Heritage and More: McGinnis Family Records, St. Michael's Parish, Chatham, New Brunswick

James McGinnis Sr.

About age 35

Copied from a photo taken in Chicago about the time

of the marriage of James and Mary Ellen Donahue in 1883

The following inserted pages are microfilm photo copies of the actual records of St. Michael's Parish in Chatham, New Brunswick or some adjacent parish. Some are extremely difficult to read due to the penmanship of various priests as they recorded the dates they gave the Sacraments of Baptism and Marriage to their many parishoners.

The Drouin Genealogical Institute of Quebec took on the task of microfilming all the church records of the various Catholic parishes administered out of Quebec City which is a considerable amount of records. The area involved in the task essentially covered every parish in the provinces of Quebec, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, all under the auspices of the presiding Archbishop or Cardinal residing in Quebec City or Montreal. The effort begun in the 1940's was primarily meant to record French genealogy records but as is evident the task encompassed all parishes, French or English speaking. Since the Maritime Provinces, unlike Quebec of course, are primarily English speaking with many sizeable pockets of French culture it was determined that all records would be filmed in order to capture the data of all the French families.

Thus many if not most of the records of our Irish Canadian ancestors came to be preserved forever and through the magic of the computer age these images are all indexed and available for easy access over the Internet. To me personally this source has been a treasure and what you view here is primarily data of our primary interests. Many other pages involving the families that various ancestors married into have also been downloaded and saved for future reference. Tracing Godparents has been a useful tool in establishing family connections and for that reason alone all these records have been a valuable source to help piece together all that is known today.

You will notice that some entries are purposely obscured or covered over for some reason. Most likely this was done for reasons of privacy but just how that was established is yet to be discovered. It occurs often through out the Drouin collection. Another common practice during the filming was to insert a loose page of information into the record which resulted in some entries being covered over. I later discovered that these pages were filmed twice so that all data was eventually filmed.

To enlarge the view simply double-click on the image.

Baptism Record of James McGinnis

September 15, 1847

Chatham, Northumberland County, New Brunswick

The record for James is on the right side of the image, third entry from the top

Reverend John Sweeney
1821-1901

Baptising Priest of James McGinnis

Father Sweeney was the second priest to serve the

parishinors of St. Michael's after it's establishment in 1839,

three years after our Great Grandfather John McGinnis

arrived from Ireland

Baptism Record for John McGinnis Jr.

August 26, 1849

Third child of John McGinnis,

Second child of Margaret McCarron
The record for John is on the left of the image,
fourth entry from the top

Baptism Record for Patrick McGinnis

August 3, 1845

First born child of John McGinnis Sr. Mother is Mary Buchanan. She apparently died shortly after the birth for no further record can be found for her. This is a stepson of Margaret McCarron that obviously raised Patrick as her own son.

The record for Patrick can be found scrawled at the bottom right of the image.