When I first started researching my great-grandmother Bridget Mary Gallagher, I knew very little about her family. I knew the name Gallagher was Irish, and honestly, that was basically the extent of my knowledge of that side of the family.
I knew Bridget had married my great-grandfather, Calvin Quackenbush, somewhere in England. I’m not even sure I knew at the time that it was York, or exactly when they had married. Calvin was easier. He was Canadian, I knew who his parents were, and there was already a family here that I could work backwards from. Bridget was different.
So I started where most family historians do: births, marriages and deaths.
The marriage seemed like the obvious place to begin because it was the one event I knew for certain had happened in England. I found Bridget and Calvin in the UK General Register Office (GRO) marriage index in York in the last calendar quarter of 1918.
This was before so many records were available digitally online, so I had to order the physical certificate and wait for it to make its way to Canada by Royal Mail. At the time, an order could take up to a month. By the time it arrived, it felt like I had been waiting forever for this one piece of paper.
It was worth it.
The certificate confirmed that I had the right Calvin because the father he named matched the family I already knew in Canada. But for Bridget, almost everything was new. Her father was Thomas Gallagher, and he was listed as deceased. Her residence was given as The Retreat.
I had no idea what The Retreat was, so I Googled it. The Wikipedia page said, “commonly known as the York Retreat, is a place in England for the treatment of people with mental health needs.” Was she a patient there? Did she work there? Why was she living there?
I didn’t chase that question very far at the time. I was too focused on figuring out the family.
Next came Bridget’s birth certificate. Another order, another wait. This time I learned that she had been born at 8 Long Close Lane in Walmgate. Her father was Thomas Gallagher, a bricklayer’s labourer, and her mother was Margaret Gallagher, formerly Calpin.
Now I had parents, an address and somewhere specific to start looking.
The census records kept the family in the same part of York, but as I worked through the pages I started noticing something else. There were Irish-born residents and Irish surnames all around them. The Gallaghers clearly weren’t the only Irish family in the neighbourhood.
When I worked backwards on Thomas and Margaret, I found that they had both been born in York too. It was their parents who had come from Ireland. Bridget wasn’t simply an Irish woman who happened to be born in England. Her family had already been part of an Irish community in York for generations.
At that point, though, I was still mostly focused on names. Who were Bridget’s siblings? Where did everyone go? How did the family fit together?
Then I started finding things that didn’t fit quite so neatly.
In March 1900, when Bridget was only nine years old, the York School Board committed her to Ashburton House Industrial School for Roman Catholic Girls in Coxlodge, Northumberland. The decision was reported in the York Herald after the School Board meeting on 7 March.
What really stopped me was what was printed on the very same newspaper page.
In the first column was an article about her father under the headline “A Cruel Father”.
Bridget’s School Board notice appeared in the next column.
The report said Thomas Gallagher had been charged with cruelty to two of his children. It described a very poor household, repeated drinking, previous assaults and injuries to the children. Margaret told the court that she had taken the girl to a National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) inspector after she had been struck.
I had gone looking for Bridget and found two newspaper items sitting almost beside each other that suddenly made the family look very different.
Her committal to an industrial school was no longer just an odd line in the record. There was clearly much more happening at home than the birth certificates and census returns had shown me.
Up until then, I had been trying to work out who Bridget Gallagher’s family was.
Now I wanted to know what had happened to them.
And before I could really understand that, I also needed to understand the place they lived.
Why was this Irish family in Walmgate, and why were there so many other Irish families living around them?
Sources & Further Reading
- General Register Office, England and Wales, marriage certificate for Calvin James Quackenbush and Bridget Mary Gallagher, York, 1918.
- General Register Office, England and Wales, birth certificate for Bridget Mary Gallagher, York, 16 June 1890.
- York Herald, 8 March 1900, report of Bridget Gallagher’s committal to an industrial school.
- York Herald, 10 March 1900, “A Cruel Father,” report concerning Thomas Gallagher.
- 1891 and 1901 Census of England and Wales, Gallagher family, York.
- The Retreat, York, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Retreat