Ancestors

John Neenan

John Neenan was born in County Cork, Ireland, on or about 24 December 1822. He gave that date himself, under oath, in 1854. He landed in the United States in July 1847, the worst year of the Great Famine in Ireland, and settled in Ontario County, New York.

He lived first in the town of West Bloomfield, where his son Dennis was born in 1852. On 7 August 1854 he went before the clerk of the Ontario County Court and declared his intention to become an American citizen. A declaration of intention was the first of two papers an immigrant filed on the road to citizenship; after a waiting period he could petition to be naturalized. His declaration is the only record that names his Irish county, and he signed it in his own hand.

He very probably married in Ireland before he left. The Catholic marriage register of Kanturk, a market town in the north of County Cork, records on 10 March 1845 the wedding of John Noonan and Kate Curran, with a Patk. Noonan and a John Curran as witnesses. Kate is a common short form of Catherine. The baptisms of Kanturk show no child of that couple in the two years after the wedding, which is what a couple who sailed by the summer of 1847 would leave behind. Two other men named John Noonan were baptizing children in the same parish in the same years, and neither of them is this man.

In America he and Catherine raised nine children. In 1860 he bought land in East Bloomfield from Philo Hamlin, part of Lot 20, east of the Canandaigua and Niagara Falls railroad. He added more from William Scott and Henry W. Hamlin, and in 1867 from Charles Page and his wife. His youngest son, William, was born that March in the house on Michigan Street Extension, where William would spend his whole life.

John died on 29 August 1872, at forty-nine. He left Catherine with nine children, the youngest five years old. His stone at St. Bridget's Cemetery, East Bloomfield, gives his age as fifty. Catherine lived another twenty-four years. In 1897, after her death, their surviving children and grandchildren signed his land over to William.

If John Neenan is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "John Neenan (1822-1872)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-neenan-1822-1872-3916c8.