John - Currach

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Jan21

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May Egan and Holy Cross Church, 1919

Posted in: Ireland, New York

Shhh! Today we are in Holy Cross Church on 42nd Street in Manhattan. It has been newly restored and I must say is a jewel of a place. The church was founded in 1852 to accommodate the influx of Irish Catholics in the neighborhood and expanded as the area population grew, eventually to include a school and convent on nearby streets.

The building in place now is the second incarnation which replaced the lightning damaged and unstable original structure in 1868. According the the church’s web site, it is the oldest building on 42nd Street from river to river.

Holy Cross is perhaps most commonly known as the pulpit of Reverend Francis P. Duffy, the highly decorated Chaplain of the 69th Regiment’s “Fighting Irish” in World War I.

My grandparents' marriage certificate
However, the reason I visited Holy Cross was a more personal one: almost 92 years ago, on June 1, 1919 my grandparents John Tierney and Mary Egan were married here.

As a native New Yorker, I can’t imagine how many times I walked near this church or any number of other locations in the city without the slightest idea that something of familial significance occurred there.

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Jan12

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Dad’s brush with fame, sort of.

Posted in: New York

This photo of a basement party, circa 1942 or so, was probably somewhere around Jamaica, Queens. My Dad, Mike Tierney is the topmost guy in the rear left.

The girl standing in the center of the photo is Barbara Nickerauer who later became the actress / starlet Barbara Nichols.

A few others can be found tagged in my Flickr Photostream.

Update
After finding an envelope with old photos that weren’t used in our albums, I found this one Barbara gave to my Dad, back in high school days apparently. Hubba Hubba!

Jan10

Footnote.com Resource Embedding

Posted in: Technology

A quick post for the blogging Footnotians among us: a few tips and tools you might find useful if you want to reference resources on their site.

Who would not like a nifty Footnote member card like this on their blog displaying all of their compiled feetnotes? How about the ability to embed spotlighted documents from the Footnotlian archives?

If you are really a dyed-in-the-wool kool-aid-drinking got-a-tattoo-of-that-little-asterisky-dongle-logo-in-an-unmentionable-location kind of user, you can also embed a widget with the latest news from their site.

I really like Footnote.com a lot and think they need to make these tools more obvious to users and bloggers. (Disclosure: I won a free year’s subscription last Fall, but that has not colored my koolaid.)

You can find a complete how-to on their site here in a blog post entitled Embedding Footnote Spotlights and Images In Your Blog or Web Site.

Jan3

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Ready, Willing and Probatable

Posted in: Ireland, New York, Projects

Probate court? We don’t need no stinking probate court!
Well, actually we do. But these images found in our family albums are a good reminder that you need to go through everything well: My grandmother’s uncle wrote his last will and testament (a few times) on a pair of her photos.

Being a wallet-carrying guy and spying the folds on the left photo, I’m going to guess he carried that one in his wallet. (Or maybe she did?) While they are simple in content, and my family already knew that Uncle James had left his houses to my Grandmother May, they would be even more helpful if we were unaware of that fact.

Front of Images

Transcription of right image: To May Egan I will everything I owen (sic) at Death. James Farrell (Signed)

Read on for the images and an additional use for them…
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Dec9

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Repairing Coney Island

Posted in: Ireland, New York, Technology

One of the treasures of our family albums is a fairly damaged family photo at Coney Island around 1920. We still have not identified everyone in the photo yet, but we’ve got some good educated guesses going, as well as a slight mystery I plan to blog about soon.

I’ve been working on repairing a few photos so that I can give them as gifts to family members. Below is my handywork on the Coney Island image. Admittedly, a couple of the faces are not perfect, but given the extent of the folds and tears I’m very happy with how they turned out.

Move your mouse over the image to see the repaired* version. Click Here to see the full family notes on it at The Flickr.

*Note: the mouse hover technique on my blog lightens images up in Firefox – the final version doesn’t get lighter as it appears to in the post. Need to figure out what in the code is doing that and give it a stern talking to.

Update: I wasn’t absolutely sure about the location of the photo – after some online research I guessed that the roller coaster behind them was the Giant Racer, given the likely 1920 – 1922 time frame. But, I wasn’t able to find any photos or postcards that had the right angle for me to compare and make a definitive guess and it was annoying me.

Then, I found the “Ask Mr. Coney” column and fired off a question about it. He graciously responded very quickly and with terrific detail, which will help us provide some background color to the image. So, Thanks to Mr. Coney!

His reply about the location:
“The photograph was taken between West 8th Street and West 5th on the public beach, former site of Dreamland.
The turreted building on the right is the Sagamore Hotel, on the corner of West 8th and Surf Avenue. The coaster is the Giant Racer, and the twin towers behind it belongs to Luna’s Aquadrome entrance at West 10th Street. The tent-like structure behind the tent in foreground houses the Dreamland Circus Sideshow and the billboard just behind the tent was located above the L.A. Thompson Scenic Railway.”