Mystery of Lot 20 Resolved

Map from the Valuation Office

     The past few days I've been blogging about my frustrated attempts to locate my 3rd great-grandfather Cornelius Ryan's lot in Goldengarden, South Tipperary.  All the books online, field, house, etc, and the printed valuation placed him on lot 20.  Which didn't exist on any online maps.  I decided the only way to answer this question was to purchase copies of the cancelled/revised books and get an opinion from the Valuation Office regarding lot 20.  Years ago I ordered the same records for another 3rd great-grandfather, Daniel McGarr, and was happy with the service at that time so I sent them an email yesterday afternoon, probably around 8 pm in Ireland given the time difference.  This morning the reply was in my mailbox.  So very different from dealing with New York bureaucracy.

     It appears that somewhere along the way, the lots in Goldengarden were renumbered and Cornelius, or Connor as he was called, was actually a resident of lot 12.  The darling lady at the Valuation Office informed me Connor only appeared in two books, 1858-1860 and 1860-1861 so she was going to just email me the images.  Which made me extremely happy!  The fact he was not recorded in the 1861-1862 book or after is what I would have expected since Connor and his family sailed into New York Harbor in August of 1860.  I was told that lot 12, which was quite small, was thereafter absorbed into lot 11.

     I'm still a bit puzzled over why he doesn't appear in Goldengarden until the 1858 book.  The books start in 1850, and Connor's children, from 1827 onward to 1844, were baptized with the given address of Goldengarden.  I'm very sure I have the right children, the church registers give the mother's full name along with the father's, and since most of the children immigrated I have records on this side of the Atlantic with which to compare the birth years in the church records.  I even have the church marriage record of one of the children confirming his parent's names were Cornelius Ryan and Alice O'Dwyer.  Connor was living in Goldengarden in 1852 also, according to Petty Sessions records, Defendant- Ryan, Cornelius.  Residence, Goldengarden, Balintemple Parish.  Offence- Being drunk at Greenane.

     It makes me wonder if Connor and his family lived with another person in Goldengarden for a time.  There was a Michael Ryan with almost 40 acres also living there a few lots away from Connor, I have to wonder if Michael was Connor's father?  Connor did name his first son Michael, while the second son was named for his mother Alice's father, Andrew O'Dwyer, whose name I have from Alice's death certificate in New York.  This is one of those questions that may not be answerable with extant records.  I'm just happy I finally know the spot Grand-Dad called home.

     

Progress on The Maps, With A Little Help From My Friend

      First I would like to thank Dara at Black Raven Genealogy for her help in determining what the flora my Gunn family seemed to live among in the nineteenth century might have been. Dara shared with me a link for this wonderful page--  OSI Characteristic Sheet which suggests the Gunns lived in an orchard.  She also shared a site called, Geohive-Spatial data made easy, a collection of old and new maps which is far superior in ease of use to Ask About Ireland or Find My Past.  You need only type in a townland and the viewer goes straight to that place, no hunting around the map. Once there I selected Gallery from the toolbar at the top of the page, scrolled down to, "Irish Townland and Historical Map Viewer".  I chose the 6 inch black and white historical map, typed in Ballygolouge or Ballygowloge, it recognized both, and in seconds it was in front of me. It even asked if I would like it to zoom in for me...why, yes please.  I enlarged the image as much as the site allowed, then took a screenshot which I pasted into my paint program.

     Next stop was the photo editing site BeFunky where I can resize images using "lock aspect ratio" which allows me to enlarge without fuzziness.  This is the result--

Lot 1 in Ballygolouge County Kerry

     I was amazed!  This image is much clearer than any of the other maps I looked at.  I can even see a pine tree or two in the image now.  There was indeed a forested area at the top of the lot! 

     I enjoyed looking at Goldengarden on the site also, though I'm still not sure exactly where my 3rd great-grandfather Cornelius Ryan lived in the townland.  I never realized from the other maps I've viewed over the years that Goldengarden sits on the banks of the Multeen River.  As does Alleen where the family also lived for a time.

     Thank you again Dara, I am having so much fun with these sites...  

