New England Naturalization Records, 1796 - 1906

[JohnInMass]

Eventually more Clare-specific information will be added to this topic.

For now, an excellent description and history of the information on the above captioned topic held by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Boston Office (Waltham, Mass.) is the following article by Walter V. Hickey published in their Prologue magazine:

http://www.archives.gov/publications/pr ... -fall.html

It's an interesting tale of how non-Federal and non-original documents ended up being preserved by the National Archives of the US--literally at the last moment as they were getting tossed into a paper mill's pulp machine.

[JohnInMass]

The article cited above discusses two important topics: the indexing project of the original court records held by 301 distinct Federal and State/County/Local courts in five New England states: Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont as well as the individual "dexigraph" photographs of the court records encompassed by the indexing project.

The index to these dexigraphs has been microfilmed as NARA Microfilm Publication M1299, Index to New England Naturalization Petitions, 1791–1906.

Additionally, images of the index cards are now available online through such popular sites as familysearch.org and Ancestry.com. These online databases of the information contained on the index cards are easily searched.

Great you might say! Terrific! Just type in County Clare, and whoosh bang, presto: there's the 60,000 (hmmm, more? less?) I just knew came from County Clare during the 19th century. Um, no...not quite.

The amount of information contained on the index card varies quite a lot. Some cards have virtually every item of data contained in the underlying dexigraph of the actual court record. Regrettably, most of the index cards contain little more than name, address (city), court of naturalization and date of naturalization. The details for port and date of arrival as well as the names and addresses of witnesses are most often omitted on these cards even though the dexigraph image will often (opinions differ on how often) will have that information. The most frustrating thing is that the Country of birth or allegiance index will often show "Ireland" or "Great Britain" when more detail is available on the dexigraph itself.

Some good news: there are plans to film/digitize the actual dexigraphs. Although this will take some time, the project ought to be wrapped up sometime in 2013.

[JohnInMass]

An example of an index card and its associated dexigraph are attached.

Index Card (see attached):
Family name: MADIGAN
Given name or names: JOHN
Address: Leominster Mass
Certificate no. (or vol. and page): 19-94
Title and location of court: USDC BOSTON MASS
Country of birth or allegiance: Ireland
When born (or age): 1820
Date and port of arrival in U. S.: [blank]
Date of naturalization: Mar 21 1856
Names and addresses of witnesses: [blank]

Additional information included on the dexigraph images (see attached):
occupation: farmer
birthplace: "in the County of Clare Ireland"
age: "about 36 years of age"
arrived at: "Boston ... on or about the fourth day of July ...eighteen hundred and forty seven"
court of declaration of intent: "Circuit Court holden at Boston ... on the Eleventh day of December A.D. 1851"
witnesses: "John McNamara of Boston and Lawrence Boland of Leominster"

Madigan, John, Leominster, index card.JPG (77.66 KiB) Viewed 12184 times

Madigan, John, Leominster, dexigraph page 1 reduced to 25 pct.jpg (160.02 KiB) Viewed 12184 times

Madigan, John, Leominster, dexigraph page 2 reduced to 25 pct.jpg (133.56 KiB) Viewed 12184 times

[JohnInMass]

One observation (noted by staff at NARA, and indeed by own experience) is that the index cards for some courts in New England are more complete than others. The US District Court in Boston rarely (if ever) provides the additional details contained in associated dexigraph (as the above example illustrates).

However, there are courts where the index cards are unusually complete and these cards are searchable through familysearch.org. I don't have much luck at Ancestry.com doing this type of search, but others might get a better result.

Performing a search for "Clare" in the "Any place" box for their New England Naturalizations database of index cards yields 677 results. Not very many, due to the reason cited above about completeness of the index.

Of these, approximately 89 are not actually County Clare, since other locations in Ireland appear to include the word or word-part "Clare". The remaining 588 have varying degrees of completeness. If there is interest, I can upload an Excel spreadsheet containing a transcription of the index cards containing all of the information on these 588 index cards. I should point out beforehand that such a spreadsheet would be a transcription of a transcription (since the index cards themselves are a transcription).

The dexigraph images associated with the 588 index cards indicating County Clare Ireland can (at the present time) be obtained either in person or by mail at the NARA office in Waltham. Since these dexigraphs are treated as original documents, the process for viewing them and obtaining copies is tedious for both the staff and researcher. My own trips to NARA usually require an hour to obtain six dexigraph copies. More time scan and summarize, etc. etc. Eventually when the aforementioned project to digitize them is complete, the process will be much quicker and easier. Hopefully, a new index that better reflects the underlying data will be forthcoming as well.

[Clare Admin]

Thanks to the generosity of JohnInMass these 588 records can now be viewed online on Clare County Library's website at http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclar ... ngland.htm

Clare Admin

[smcarberry]

John and Library staff,

Thanks very much for making this resource available. I realize the time and patience it takes to cull out details for those 588 lines. Having it online and being able to use the "find" function to pinpoint certain details is really valuable.

Having once lived near the Waltham NARA branch, I spent an afternoon doing this for all the Carberry arrivals, without going into the dexigraph images of the underlying records (New England was not an immigration point for Carberrys from Clare). Just having the index information has been handy for comparing various Carberry families in that part of the country.

News that the naturalization records in full will be coming online is definitely something to look forward to, and I heard it first here. Waltham director Walter Hickey is a great friend of family historians.

Sharon Carberry
Georgia USA