What On Earth Is Banope? Or Irish Research Is Hard

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     Eighteenth century, Kildare.  What baptismal records still exist from that time and place are in varying states of preservation, some easily readable, others barely decipherable.  Some records no longer survive at all, and there's the rub.  Even after finding a likely record it's impossible to tell if that record seems so likely because the better one is no longer available.  Nor is it always easy to tell if that better record even ever existed.  In other words, I don't know what I don't know.  With home baptisms common in pre-famine Ireland, it sometimes happened that the event didn't make it into the church register, or was entered incorrectly; as in the case of my great-great-grandmother Maria McGarr's sister in the early 19th century:

Children of Daniel McGarr and Anne Donahoe

     
     The third baptism down gives no first or last name for the child and no father's name.  Only the name of the mother along with the date and family address made it possible to deduce this was the baptism of Bridget McGarr who later came to America with her sister Maria.  I could easily have missed the fact Bridget McGarr ever existed.  She doesn't appear in any other records in Ireland and married soon after arriving in the US in 1851, changing her name to Kinsella.

     It's that much harder when seeking the parents of our great-great-grandparents. Using the naming pattern I guessed the first daughter, Catherine, in the baptism records above was probably named for her father Daniel McGarr's mother whom I believed to have been Catherine Murphy, and Maria was logically the name of her mother Anne Donahoe's mother.  I'm not sure why the infant Maria's name appears as Mary above, she is Maria in all US records, but in viewing the original entry, I found she was indeed recorded as Mary in the Baltinglass register.

     My search for the birth of Anne Donahoe and Daniel McGarr has been, in a word, frustrating.  Daniel can't be found at all and the closest I can find for Anne is a baptism that occurred in August of 1798 at Ballymore Eustace about 15 miles north of the couple's future home in Ballyraggan.  This baptism, written in Latin, gives the parent's names as James and Maria Donahoe and the godparents as Edward Cavana [Kavanaugh ?] and Maria Barnaval [Barnacle?].  There is no indication of what Maria's maiden name may have been.  If this is indeed Anne's baptism, the naming pattern would indicate Anne should have named a child James, but there is a five year gap between her daughters Mary and Anne's baptisms so it can't be ruled out there was a son named James. 

     The address contained in the baptism of Anne Donahoe is perplexing, it looks like "Banope" but there is no townland of that name.  The closest I can find is Banoge in County Wexford quite a distance away and definitely not in the right parish.  But that looks like a letter "p" to me, not a "g", an example of which can be seen in the top line of the entry, it's tail dangling down between the "e" in Donahoe and the B in "Banope".

Banope?

     A few pages on in the same register however, the below entry is found, now it looks like Banoge :

     
   There are two other baptisms of children of James and Maria Donahoe--an earlier one of Catherine in 1793 and one of William in 1802.  Their addresses were Tober and Toberkevin.  I can't find Toberkevin either, though there is a Tipperkevin near Ballymore Eustace.  There are two more Donahoe baptisms in Ballymore Eustace parish with the mother being Maria but this time the father is John. One was John Jr. in 1788 and the other was Bridget in 1804; both give their address as, "Toberkevin".  I almost wonder if this is in fact the same couple? Then the name John of Anne and Daniel's youngest son would fit the naming pattern, although I believe Daniel's father was also named John.

     Obviously, there is a lot more work to be done on Anne's parents.  I have no proof they were even from Ballymore Eustace parish, I'm examining it because it's the only parish with extant records that includes an Anne Donahoe whose mother was named Maria.  That made it seem like a good place to start, but it could be the answer was not recorded or has fallen victim to the ravages of time.  A sad truth of early Irish research.