re: #125 LeftyRambles2413 (HappyWarrior)

My Dad’s cousin was telling me that their Nana’s Aunt survived it but I’m not sure. The lack of a 1890 census leaves a big twenty gap about where she was. 1880 she was in Cleveland but by 1900 she was in old Allegheny City (Manchester) with her widowed mother the Irish speaker and near her brother (Dad’s Great Grandfather). The family survived the Famine in Ireland. Part of why I’m a big supporter of refugees.

A lot of that going around. My GGGF and GGGM came from Ireland around then, first to Indiana, before settling in Pittsburgh in 1870 (where they appear in the census in the Allegheny County Home - the Poorhouse), with about 6 kids.

They’re fun to track with ancestry.com, because their name - Dignal - appears in various documents as Dignal, Dignol, Dignan, Degnan, and Buignol. My presumption is they were illiterate, so they had no idea how to spell the name, and had heavy accents that the census takers couldn’t decode. But I know it’s them because of the names and ages of the children!