Valuation Maps, Which Are Slightly Confusing Me

      I recently purchased a month's subscription to Find My Past specifically because I read somewhere that they had the best maps of Griffith's Valuation.  I'm not sure I would agree.  Their maps might be the most contemporary, but I've found the condition of some to be so bad they were nearly useless.  I had much better luck at Ask About Ireland.  Even finding places was easier; if I moved the slider to "modern map" I could clearly see the larger towns that I knew my ancestor's tiny townland was near.  That made it so much easier to locate the smaller townland once I had zoomed in enough to be able to read it's name.  I also noticed Ask About  had five different maps for Ballygolouge, (also Ballygowloge), in County Kerry, home of my 3rd great-grandmother Mary Gunn.

ValuatiBallygowlogeon for 

     I found Mary's father John Gunn in a search at the Family Search site, the spelling of the name was a bit off, Guinn, though the book above has it Ginna, but I'm fairly confident it's him.  There is also a John Senior who may well be his father!  The search engine at Ask About is very particular however and none of the spellings I tried for his name would bring him up.  I finally used the name of his neighbor Ellen Stack to search at that site.  Reading through his entry from the valuation I saw he was at number one which was divided into a, b, and c.  Lessors were John Jr. at a, John Sr. at b, along with Timothy Relihan at c.  I also saw they had no land which surprised me.  Also at number 1 was Gabriel Thorpe M.D.  He had no house, only land, a bit over two acres.  There was a fever hospital operated by Listowel Poor Law Union listed in the townland also, but it was at number 9 so not near them...or so I thought.  Once I looked at the map I could see lot number one was directly across from the hospital, not exactly prime real estate.  I wondered if they worked at the hospital?  Take a look at the map below, number one is the triangular shaped lot with something, I don't know what, drawn all over it.  

 

Lot number 1 with fever hospital directly beneath it

   
     I scoured the net for an explanation of symbols used in making the maps but I couldn't find a site that would enlighten me.  It almost looks like trees?  Did they live in a forest?  I don't think so.  Another look at the map near the top of the triangle shows some irregular groups of what appear to be trees or bushes while the symbols in the Gunn lot are in perfect rows, evenly spaced.  I'd love to know what that represents, some sort of crop I would think.  Maybe their job was to tend that crop?  I don't know who Timothy Relihan was, he hasn't appeared in any research into this family. 

     I also found it a bit odd that the a,b, and c noting where each person lived were grouped so closely, though if one didn't have a garden I don't suppose that would matter.  Perhaps they were caretakers of whatever was growing there.

     Next, looking for my 3rd great-grandfather Cornelius Ryan's lot in Goldengarden, Tipperary left me totally frustrated.  The valuation itself, and the various books generated by it, place him at lot 20.  But not a single map shows a lot 20 located within Goldengarden.  I'm at a loss as to why that is.  Goldengarden is a very irregularly shaped townland, wide at the top and narrowing halfway to the bottom where in the right corner is lot 12. (See below) That is as high as the numbers go.  The parallel lines running diagonally near the top of the townland is a railroad which the valuation field book places at lot 21, near Cornelius at 20 I would think?  Yet the map shows the railroad being on lot 13, not 21, and far from lot 12 at the opposite tip of the townland.  Something is not right here!  I really need to go to Ireland and figure this out.

Goldengarden, Tipperary

Connor Ryan is barely visible at lot 20 with the Railway at 21

From Whence The Lannes in William Lannes McGarr?

Jean Lannes

     For quite awhile, ever since I found him actually, I've been curious as to why William McGarr from County Wicklow, Ireland was blessed with the middle name of Lannes.  It wasn't his mother's maiden name, she was Mary Doyle.  It wasn't a name I'd ever heard before.  It certainly didn't sound Irish; not to mention very few Irish persons even had middle names in 1836, the year of William's birth.

     Today I typed "Lannes" into my Google search engine.  What came up was page after page of a Frenchman by the name of Jean Lannes, aka the 1st Duc de Montebello, one of Napolean's generals.  Now why would someone in County Wicklow name their son after a French general?  From my reading of Irish history, I recalled the French offering assistance during the Rising of 1798, perhaps that was it?  Indeed, Napoleon did stage the  Expédition d'Irlande to aid the United Irishmen in their rebellion against England. Furthermore, a certain Madame Junot wrote, "only those who knew Lannes can form a just idea of the hatred he bore England...".  That would do it.

