Still Enjoying The Hunt Or, Oliver Is That You?

      I've always been a fan of the idea of researching the friends, neighbors, and in-laws of my ancestors in addition to their close family members.  You never know what may turn up that could aid in your search.  That is why I've been looking at the Hennessey family for many years but finding very little.  The youngest daughter of this family, Anna Hennessey, married Cornelius Ryan, the brother of my great-great-grandmother Anna Ryan from Tipperary, at St. Anne's in Palmyra, New York in 1869.  Her brother Edward Hennessey had earlier married Mary Keyes, (Keyes is another surname in my tree), also at Palmyra, thus giving me another reason to be interested in this family.  I must have done hundreds of searches for the Hennessey's over the years and never found their home county, much less a townland.  I knew the names of the older generation from the marriage record of Cornelius and Anna at St. Anne's.

 They were Kieran Hennessey and his wife Bridget Gorman. Bridget and most of her children came to the United States where she died in Palmyra in November of 1868, but I've found nothing to suggest her husband Kieran ever immigrated.

     Since I now have a one month subscription to Rootsireland I thought I may as well do yet another search for the Hennessey clan.  I knew nothing would come of it after all this time, I'd long since decided they were probably from a parish with missing records, but it seemed foolish not to try.  I started with an all Ireland search for Anna's older brother Oliver Hennessey who I've been studying lately.  It's not a very common name in Ireland so I knew I wouldn't have a large number of hits to wade through even without using a place or any dates and I was right, only one came up, that in County Kilkenny.  I clicked on it, knowing it would be yet another disappointment, but to my utter shock the transcription read, father-- Kieran Hennessey, mother-- Bridget Gorman!  I think I screamed, I know my little yorkie Darby jumped, it was them, in County Kilkenny!

     How did I miss them all this time?  A little sleuthing answered that question, only Rootsireland has the parish records for the years I needed.  Just like the Tramore records that I blogged about in my last post.  I quickly did a search in Kilkenny records using only parents names and found seven children of Kieran and Bridget including two who were previously unknown to me, Johanna and Margaret.  I also found a townland for them, Michaelschurch in the Catholic parish of Ballycallan-Kilmanagh. Amazing!

     I have to admit the price of the subscription was worth it considering the new information I've found on the Hennessy and Crotty families.  One caveat however, don't use Rootsireland to search Griffiths Valuation or census records even though you can.  In reading the fine print I found Rootsireland puts a limit on the number of views that can be accessed.  In my case it's 1,300 for the month which sounds like a lot but in eight days I've already burned through 380.  Griffith's Valuation can be searched for free at askaboutireland.ie, and Ireland's census records are also free at the National Archives site.  Death records on Rootsireland are for the most part civil registrations that can be accessed at no cost at irishgenealogy.ie.  There's no point in using up one's allotted views when the records can be easily found elsewhere.

Connolly? Crotty? Or, The Internet Will Drag Those Skeletons From Your Closet No Matter How Old

 

     Last week I broke down and purchased a one month subscription to Rootsireland.  I was a little disappointed to find there really weren't any records there I didn't already have, most all of which were free online I might add.  But then I tried searching their records of Tramore Catholic Parish in County Waterford. What I found there justified the expense of the site.

     A few weeks ago I wrote a blog in which I vented my frustration at trying to track down some of my Crotty relatives who had lived in Cullen Castle, a short distance north of the town of Tramore.  They should have been found in civil registrations but somehow were missing.  In particular, I was looking for the children of Ellen Crotty, who had erected a grave stone in Tramore bearing her name, or rather her nickname Nellie, and the names of her parents and children.  The dates were off but that's not terribly unusual on stones, as I've found in many instances.  The odd part was the surnames. The stone read, Erected by Nellie Crotty, Cullen Castle, but those on the stone identified as Nellie's three children bore the surname Connolly.  The baptism of only one of those children, David Connolly, has ever been found by me until recently when I tried searching by substituting their mother's surname of Crotty for Connolly.  That worked, but left me wondering what was up?  Though I didn't wish to impugn Ellen's good name, it really looked like two or maybe all her children were born out of wedlock.  

