Austin Scahill - Missing Friends 1831 To 1920

Extracted from a page on the website of New England Historical Society:

Beginning in 1831 and over the course of the next eighty-five years, the nationally distributed, Boston Pilot newspaper printed some 45,000 �Missing Friends� advertisements placed by friends and relatives. No one knows how many of these families found each other as a result of the ads, but these nineteenth-century notices continue to help families today find their ancestors.

These advertisements typically referred to the exact place of origin of the seeker and/or the sought. Many of the ads also describe the process and route of immigration, and even the name of the passenger ship. Many advertisements refer to women, for whom determining exact origin is even more difficult, due to the lack of naturalization records. So the Missing Friends advertisements help fill a great gap in nineteenth-century records for a mobile, impoverished, immigrant population.

Date: 12 November 1859

Name: Austin Scahill

Record: OF AUSTIN SCAHILL, native of Murrisk, County Mayo, when last heard from he was in the western part of New York State. Any information will be thankfully received by his brother-in-law, Owen Garrity, No 3 Endicot Court, Boston, Mass.

Published Volume: Vol IV, 1857 to 1860

Allan Scahill