Continued from John Aloysius Hankard, East Boston, Mass.
Having found John Hankard's father's name (Thomas) and a range of years for his birth (1820-1830), I started to look for his county of origin in Ireland. The first thing I did was to try the Irish Times surname search page for "Hankard". The results said:
Hankard: Very rare: E Cork. English, 16 cent.
There were only 11 Hankard households in Ireland on Griffith's Valuation. Nine were in Cork, and one each in Waterford and Limerick.
AskAboutIreland.ie is the place to go for details from Griffith's, but it was off line for maintenance, so I had to search at ancestry.com. All the Hankard households in Cork were centered on a point about halfway between Cork City and Youghall. The two in Waterford and Limerick were just over the county borders. Unfortunately for the genealogist, none of these households were headed by a man named Thomas.
I also used stevemorse.org to look at the Ellis Island records. There were five immigrants named Hankard listed and all of them were from the same area in East Cork.
Finally, there was a John Hankard on the New York Port Arrival Records who was age 20 when he arrived aboard the Nisidi Stewart, on April 8, 1850. He had left from the port of Cork.1
My next stop was the baptism records at rootsireland.ie. They did not have a John Hankard baptized anywhere in Ireland between 1820 and 1830 with a father named Thomas. But they did have these three children whose father was named Thomas:
Michael baptized 1829, Cork
Honora baptized 1832, Cork
Thomas baptized 1834, Cork
There were no baptism records for Hankard children whose father was Thomas in any other counties.
The records for Killeagh parish in East Cork do not start until 1829 and John Hankard was most likely born before that. The three children listed above might be John's younger siblings. We will discuss Michael and Honora in the next article.
Continued in Other Hankards in Eastern Massachusetts in the 1860s.