Keep Looking

Recently I have been checking the FindMyPast website hoping to find new transcriptions or scanned images to check. I thought to check and see if children of Robert English might have shown up and I hit pay dirt.

Robert’s younger son, Martin, married two Catholic women and baptized all 6 of his children with them in Catholic ceremonies. Martin, his children and wives were buried at Calvary Cemetery in Woodside. I had not been able to find birth or baptismal records for Martin or his siblings and half-siblings. 

I had found an 1854 marriage between Martin’s parents at Twenty-eighth Street Presbyterian. Robert’s first wife died and he wed a widow, Fanny Wilson Mulligan. Mrs. Mulligan had married in Ireland in 1856 in a Presbyterian ceremony. No record of this second marriage has been found. 

Robert and Fanny had three daughters. These daughters and their half-siblings(two English brothers and four Mulligan siblings) were often found in Episcopalian records. 

One, Sarah, married John Rogen in 1890 at St. Raphael Catholic and baptized their daughter in the Catholic rites there in 1891. This little girl died in 1893 and was buried in Evergreen, a non-Catholic cemetery. 

Sarah’s second marriage to John Baker was at St. Chrysostom Episcopal in 1901 but their children were baptized at St Raphael in 1905 and 1907. Despite a Catholic baptism, the little boy born in 1905 was buried at Evergreen in 1906.  

Sarah had been a baptismal sponsor in 1893 at St. Chrysostom for her nephew.(Interestingly, this nephew would enter a mixed marriage and marry a Catholic woman in 1915 at St. Raphael. Their sons were baptized at St. Raphael in 1917 and 1919.)

It had been unclear what religion Martin English was raised in. He joined the Catholic Church on 27 Apr 1884 by being baptized at Holy Cross. It neighbors St. Raphael in Hell’s Kitchen. This entry recorded his middle name as Francis. He was formerly a Presbyterian. His parents were Robert English and Lizzie Morrison. He was born in 1857. His sponsors were Patrick Sweeney and Maggie Healy. This provided a tidy bit of information all because he was an adult convert to the Catholic Church. There is no notation that the baptism was conditional. It is possible that a Presbyterian ceremony may be found earlier in his life but it might be that he had never been baptized previously. He remained a practicing Catholic. He married in the Catholic Church in 1888 and 1900. His children were baptized Catholic in 1889, 1891, 1893, 1895, 1901 and 1903. He was buried in a Catholic cemetery in 1908.