Sacred Heart Church Irish Families in the Early Years 1841-1847
Up until the early 1840's missionary priests were based at Notre Dame and performed baptisms and marriages for a large geographical area including places like Michigan City and Laporte to the West, Goshen to the East and up in Michigan at places like Niles (just over the line), Pokagan and Kalamazoo. If my Irish immigrant grandparents were up in Kalamazoo or out in Michigan City, I wouldn't probably have considered looking in South Bend Church records; so for the sake of being thorough and because some of these Irish families were in the immediate area I am including them in this separate section. What was most challenging was determining who was Irish born, as many records didn't indicate Ireland or Hibernia origins. I used a combination of census records, irishtimes.com surname search and other Irish surname resources to try to identify if either of the surnames had an Irish origin. If one of the names is of Irish origin I will include it here. It would be far easier to delete it later if it turns out they were born in the United States and not Ireland, than to leave it out and have the compilation incomplete.
Most of these records document the parent's name followed by conjugibus or conjugatus (married) and then list a town or parish name. I will list this name of the Town or parish under the heading Town to help narrow the geographical region. If Hibernia or Ireland if noted after one of the spouses names I will list it after their place of residence (in example Niles/Hibernia). If the town of origin is listed for a husband and then a different one for his wife it will be listed in that order under "Town". I noticed that many records were duplicated in different item numbers of the film and sometimes those records had variations in spelling or other information, if this was the case I will include them both. This compilation is meant to provide a link to Irish families that might otherwise not be identified. If you see your family in these sections please consider looking at the microfilm yourself to confirm my interpretation or at least contact me so I can give you further details that I didn't have space to include here. The following families are documented in baptisms and marriages covered by items 4 and 5 of Sacred Heart Church microfilm number 1617238.
| Surnames A-C | Surnames D-F | Surnames G-I |
| Surnames J-L | Surnames M-N | Surnames O-R |
| Surnames S-T | Surnames U-Z |