Wherefore art thou Thomas - 2

 The previous article attempted to unravel three possible dates for the birth of CTR’s older brother, Thomas. One date was provided by the Allegheny burial site map, which had an entry to the effect that Thomas died on August 12, 1855, aged 5 years and 3 months. However, this entry on the document dates from decades after the event, and was therefore suspect.

I am extremely grateful to J who went back to the Allegheny cemetery and photographed the complete burial record for Thomas from 1855. So now we have a contemporary document to consider, although it doesn’t solve the discrepancy at all.

So let’s have a look at the original entry from 1855.

 

Going in close for the entry for Thomas we read that he died of whooping cough, aged 5 years and 3 months, and was buried on August 17, 1855.

This means that whoever compiled the plan of the graves in the Russell plot copied out the entry accurately from the register when they added Thomas’ details.

So where does this leave us?

First, we must remember that none of the information actually comes in Joseph or Ann’s handwriting. It is at the very least second hand – they provided information for others, and it is others who have recorded it.

We can certainly do away with the incorrect March 1850 birth that turns up in various places. This is simply a misreading of the family’s 1850 census return which may look like 3/12 but turns out to be 5/12 when magnified, as shown in the previous article.

So let us for the sake of argument assume that the burial register is correct. Thomas died in the middle of August aged 5 years and 3 months. On that basis he was born in the middle of May. But if that were true, we have a census enumerator recording events as they were on June 1, 1850, who describes a two week old baby as a child of five months.

If a mistake is going to be made somewhere – as is obviously the case from the discrepancy – personally I would expect it to be made at the other end of Thomas’ short life, at the time he died. In the register page reproduced above, the same hand made all the entries – names, where from, cause of death and age at death. So the appointed scribe received the different pieces of information from different sources, perhaps verbally or more likely written down and passed on. At some point after events he wrote it all up in the official registers. Would Joseph and Ann provide incorrect information? Here my theory in the original article about the numbers 3 and 8 being misread could still hold true – pushing Thomas’ age back to the January, which would tally with the 1850 census return.

Does it matter? Well, I concede there are far more important things in life to consider. But the date of Thomas’ birth will provide the approximate date of his conception, which will help us in establishing when Joseph Lytle Russell and Ann Eliza Birney were married. We know Ann Eliza was sent a letter under her maiden name in March 1849. Maybe she had recently married and perhaps the correspondent did not know that.  But however you analyse or theorise, the marriage would seem to have taken place in the earlier part of 1849.

Maybe one day extra documents will come to light. One thing is clear, Joseph and Ann didn’t arrive from Ireland to America as a married couple in 1845 as suggested in a history video commentary. (The video was obvious based on a newspaper obituary for Joseph which said he came to America “about 1845.” However, the problem with obituaries is that the one person who can verify the information is not there to do so. Joseph had to arrive before that, if his statement about five years’ residency in his naturalization declaration of 1848 is truthful, and Ann Eliza was single at that time. It would seem that both Joseph and Ann came from Ireland at different times, but then they met and married in America, probably through their association in Pittsburgh Presbyterian Churches.

Of course, I could be wrong…

A suggestion has been made by a correspondent that may solve the above mystery. The expression 5/12 would normally in census returns refer to the 5th month out of 12 in a given year. However, it can also refer to an actual date. In the UK we put the day first and the month second - which is why the suggestion that follows never occurred to me - but in America the month goes first and then the day is second. So what if this enumerator put down Thomas as born on 5/12 - in other words on the 12th day of May? That would fit the burial register. It would also allow a longer period for the marriage of Joseph and Ann to take place in 1849. On reflection, this would answer all the queries about Thomas' birth. 

As said earlier, of course I could be wrong...