     The naming choices in this family get even more interesting.  When William Lannes himself became a father, the name he chose for his son was Robert Emmett McGarr, as in the great Irish patriot Robert Emmett who led a rebellion against England in 1803 for which he was executed.  William's other son was named William Marion McGarr.  That one took some searching and I'm not positive I'm right about the origin of this one.  A search for Marion came up with many unrelated hits.  When I added the search term "Irish hero" however, I found numerous articles about a soldier in America, among them, one titled, "Irishmen in General Washington's Army", and we all know who General Washington's foe was.

     This individual the articles referred to was Francis Marion, born in South Carolina and of Irish heritage.  He was credited with being

the father of guerrilla warfare, and with being the source of many headaches for the English Army in America during the revolution.  Do I see a pattern here or am I stretching it?  It looks to me like I have a family of rebels, God bless them.

Francis Marion

     

This Took Me Most Of The Day/The Story Of Margaret Steine And Thomas O'Hora

     

     This past week I've been busy getting the information I've collected on the extended family of my 3rd great-grandfather James O'Hora, who was born at Ricketstown, County Carlow, into my online tree. James and his brothers came to America during the famine, settling in Auburn, New York with James later moving on to Manchester, New York.  Things were going fine until I began entering data for his brother Michael and Michael's wife Margaret Welsh, who remained in Auburn.  In my old PAF, which was the genealogy software Family Search used to offer, I had Michael's son Henry O'Hora (1872-1909) married to Margaret Steine with seven female children.  But all the trees on Ancestry had Margaret married to Thomas O'Hora, with the girls being his daughters???  And there was a census record, 1910, to back this up.

    However, I had baptismal records from Holy Family in Auburn copied by a cousin which named Henry and Margaret Steine as the parents of the seven girls.  Since I didn't compile the list of baptisms myself, I wondered if perhaps my cousin had made a mistake in copying them.  But all seven?  Also, there were two Auburn censuses, 1900 and 1905 showing Henry and Margaret O'Hora as the girl's parents.  Then too, I had the index on Cayuga County GenWeb showing the marriage of Margaret Steine to Henry O'Hora at St. Mary's in Auburn in 1892.  Luckily, unlike most of the numerous O'Horas in Auburn, Margaret and Henry had chosen some unique names for their girls, among them were a Gertrude, an Agnes, and a Josephine.  The census records ALL showed the correct names and correct ages for the girls--but with two different fathers with the same surname.  And, Thomas was enumerated with his parents in 1900 while the oldest daughter of Margaret's was born in 1893, Thomas couldn't be their father could he?

     Something was really off here.  I spent an hour, (at least), looking for other census records and hints on Ancestry but nothing got any clearer. I then began reading through the notes in the PAF file to see what might turn up.  I hadn't done anything with this branch in years and could easily have forgotten something.  I studied Henry first and saw that I had noted a city directory of Auburn which gave his brother Thomas' address as the same as Henry and Margaret's.  Could it be...

     A theory began forming in my head, if Thomas and Margaret were already living together at the time of Henry's death perhaps they had married?  I turned to the New York Marriage Index but couldn't find an entry for the two.  Darn, a perfectly good theory debunked.  But!  I kept at it and found this, a Margaret "Stine" had married Thomas "P. Ohora" on 30 September 1909, in Auburn!  The search engine must have been temperamental today and refused the surnames Steine and O'Hora even though I did not check the "exact" box.  There it was in black and white; fifty-five days after Henry's death his widow Margaret had married his brother Thomas.  Which brings up a whole new set of questions, but I'm NOT going there.

     Margaret's marriage to Thomas lasted a little less than nine months.  On the afternoon of June 18, 1910 an explosion rocked the Auburn quarry where Thomas was employed.  With nearly every bone in his body broken, he lingered until the next day leaving Margaret a widow once again.

     So what did I learn from this?  Don't believe the trees on Ancestry until what they contain has been proven, they all claimed Thomas was the father of Margaret's seven daughters, (I said we're not going there).  Secondly, don't doubt myself, or cousin Rita's copying skills, until the research is done, (I admit I started changing parents on the girls before I came to my senses and looked harder at the question; that being another reason it took so long to accomplish this.  Also, read those old notes!  If you're like me you forget things.  Besides, clues that made little or no sense when you first found them may be clear now.  Lastly, census takers were not always diligent in their duties and those being enumerated were sometimes less than forthcoming.  The relationships and ages in the census could be quite inaccurate.