Sources: Where I began

Why did I ever think my great-great grandfather and great grandfather were in the crimping business in the first place? For the simple reason that I found a historian who said they were.

My father used to check the phone book every time he went on a business trip to see if there were any people who might be related to us there. I Google my relatives' names for the same reason. I often come up with something but rarely do I hit a vein as rich as I did with Denis Costigan.

I hit an academic article entitled, "Masters and Friends, Crimps and Abstainers:
Agents of Control in 19th Century Sailortown" by Judith Fingard. As of today it's still available online. I strongly recommend the article for anyone trying to get a sense of what life was like in Saint John's sailortown.

And what does it say of my great-grandfather? Very little but the one thing it does say is very important.

The dissolution of the sailors' homes did not, for example, represent a victory for the boarding house keepers; by the turn of the twentieth century they too were disappearing from sailortown or turning their houses into working class tenements. With the decline of the sailing vessel, most seamen became visitors rather than short-term residents and sailortown, as their predecessors had known it, ceased to exist.

Backing that claim up, is a footnote and, for anyone doing family history of the Costigan and Warner families of Saint John New Brunswick, it's a real game changer.

By 1901-2, the boarding houses of three of the leading keepers of the 1880s had been turned into housing for themselves and various families of onshore workers. See the listing by streets for John Abbott and John Bartlett of Brittain street and Dennis Costigan of Pont street, Saint John City Directory, 1901-2.

There will be a lot to specify here. For now, suffice to say that we have a serious historian who has not just linked Denis Costigan with the crimping trade, she's identified him as a leading figure in that shady business.

It's not a surprise to me that my ancestors were sometimes on the wrong side of the law. My mother was always ashamed of them. In addition, my browsing through microfilm of old Saint John newspapers finds more mentions of family members related to various legal difficulties than you would expect to find for law-abiding types. This, however, is something of another degree.

As I've said before, I find this all very romantic. It's like finding your descended from pirates.