     Catholic registers of Tramore are not easy to search.  A large section is missing, and the NLI has only a small number on their site.  Find My Past appears to have baptisms only through 1831 for Tramore.  Rootsireland has later baptisms but they are transcriptions not linked to images so pertinent details are missing.  I'm willing to bet those register pages would answer the question of  the circumstances of Ellen's children's births.  I've seen many entries in Catholic baptism registers with the word "ILLIGITIMATE" proclaimed in all capitals like an inscribed scarlet letter.

     As it is, the limited available information does point to Ellen's children indeed being illegitimate.  Her first child, Patrick, was baptized in 1866.  The transcribed record says he was born at Cullen Castle but in the space for father's name is seen only, "Crotty".  The mother's name is missing entirely.  However, many church baptisms were simply written out in a register without designated spaces or columns for mother or father's names, so it's likely the original contained only the name Crotty and didn't specify which parent that was.  Rootsireland's transcriptions are on a form containing spaces for parent's names and doesn't really allow for the possibility the record did not follow that format. The second child baptized in 1876, David Connolly, was also born at Cullen Castle to parents David Connolly and Ellen Crotty.  Ellen's last child, a daughter named Bridget, baptized in 1877, was born at Monmahogue, in Tramore.  Again, the father's name is recorded as Crotty, while the mother's name is Ellen Crotty.  It's so confusing I sometimes wonder if there are two Ellen Crotty's here, but then I remember that grave stone in Tramore with all those same names literally carved in stone.

     A marriage for David Connolly and Ellen Crotty cannot be found though of course that could be attributed to the lack of records.  It seems the only place marriages after 1840 can be found online is the Rootsireland site, but even those are incomplete.  They require a surname to search, so I did a marriage search for the most common surname in the parish, Power, just to test it.  Only three came up for the entire year of 1876, none for the majority of the 1840's or 1850's even though the site claims to have marriages from 1786-1980; it doesn't.  Which reminded me how annoyed I became the last time I dealt with Waterford Heritage, source of Waterford records on the site.  It was like pulling teeth to get them to confirm several decades of Tramore Parish records, both births and marriages, are missing.

     So--- Ellen had a child in 1866 whose father's name did not appear on the baptism record; in April of 1876 another child was born to David Connolly and Ellen Crotty who were probably not married; a last child was born in December of 1877 whose father's name once again did not appear.

     I have my doubts about Ellen ever being married given her surname of Crotty on the grave stone, and the fact that when "David Connolly Jr." died at the age of twenty-nine, the registration of his death was signed by Ellen Crotty with her mark, (see below).  The name of the decedent was recorded as, "David Crotty".   In the 1901 census, Ellen and David Crotty can be found living in Summerhill, a section of Tramore and the same place Ellen's daughter Bridget had died two years earlier from tuberculosis.  In another five years tuberculosis would also take David.  Ellen doesn't appear in the 1911 census. I'm still looking for her death registration under both surnames, a couple stand out but the locations seem unlikely...

Fairy Tales Do Happen

 

     Not long ago I wrote a blog about Oliver Hennessey and the woman I believe to be his widow, Johanna, or Jane Quinlan.  Jane's story continued after Oliver's death with her marriage in about 1869 to a German immigrant by the name of Martin Rigger.  Jane and Martin became parents to three more girls, Mary, Sarah, and the youngest, Jane who was born in Palmyra, New York in 1878.  The elder Jane passed away in Palmyra in 1881 which apparently was when her last child and namesake was placed in a Catholic orphanage in Rochester, New York, not far from Palmyra.

     Young Jane was adopted not long after by Mrs. Margaret Sholes, who like her biological mother Jane Quinlan, had come to America from Ireland.  Mrs. Sholes raised Jane in Elmira, New York as her own daughter, never divulging the truth of her parentage to her until the girl had reached her twenty-first birthday.  Still living with Mrs. Sholes at age thirty, Jane was about to receive news that would change her life forever.

     That news arrived in 1910 in the form of a message from Father Moriarty of Rochester, the location of the orphanage where Margaret had been left years before.  Father Moriarty had also been communicating with the two older Rigger children, Mary and Sarah in Rochester who had been searching for their younger sister.  The young women had been notified of the death of a relative in Germany whose substantial estate had been left to the children of their father Martin.  Before the estate could be settled however, the whereabouts of the youngest sister, the former Jane Rigger, needed to be ascertained.

