . . .) The next step is probably to consult with the folks at the Notre Dame University archives.

[I might add that in asking questions of anyone I ran into in Francesville, which is quite a small town in the western part of the county, many miles from the county seat, it seemed that no one I spoke to was actually from Francesville! Everyone there and in the county seat of Winamac also was very vague about the existence of an Irish population during the 19th century -- though Francesville was virtually an "Irish town," most of whose residents were railroad laborers. Later, while browsing through what remains of the county's weekly newspaper of that period (on microfilm), I got the distinct impression that Morgan's Protestant contemporaries in the eastern part of Pulaski County also were not thrilled by the presence of a sizable Irish Catholic presence near their community. . . .]

On my research trip to Indiana in 1998, I discovered a newspaper obituary in Attica (Fountain County), just a brief mention, really, for a "Michael" Cronin, who died at his home 17 February 1887 and was buried locally (though I was subsequently unable to locate a grave marker of any kind in Attica's only not-very-large Catholic cemetery). The local parish priest kindly hiked up to the attic of the Parsonage, located the old Interment Book, and made a photocopy for me of the relevant page -- which, unfortunately, provided no additional information. It seems also to indicate that no family members were present at the burial.

The Attica city directory for 1887 -- the only one in which he appears at all -- lists "Cronin, Morgan -- laborer -- w side Union, 1 [block] s Monroe." The parish priest in Attica in 1887 presumably provided the information to the authorities and the newspaper regarding his deceased parishioner, using his "proper" baptismal name. Later research showed no Cronin families at all residing in Fountain County at that time or for several decades before and after, so the Michael Cronin who died in Attica must have recently come from somewhere else, or was not a permanent resident.

Morgan would have been about 65 years old in 1887, still apparently a laborer for the railroad and still relatively poor. If the family didn't have the money to have his body shipped home, he would have been buried in Attica -- probably without a stone, for the same economic reasons.

A Catholic genealogist with whom I later had a conversation pointed out that "Morgan" was very unlikely to have been his baptismal name, not being a saint's name or even a Christian name. ("St. Morgan" . . . ?) It seems likely, then, that Morgan would have been buried until a name the Church approved of. And Morgan's and Johannah's first child was named "Michael."

One other piece of useful evidence came to my attention at this point. Agnes Cronin, my mother's grandmother, married Plummer E. Gastineau in Indianapolis on 5 February 1894, which was four or five years after she moved to the city with her mother and siblings. In reexamining all the "Cronin" documents in my files, I looked again at my copy of their marriage license for the first time in years, and realized that she had given her father's name as "Michael Cronin."

The Boston Pilot was a newspaper widely read by immigrant Irish all over the eastern United States, and it therefore became a kind of notice board where new arrivals or those remaining behind in Ireland would post advertisements seeking to contact their relatives. A five-volume set called The Search for Missing Friends has been published which compiles and indexes these notices, and it contains the following interesting item:

23 March 1844 -- "Information wanted of Daniel and Michael Cronin, natives of County Cork. About four years ago they were in Boston. Their brother, Patrick, is now in Boston, and is anxious to hear from them. He can be found at No. 2, Clark St., Boston, Mass."

Also: The index to New Orleans naturalization records does list a "Michael K. Cronin" [no, I wasn't named for him!] for the period between June 1839 and October 1844. (I haven't yet located a copy of the original record.) Could Morgan/Michael have resided in New Orleans long enough and been old enough by 1844 to have become a citizen there, and not in Indiana? Because Pulaski County was in the northwestern part of Indiana, which was under the jurisdiction of the courts in Chicago for the purposes of naturalization, and the indexes to those records (which, admittedly, are incomplete) include no "Cronin" listings at all.

Records for laboring-class Catholics in the far southwest of Ireland being what they were in the early 19th century -- almost nonexistent -- I don't really expect to be able to locate Morgan's or Johannah's actual townland. But I would certainly like to be able to meet them as they get off the boat in this side of the Atlantic!