The hard-to-find Hardmans

Shop Street, Galway, Ireland
Photo by Peter Gorman*

After my success in discovering new information about the St Leger family, I decided to see if I could find out more about another Irish family in my mother's line, Patrick and Margaret Hardman or Hardiman (nee Jenkins.) The Hardmans apparently arrived in England between the birth of their daughter Elizabeth (my maternal grandmother's great grandmother) in 1835 and their son Thomas in 1840. They were in Salford, near Manchester, in time for the 1841 census.

Unlike migrants to North America, the names of Irish people travelling to England, Scotland or Wales were not recorded, since Ireland was part of the British Isles at the time. All we can say is that Patrick and Margaret left Ireland with Elizabeth before the great famine of 1845, probably as part of an on-going movement of people looking for work and a better life in the new industrial areas.

Old buildings, Chapel St, Salford
Photo by Alfred Brothers, 1878, courtesy of British Library

They settled first in Church Court off Style Street in Manchester. This was part of the rabbit-warren of decaying buildings around St Michael's Church yard known as Angel Meadow. Many of their neighbours were Irish. Samuel St Leger and Alice Dodd also lived in the area at one stage, though it would be several generations later that the two families were linked by marriage. Patrick found work as a labourer.

By 1851 he and Margaret had added Bridget (1843) John (1847) and Margaret (1850) to their family and had moved to number 10, Briercliffe Buildings in Chapel Street, Salford. Patrick was working as a brick layer's labourer both in 1851 and 1861. He died in 1868, in his mid fifties. Margaret lived on until 1888.  Before she died she was an inmate of the Manchester Work House in Crumpsall.

This much I already knew, but I had no information about the family before the 1841 census. According to all the census records, Patrick, Margaret and daughter Elizabeth were born in Galway, Ireland. Since no other location is listed, my guess is that Galway refers to the town, not just the county.

Unfortunately the Irish Genealogy site doesn't yet have many parish records for Galway. Nor can I find any trace of the family in Irish records on Ancestry or FindMyPast. At one point I thought I'd found Patrick in the Royal Hospital Chelsea Military records, but that Patrick Hardiman (born in Galway in about the right year, 1813) is said to have died in Manchester in 1853.

The names Hardman and Jenkins are not particularly common in Galway. From the internet I found several variants of both names (Hardiman, Harman, Hardogan etc, for Hardman, along with Jennings, Junkin, Johnson and even Shinkwinn for Jenkins). But using those in my search hasn't helped to discover anything.

I'm still quite a novice at researching Irish records, so perhaps if I keep learning more about it and searching, something will turn up. Just this week, Chris Goopy provided a link on her amazing blog That Moment In Time, to the Irish Genealogy Toolkit, which has lots of useful information about Irish research. Meanwhile I've been looking at pictures of Galway and thinking it would be great to do some on-the-ground research for the missing Hardmans!

*Photo used under a Creative Commons licence