New Discoveries

 

     This has been a marathon 6 weeks, so much has been found!  In April while browsing through copies I had made of the marriage register at St. Anne's, I happened upon the page containing the marriage of Jane Quinlan to her second husband, Martin Rigger.  It was just a few lines below the marriage of Dennis Driscoll and Mary White, the niece of my second great-grandfather James White from Queens County.  When I copied that page, I was not yet aware of Jane Quinlan but by happy accident her marriage happened to be on the same page as the Driscoll's, waiting for me to notice it.  This record provided the names of Jane's parents, which are entirely different than the ones Find A Grave has for her.  The church record says her father was Andrew Quinlan and her mother was Anna Bray or Broy, which I happily added to my family tree.

     On the last day of April I recieved confirmation, in the form of the church baptism record for Jane's first child Anna, (after her mother Anna B no doubt), that Jane's first husband was in fact the man I suspected all along, Oliver Hennessey.  I also found his townland of birth, Michaelschurch in County Kilkenny.  Again, Find A Grave has the wrong information concerning Jane's husband.  It names her husband as Thomas Hennessey instead of Oliver. This is what annoys me about that site, I wish they would stick to recording the tombstones, burial records, and obituaries and skip the speculation.

     Speaking of Mary White, I finally found the death date and place of her second husband Martin McDuff.  After much searching, I became aware Family Search has death record indexes from Pennsylvania's Orphan's Courts online.  Martin wasn't an orphan, (as far as I know), but before 1906 Orphan's Court was where deaths in the state of Pennsylvania were recorded.  Martin is in the index along with the date of his death, his age, birthplace, and burial place.  Using that information, I located his obituary which told me nothing more about Martin, but it did clear up the details of his burial.  All the filmed index said was, "Newtown C".  At first I thought the C might be short for cemetery, but the index consistantly used the abbreviation Cem. for that word.  There is an historic cemetery in that place called Newtown Cemetery, but it's a Protestant cemetery and I was quite sure Martin was Roman Catholic.  Martin's obituary told me he was buried in the Catholic cemetery in Newtown, St. Andrew's.  In this case the letter C in the index stood for Catholic.  Finding his birthplace of Ireland in the court's index pointed to the 1875 immigration record for Martin McDuff from Ireland being the likely record, rather than another I had found for a Martin from Scotland.

     Then on May 7th my Ancestry mailbox held this little pearl from a DNA match I had written to-- 

Hi Ellie, I live in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. My great grandmother Alice O'Dwyer arrived in Brisbane about 1876. She was born in Tipperary about 1855. Her father was Andrew O'Dwyer.

    After some research, and a month's subscription to Find My Past, I found the record of Alice's marriage in Australia with both her parent's names, Andrew Dwyer and Hanora Dawson. With that information I searched baptism records in Tipperary and found that couple and their ten children living in Churchfield in South Tipperary. The same townland my 3rd great-grandmother, also named Alice Dwyer, was living in when she married Cornelius Ryan in 1824.  Her father was named Andrew Dwyer too, (of course he was), and I believe the Andrew who married Hanora Dawson was probably his son, given the shared townland and the DNA match with both my father and I.  At FMP I also found Australian immigration records and the manifest from Alice's ship, she arrived in 1875, close to my newfound cousin's date of 1876.  Alice was a remittance passenger, I had to look that one up-- it meant her passage was paid for by someone already in Australia. Who that someone was I have no idea, but I'm searching.

     Perhaps the most exciting find of all, also in April, was proving to my satisfaction that my 3rd great-grandmother on the McGarr/O'Hora side, Mary Travers O'Hora, was a native of Kilkea in County Kildare, close to Ricketstown and Ballyraggan where her son and daughter-in-law respectively were born.  I've been looking for that one for a very long time.  Her baptism record gave me the names of her parents as well, John Travers and Margaret Lawler, my 4th great-grandparents!  I've proved only four sets of 4th greats so far, but I'm told that getting back to the 18th century in Irish research is doing pretty well.