Choose the part you know
Pick the side of the family that is most familiar. You can still reach the complete archive from every page.
The Leahey Family Archive
Find a relative, follow the family lines, and read the original records and stories preserved for us.
Type a first name, last name, or part of a name. Living relatives do not appear in search results.
Start with a story
Nine remarkable lives and events, told through the records that survived.
A likely Templemore baptism begins a journey through Syracuse, Jersey City and Bayonne, where records call Dennis a boatman and captain and identify a household of eighteen children, eleven still living in 1900.
John worked “On Boat,” died in 1887 in his mid-twenties, and shares a monument with his father Dennis; the 1880 census now proves their relationship by calling John “Son.”
John died in 1887, James in 1914, and eleven-month-old Margaret died only twelve days before her father—a repeated family loss across three generations.
Thomas Ramsey lost his left arm beneath a locomotive; boat owner Matthew Leahey fought compensation through New Jersey’s courts and lost, leaving a reported decision still cited decades later.
Killed on 14 October 1918, two days before his twenty-eighth birthday, Peter Cooney was buried on the battlefield, reburied in 1919, and moved to his permanent grave in 1921.
The passenger index records a nineteen-year-old German farm worker arriving at Manhattan in 1880; thirteen months later Rosine married George Hoffman in Bayonne.
A contemporary newspaper reported the full circumstances of the fire that caught Sarah Ellen’s clothing and her death at Ipswich Hospital; the archive preserves the account without softening it.
Newspaper coverage placed West Twenty-third Street at the heart of the 1915 refinery strike and described a rifle-swept strip as “No-Man’s Land,” beside the Hoffman family’s home.
The Garvey household joined shop and home: eleven people occupied four rooms above the Ventry grocery, while Thomas was recorded as a grocer and shopkeeper.
A major finding
The 1880 Jersey City census explicitly records 19-year-old John as Dennis’s son. That record completes this step in Andrew’s direct line.
Generation by generation
Follow one line from child to parent, from the present day back to County Cork.
Jersey City, Hudson County, New Jersey
John Joseph Fitzgerald was born in Jersey City on 2 September 1913 and registered for the draft there on its first day in 1940; registration does not establish military service.
Cullane (county unresolved), Ireland
David Fitzgerald was born at Cullane on 28 March 1875; our family tree says he later had a family and died in Jersey City about 1939.
Ireland
John Fitzgerald was a farmer who married Margaret Fraher at Kildorrery, County Cork, on 25 February 1870.
Maurice Fitzgerald was a County Cork farmer named as John Fitzgerald's father in an 1870 marriage record.
Browse at your own pace