Searching the Glasgow Roman Catholic Registers for Thomas Neil and Agnes Feran

The Problem.

For decades now I have met a big “brick wall” in my Neil family history – the problem of the lack of documentary evidence about Thomas Neill and Agnes Feran who were the parents of my ancestor, John Neil whose birth and baptism (14th April 1836 and 4th July 1836 respectively) were recorded in the birth registers of St Andrew’s Cathedral, Glasgow. Basically, I cannot find any further reference to Thomas after 1836 but I have located an 1841 census return for a household in Muirhead Street, Gorbals, Glasgow that shows Agnes and some children. She goes by the name of Feren not McNeil but her children are McNeils. It is possible she was a widow.

This census return shows Agnes Feren, aged 40 in a household with Charles McNeil aged 14 and John McNeil aged 4. From this we can infer that Charles was born around 1827 and John was born around 1837. This, of course, fits well with our John who was born 14th April 1836. For a long time I could find no other siblings and so I started searching some of the baptismal registers for St Andrews and came across the birth of another child, Patrick, born “about two weeks ago” from his baptismal date of 26 August 1833. The parents were Thomas McNeil and Agnes Feran.

So this is where I was left; Thomas was last recorded alive in 1836 at the birth of his son, John. At the 1841 census he may no longer be alive although I have found no evidence of his death. Agnes is living with Charles McNeil and John McNeil but the son, Patrick, who was born in 1833 and who would have been aged about 8 at the time of the 1841 census is not present.

There are many reasons why neither Thomas nor Patrick is in the household at the taking of the 1841 census but after searching for years for a trace of these people, it is ultimately only my great-great grandfather, John McNeil (later also Neil and O’Neil) that I know much more about.

The indexes I have searched so far have proved a bit fruitless. True, I found Patrick but that wasn’t via an index but by scouring the register pages of Glasgow Cathedral. If I wanted to find out more about Thomas and Agnes as well as Charles and Patrick, I might have to dig a lot deeper. With the appearance of the Catholic registers for Glasgow on the Find My Past web site, this became a feasible option. At the time of writing this, Ancestry has 16,579 images of pages of the Cathoilc registers of baptisms, marriages, burials, communions, confirmations, sick calls and lair registers etc.

I decided that I would start looking at as many of these as I could noting all the entries I could find for Neils, McNeils, O’Neils and other variations.

The Methodology

The method I used was to open the image page on Ancestry. These pages have an indexed strip running along the bottom of the web pages which features the names of the principals named in the register page. Where these were unambiguous, I used them to locate individual entries which had been transcribed. I then used the software program “Online Repository Assistant” (ORA) to copy this information automatically to pages of an Excel spreadsheet. This was done by writing a short Auto Type template to direct the program to extract the information on the indexed web page to Excel. This was essential to the whole idea as to manually copy and paste or manually copy the data would have made the whole project far to big to be possible. Using ORA also ensures that I did not introduce any typos into the data.

Having said that, not all the transcriptions are correct or complete and some are missed entirely. Sometimes this is caused by the registers themselves being very hard to read but at other times errors creep in due to transcriber failures. When the index strip at the bottom of the page started to feature part-names, question marks on plain blanks for some name parts, I looked at the entire image and scanned down all the names myself. I found a number of errors and omissions that I corrected as I entered them into my Excel spreadsheet. A couple I contacted Find My Past to correct them.

Baptisms

Regarding baptisms, the index shows the child’s forename and surname, but the surname is, of course, the father’s surname. Effectively this means that I was extracting baptisms only of the children whose father was a Neil not children whose mother was a Neil by birth. Mothers maiden names are listed but not indexed; if I were to read every page looking for the mothers maiden names, then the project would be impossibly large. However, when I did read a page, I kept an eye out for any baptisms where the mother’s maiden name was Neil. I also kept an eye open for other familiar names in my family history on the Neil side and made a note of them. Most baptisms have one or two sponsors and I added these to the spreadsheet manually as they were not shows on the transcriptions done by Find My Past. Often the entries will record whether either of the parents was a Protestant.

The Findings

My findings are still ongoing but the registers feature many more O’Neils than McNeils or plain Neils. At the moment (30 May 2024) I have completed about 4625 pages but there are still a lot to go. I am hoping that, as the registers move forward in time, that the transcriptions will get more reliable and so scanning the indexes will be easier. With another 11,954 pages still to go I may need to cut down the number of years covered by my searches.

More Comments

Although I limited my record extractions as noted above, it is still very worthwhile reading the actual pages in their entirety for specific limited time periods – say a five-year period. This is a practical use of the very large number of images in the collections. In some registers there is a tally at the end of each year. For instance, the number of marriages in a given year in a given church and how many of them featured Protestants marrying Catholics. For the baptisms there will be comments on the legitimacy, or not, of the child. Where a baptismal date is given but no birth date, there is often a note that the child was born “about three weeks ago” or similar.

An example of the summary information recorded in the registers, the 1866 Register of Baptisms for St Andrew’s Cathedral, Glasgow were 795 marriages of whome 637 are Catholics, 123 mixed and 35 Protestants. Of the total number, 129 are illegitimate. The keys for Protestantism are MP, FP or PP. The page that this information appears on is on Find My Past here.