     After the church was able to locate Jane, one of her sisters traveled to Elmira to meet her and impart the facts of the case.  It must have been an emotional reunion, Jane was unaware of having sisters or even of her family name.  She was also surprised to learn her father Martin, though in ill health and confined to a Rochester hospital, was still living.  Plans were made for Margaret to accompany her sister to Rochester to sign the legal papers to settle the estate and meet her other sister.  I like to think perhaps she was able to spend time with her long lost father as well before he died the following year.

     The papers trumpeted the news of Margaret's good fortune with headlines like, "Adopted Girl Gets Fortune And Learns Her Real Name".  As they so often do, the press got some details wrong, asserting Jane had been left at the orphanage where she was adopted by Mrs. Sholes as a baby when in fact she was almost four years of age at the time.  She can be found in the 1880 census of Palmyra, below, still living with her parents Martin and Jane and her sisters, including her half sister Anna Hennessey, at the age of three. 

     Sometimes I think reporters played a bit fast and loose with the truth if they thought it made for a better story.  But it could only be through negligence the reporter transposed the names of Jane and her adoptive mother, stating throughout the article that it was "Margaret Rigger" who was adopted by "Jennie Sholes".

     I've come across similar stories while seeking my ancestors, it happened all too often that mothers of small children died while giving birth to another and the family was broken up, which given the timeline could be the case here.  This was the first time however, that I found them completely losing touch with each other only to be reunited over a small fortune!

    

Death of James Quigley, A Follow-up

     A short time ago I wrote about my search for the birth registration of Mary Quigley and the death registration of her father James Quigley.  The death certificate I ordered since it wasn't available online, arrived last week.  While it took longer than the usual time to receive, it was still well within the thirty days the GRO warned it might require.  The document itself has left me a bit puzzled though.

     For one thing, it says the death of James Quigley, a laborer, occurred at Raheen in the Parish of Baltinglass on 3 January 1869.  For another, it's signed by the mark of Judy Connors who was present at the death.  This presents several problems.  Firstly, all documents I've found for James and his family place him in Baltinglass proper with the exception of the baptism of his first child. There was no civil registration of births in 1859, but the Baltinglass church baptismal register records the infant was born at Ballyraggan, County Kildare. That could be because Ballyraggan was the home of  his mother-in-law Anne Donahoe McGarr, and James Quigley's wife Anna McGarr may well have gone home to her mother for the birth of her first child.

     Then there's the matter of Raheen. There are several in Ireland but none in the Parish of Baltinglass according to Google Maps.  However, other maps place Raheen under two miles from Baltinglass, (thank you Dara)!  Two miles is not a deal breaker, so I'm not ruling this registration out on that basis.

     The occupation of laborer is more troubling.  When the birth of James' son John was registered in 1864 in Baltinglass, James' occupation was given as, "dealer".  Dealer of what I can't tell.  His son Daniel's registration two years later says James was a shopkeeper at that time.  Why would he be a laborer three years later?  I guess it's possible he fell on hard times and lost the shop. But who was Judy Connors?  The death certificate states James was married when he passed, I was expecting the document would have been signed by his wife Anna, that would have made things nice and tidy but it was not to be.  I found what I believe is Judy Connor's death in Raheen in 1873 at the age of fifty-three. She was widowed and there was no mention of a maiden name so I can't determine if she was a relative.  I looked for a marriage for her but nothing promising was found.

     On the other hand, there are parts that do fit.  The name for one, there weren't many James Quigley's in the area and this man's age is what I would have expected given Anna McGarr's age.  A baptism in nearby Hacketstown Parish just across the border of Wicklow and Carlow shows the baptism of Joannes Quigley of Knockagilky on 13 May 1830.  The parents were Joannes Quigley and Sarah Whelan, also what I would have expected.  The children of the Quigley/McGarr marriage, in order, were Anna, for Anna's mother, Sarah for James' mother, John for James' father, and Daniel for Anna's father.  I can't account for James' name being recorded as John, but stranger things have happened in church records.

