The Brooklyn Mat Maker
Thirteen John Kennys
The certificate was issued by St. Patrick’s Church, Kent and Willoughby Avenues, on 7 May 1924, four months after Mary Agnes Robertson died at North Caldwell, New Jersey. It copies the register entry of 12 February 1882. The certificate passed from her daughter, my grandmother, to my mother.
Mary Anne Kenny · born 8 February 1882
Parents John Kenny and Margaret McKenny; sponsors James Kenny and Mary A. Dunne. Certificate of Baptism, St. Patrick’s Church, Brooklyn.
Her 1924 death certificate names the same parents. Beyond those two documents there was nothing: no civil birth record for her has been found, no marriage record for John and Margaret, and the Brooklyn death certificates of the 1880s recorded where a person’s parents were born, never their names.
The 1879 Brooklyn directory lists thirteen entries for Kenny, John on one page, before counting the Kenneys: laborers on Spencer, Hope and Bergen streets, a printer, a sailmaker, a stevedore, a billposter. Any of them might have been born in New York, married a Margaret, and died before 1900.
The certificate calls the child Mary Anne. Every record of her adult life calls her Mary or Mary Agnes. No other baptism or birth record for her has been found, so this parish copy is the only witness to the name. It is read as the same child: the same parents, the same birth date, and kept by her own daughter.
Widow of Richard
Kenny Elizabeth, wid. Richard, h r 75 Walworth
Kenny John, matmkr. h r 75 Walworth
A directory names a widow by her husband. Here it also tied a mother and a son together by their address. The 1880 census then put them in one household with the rest of the family.
| Year | Age | As recorded |
|---|---|---|
| 1850 | 3 | son of Richard and Elizabeth |
| 1855 | 7 | son of Eliza, widow |
| 1860 | 12 | at school |
| 1870 | 20 | Mat Maker |
| 1872 | lab., with James, hatter | |
| 1875 | 25 | Mat weaver |
| 1879 | matmkr. | |
| 1880 | Works mat factory | |
| 1887 | matmkr. | |
| 1888 | 36 | hatter at death |
The trade did not identify him by itself. It pointed to the right man; the shared address and the 1880 household proved him. Read side by side, his ages agree from 1850 to his death, which puts his birth in Brooklyn about 1848.
The Mat Maker’s Family
Richard Kenney, a laborer, was enumerated with Elizabeth and their sons James and John in October 1850. By June 1855 Eliza was a widow keeping a grocery, which she still kept in 1860. James went into the hat trade; John made mats. In 1872 the brothers shared the rear house at 79 Walworth Street, and James, a hatter, died there of smallpox in November 1875.
John married Margaret McKenny, daughter of George McKenney, an Irish laborer who had reached the United States about 1841, and his wife Ann. Margaret died of pulmonary consumption at 39 Nostrand Avenue on 24 May 1884, aged 33. Their daughter Margaret, six months old, died seven weeks later. The next year’s directory lists Elizabeth, widow of Richard, at 39 Nostrand Avenue. Eliza died in the Kings County Hospital at Flatbush on 2 December 1887, aged 79. John died of pulmonary phthisis on 30 November 1888. James, Eliza, the infant Margaret and John were all buried at Holy Cross.
Margaret’s unmarried sister, Mary F. MacKinney, kept a boarding house in 1920 with her niece Lillian Kenny in the household; she died in 1935, “survived by several nieces.” Mary Agnes became the wife of Joseph Robertson and died of tuberculosis at North Caldwell, New Jersey, twelve days after him, in January 1924. Their elder daughter, Lillian Josephine, was my grandmother.
The record-by-record account behind this case study, including how the household was traced back from 1880 to 1850, the conflicts in the record and how each was weighed, where DNA fits, and what remains open, is set out in the full methodology. Every record is reproduced and cited in the document gallery.
Full Methodology Document Gallery Evidence Trail Timeline