CONDR*Ns in the United States in the 19th Century

The 1877 courthouse in Williamson County, Texas (image from www.texasescapes.com , courtesy of texasoldphotos.com). William Franklin CONDRON migrated from Decatur, AL, to Williamson County, TX, in 1848.

Many CONDR*Ns today live in the United States. There was significant migration of CONDR*Ns from Ireland to the US in the nineteenth century, and this is probably typical of the migration of the Irish population as a whole for the areas of Ireland where they lived. But there were also certainly CONDR*Ns in the US whose families had lived there as early as the eighteenth century, if not earlier.

The census of 1880 was the first national US census to require respondents to specify the state or country where their parents were born. According to my extractions from the ancestry.com website (the precise numbers do not matter, rather the trends and ratios), there were 106 CONDR*N heads of household, of whom 56 (53% of the total) had been born in Ireland, as had their parents. So a little over half of all male CONDR*N heads of household were first-generation immigrants to the US. This is not so different from the population mix in the 1860 US census twenty years earlier, where 54% of the 46 CONDR*N heads of household were born in Ireland. Perhaps predictably, most of these immigrant heads of household in 1880 were living on the eastern seaboard, in New York (14), New Jersey (9) and Pennsylvania (9).

Some 35 (33%) of the 106 CONDR*N heads of household in the 1880 census had been born in the US and their fathers had also been born in the US, which we may consider to be established US-based families. Of these, 23 were born in Pennsylvania, 4 in Alabama, 2 in Kentucky, and one each in Arkansas, Illinois, Massachussetts, Michigan, New York and Ohio. And of the 23 born in Pennsylvania to US-born fathers, 3 had fathers born in Maryland and the remaining 20 had fathers born in Pennsylvania. Thus Pennsylvania seems to have been a focus for early US-based CONDRONs, at least in the early 19th century.

The occupations of these individuals in the 1880 census exhibit differences between the newer immigrants and their more established namesakes. Amongst the 35 established individuals, the most common occupation was farmer (16), followed by laborer (5) and carpenter (3). Amongst the 56 more recent immigrants, the most common occupation was laborer (24), followed by farmer (4) and miner (3).

In the coming months and years, I intend to research and write more here about the families and ancestry of both the established and newly immigrant CONDR*Ns in the US in the nineteenth century. In the meantime, I note two rich online family histories for established CONDRON families.

One is an extensive eleven-generation genealogy starting with James Condron, who was born about 1732 in New Castle County, Delaware:
http://www.saylorhomestead.com/McMahan/Condron_Tree.htm .

Another is based on a 1961 document and describes the migration of William Franklin CONDRON from Alabama to Williamson County, Texas, and his subsequent descendants:
http://files.usgwarchives.net/tx/williamson/history/condron.txt .
There is a discussion thread regarding inter alia the accuracy of this document at
http://boards.ancestrylibrary.com/thread.aspx?mv=flat&m=72&p=surnames.condron .

As always, I welcome your comments, corrections, additional information, etc. Please send them to me at condran[AT]one-name.org .