Margaret 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: 16 February 1856

Name: Margaret Scahill (Please note that Margaret is misspelled MAGRGRET in original post)

Record: OF MAGRGRET [sic] SCAHILL, of Belvin, parish Mount Temple, County Westmeath; when last heard from was in New York. Information received by her sister Ann, care of Mr Thomas Scahill, Pittsburg, Pa.

Published Volume: Vol III, 1854 to 1856

Allan Scahill