Kitty Gallagher

In the sources

Helen Collar (1911–1995) spent four decades transcribing Beaver Island census returns, parish registers, deeds and death records onto index cards, and recording what islanders told her. Clarke Historical Library publishes that work. It is a researcher's working file — what a record says, what she suspected, and what an informant remembered, often in the same paragraph — so what follows is what the archive holds, not what this archive claims.

• Helen Collar's biographical papers hold an entry headed “Kitty Gallagher”. Whether it concerns the same person is unverified — names repeat heavily in this community.

  The names agree; nothing else in the entry corroborates it.

  Read the entry at Clarke Historical Library

These are Collar's twentieth-century working notes. They preserve the language of her informants and of her period, including racial descriptions of Anishinaabe residents, and they are quoted verbatim because altering a transcription silently would be worse. See the register of dated records for what the parish registers record, and the editorial standards for what this archive will and will not turn a transcription into.