Dear John, [and Anthony as well in the email name?]
I read the following on this forum;
THE ENGLISH McGARR'S
by John McGarr
I know that my ancestors came to Liverpool as 'navvies' who laboured and
built working class housing. Some of them went to Canada to find a better
life while some stayed and worked in the coal pits and mills of Lancashire.
McGarr's have lived and worked in Leigh, Lancashire to this day. My great
grandad, Thomas McGarr, died in an explosion in a Leigh coal mine. If you
are a Lancastrian McGarr, send me an E mail.
Posted on Feb 5, 2002, 9:15 AM
--
And I am indeed a Lancastrian McGarr, Benjamin Lee to be precise from
Manchester. I write as a natural courtesy of course, but your story has an
extra little thing that caught my eye; I too have a Thomas down my line, My
Great Great Grandad. Could they be one and the same? I'm afraid that
living memory runs out by the time you get to my Great Grandad Jimmy, as is
often the case in Working Class families who don't seem to keep records of
this sort of thing.
It'd be fascinating if we could tie up our family trees [although of course
I am well aware of the potential for mere conclusions here what with Thomas
being a far from rare name at the time], and also quite horrifying for a
proud Mank like me to admit Scouse ancestry .
My own idle studies have tempted me to come almost to the conclusion that
my branch appeared in this region from Cumberland, and the internet's
Mormon genealogy www.familysearch.com reveals a large collection of us
there in the nineteenth Century. Could it be that they took a detour
through Liverpool and Leigh? Entirely possible. I'm waaiting for that
1901 Census to come online hopefully clearing up a few problems. There
aren't many McGarrs in Cumbria now, so there has obviously been a large
migration, without and within the UK, and why not to the centres of
industry in the Mersey basin? We got to Cumberland from Ireland quite
early, around the time of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland which may or may
not be related. Or perhaps indeed your branch [and maybe mine] were a
later set of immigrants.
Anyroad, I'm Ben [1980 -] son of James/Seamus [1959 -] son of John/Jack
[193summat - 1978] son of James/Jimmy [191????] son of Thomas [1880s? -?].
Not much information there but do tell me your own history, and I'll get
off my rear and fine tune those approximations a bit!
As for me, I'm 22, and as you might see from my email address, I'm in
Russia teaching English.
I look forward to hearing from you! I did try the email address you posted but it didn't seem to work for some reason.
.