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.

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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In Part 1 of this post I gave a running description of my search for information on my great-grandfather Michael Tierney. I also left my son in the jail at Old Slip. I better get on that.

And I promised something surprising.

Several weeks after writing a letter to the NY Police Department inquiring about possible records for Michael they replied with some terrific items: a letter from the First Deputy Commissioner outlining what they found, some useful pages on genealogy research at municipal archives and copies of my great-grandfather’s Force Index card and his Transfer and Assignment card.

This was a terrific find for our family! The cards included his shield number, birth and naturalization dates, country of birth, former occupation, addresses, dates of service, retirement and death and even how much his annual pension was. ($700 per year in 1913.)

Celebration ensued.

With all of that information, I couldn’t be too disappointed that his country of origin was not more detailed than “Ireland” – especially since the given date of naturalization matched one of the “possible” index records I had already collected. An additional clue that it was the right index record: the former occupation field on the Assignment card was “Hostler.”

A hostler is someone who works with horses, and the index record I was eyeing had an occupation of “Stabelman” (sic). The next day I went right to the National Archives at New York City site to order me up some documentation.
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When I was a boy I visited a New York State museum in Albany with my mother. By chance, we found that among old city railroad and subway cars was an exhibit on police uniforms. Among them was a late 19th century uniform with the distinctive high helmet worn by New York City policemen, and I recall my mother telling me that my father’s grandfather was on the force and wore one just like it. An Irish cop in the 1800s – fancy that!

Since that trip, I’ve always held the image of that helmet and uniform in my head and thought of my great-grandfather when seeing images from the 1890s.

(Especially the ones where pretty young women clamor for the officer’s attention. Ahem.)

When I finally began working on my family research several years back, I did not expect to find much detailed information on my great-grandfather Michael. After all, we’re talking about 100 years in the past and scant known information on him.

One tantalizing, yet elusive clue came from another story from my mother. When she first married my father she had seen a large portrait-type photograph in my grandmother’s collection of a uniformed Michael Tierney. Sadly, when she inquired about it later my grandmother told her that it had been ruined and thrown out long before.
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