Agnes Kelly

Life

References for this account: [1][2][3][4][5]

Where they lived

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The pins show approximate places. The line only joins them in time order; it does not prove the route travelled. 3 of the places listed above are recorded only as a county or country, so they are not pinned. Cemetery and burial places have red pins.

Historical context

These background articles explain the places, work, and events in this entry.

What we still don't know

• [THE CERTIFICATE THAT WOULD ANSWER THE MAIDEN NAME AND THE ORIGIN QUESTION, AND IT IS FREE] Death, Kings, 1924, certificate 17325 — Noga, Agnes, 65 y, 19 September 1924. This page has asked for a death record for either of them because it would give a maiden name for Agnes and the couple's origins; the censuses say only Germany, which this archive already suspects of concealing Prussian Poland, and a living descendant's autosomal test shows an unambiguous Ashkenazi component that nothing in the recorded ancestry explains. The image is digitised and online — it names her father, her mother and her birthplace. It is the first thing to read. Finding 151.
• [CANDIDATE CLUSTER, 21 August 2026 — SIX CERTIFICATES, ALL DIGITISED, NOTHING ATTACHED] A sweep of the New York City death index turned up not one Noga row but a household, and the ages line up with children this archive already records from the 1910 and 1920 censuses: Charles, 73 y, 20 Sep 1927, Kings, no. 17648 (b. ~1854); Agnes, 65 y, 19 Sep 1924, Kings, no. 17325 (b. ~1859); Charles Jr, 37 y, 30 Jan 1919, Kings, no. 3723 (b. ~1882) — the index prints the suffix, so that row is by construction the son of a Charles Noga in Brooklyn; Frank, 45 y, 28 Jan 1925, Kings, no. 2270 (b. ~1880), which matches the Michigan-born second son of 1879; John, 55 y, 16 Sep 1940, Kings, no. 18496; Anna, 59 y, 5 Oct 1947, Kings, no. 19571. Nobody has been attached. Noga is a Polish surname and the same twenty-three rows hold Wojciech, Wladislas, Victoria and Stephen Noga — Brooklyn had Nogas this family need not be related to, and surname plus place is not kinship. What makes it worth the certificates is that six ages match six recorded children of one recorded couple. All six are digitised and free. Finding 151.
• Her maiden name is Kelly, from her son Julius's 1914 marriage record — which makes her almost certainly Irish, where this archive had her simply as the German-born Charles Noga's wife. A German or Polish immigrant of 1875 marrying an Irishwoman in Michigan is an ordinary American story and it changes what this quarter of the family is. Her birth and her own parents are unknown.
• Where the Nogas actually came from is not settled, and the census answer may mislead. Charles Noga is recorded as born in Germany about 1852 and as arriving in 1875, with his two eldest sons born in Michigan in 1877 and 1879. But Noga is a Polish surname, not a German one — it is the Polish word for leg — and between 1871 and 1918 a great part of Poland was inside the German Empire. A Pole from Posen, Silesia or West Prussia would be entered as German by any American enumerator, and would have said German himself. So 'Germany' here is a statement about a passport, not about a people. The distinction matters: it decides whether this line runs back to a German parish register or a Polish one, and they are different archives in different languages. A passenger list for 1875, or a naturalisation, would name the town and end it.
• Their own births, marriage and deaths. A death record for either would give a maiden name for Agnes and the couple's origins — the censuses say only Germany, which for this period often means Prussian Poland.
• The other five children — Frank, Charles, John, Anna and Joseph — are Ruth's aunts and uncles and are not yet entered. One of them is very probably the aunt or uncle Ruth was living with as a niece in 1920.
• [NEGATIVE, CONTROLLED — NOT MARRIED IN NEW YORK CITY] Tested on 21 August 2026 against the New York City marriage index by intersecting both spouses' rows on county, certificate number and year. No certificate joins them. Two controls make the zero usable: the surname alone returns hundreds of rows, so the query works; and the GGG transcription of every record and the City's index of digitised records return identical counts, so this is a real absence and not a scanning gap. Within the index's coverage — five boroughs, 1866-1937 — they married somewhere else. Finding 158.

References

1. [1] Julius E. Noga in the Charles Noga household, 1910 and 1920 censuses, BrooklynBack to citation 1
2. [2] Charles Noga household, 1920 United States census, Brooklyn Assembly District 3Back to citation 2
3. [3] Marriage of Julius Edward Noga and Lottie Florence Mayer, Manhattan, 13 October 1914Back to citation 3
4. [4] NYC Historical Vital Records: Index to Digitized Death Certificates — City of New York open dataBack to citation 4
5. [5] NYC marriage index, 1866-1937 — controlled sweep of twelve archive couples, 21 August 2026Back to citation 5

See also

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