     Also, I know my James Quigley was indeed married when he died. When James and Anna's last child Mary was born on 30 April 1869 at Baltinglass, her registration notes that her father James Quigley was deceased.  That means he must have died between about August of 1868 and April of 1869.  The date of January third would fit nicely.  Like her older brother Daniel, Mary's birth registration was singed by Kate Haydon, another mystery lady.

     While I plan to spend more time analyzing this, I think it probably is the registration of James Quigley who married Anna McGarr.  If anything changes I will be blogging about it again...

The Oliver Hennessey Question

 

     With my local Family History Center locked down tight due to the pandemic, my to-do list grows ever longer.  While many of the records filmed by the LDS over the years are now online, those of the Catholic Church are not among them for the most part.  And naturally, those are the records I need.  

     Ever since I found my cousin three times removed, Oliver Ryan, I've been curious how he came by that name?  Oliver seems an unlikely moniker to be chosen by an Irish Catholic family in light of the notoriety and hatred, rightly directed at Cromwell.  How did Oliver's parents, Cornelius Ryan Jr. and Anna Hennessey, come up with that one?  Then one day, while browsing census records I came across Oliver Hennessey spelled, "Hnnisse", age 25, born in Ireland.  He was living in Walworth, New York just one town over from the other Hennessey's in Palmyra, New York.  His age was close to Anna's, could Oliver Ryan be Oliver Hennessey's namesake?

     Looking back through my notes from St. Anne's in Palmyra I found the 1868 burial record of Oliver Hennessey, son of Kieran.  That settled it, when Anna married Cornelius, the record gave her parent's names as Kieran Hennessey and Bridget Gorman, Oliver was definitely her brother.  When Anna's son Oliver Ryan was baptized in January of 1870, Oliver Hennessey had been gone less than two years.  Instead of choosing one of the baby's grandfather's names for him, as tradition would have dictated, he was named in honor of his deceased Uncle Oliver.  That solved that question, but another remained, who married Jane Quinlan?

     That is why I need to see those church records.  I've always thought it was probably Oliver who married Jane and was the father of her child Anna Belle Hennessey, born in 1865.  There is however, a memorial on Find A Grave that contends Jane Quinlan was married to Thomas Hennessey and that Thomas died in 1867.  No photographs of the markers on the grave site are included on the family's memorial page even though a stone for Jane's daughter Anna Belle does exist, I've visited it.  There is also one on the plot I believe is Jane's but it says only, "mother" and the birth and death dates; another marker there reads just, "father" and the dates.  As you can see below the death date is 1867.

     Returning to burial records, there is an entry for Thomas Hennessey, son of Richard, who was buried on 7 April 1868.  There is also a memorial on Find A Grave for that Thomas who rests with his father who indeed was named Richard.  This one has a photograph but while there is no date of death the marker does give his age as one.

     It should be mentioned that in the 1860 census of Palmyra there was a Thomas Hennessey from Ireland of the same generation as Anna and Oliver Hennessey, so it is somewhat possible Thomas was the one who married Jane, but I think Thomas from the census of 1860 is the Thomas Hennessey enumerated in the census of Walworth in 1870.  The same town where Oliver Hennessey was living in 1860, just seven miles from Palmyra.  After checking every available censuses for Wayne County, where Palmyra and Walworth are both located, there is only one Thomas Hennessey of the right age in any of them, and none after 1892 when this Thomas died.  It was clearly not a common name in the area. Oliver Hennessey appears in no census but the 1860.

     The lack of photos on the first memorial makes me wonder if it was put together using just burial records?  The stone reads "1867" and if one checks the burial register at St. Anne's for a Hennessey who died in 1867, Thomas' name at 1868 is going to fit the bill considering tombstone dates are often a bit off, but so does Oliver.  If I could just get a look at marriage records, or even the baptism of Anna Belle Hennessey I'd probably have an answer to who Jane married.  It would take me fifteen minutes at most, tres frustrating!

    

Connolly Or Crotty Which Is It? In Which I Finally Find Them...Maybe

 

     The photograph above was taken at the old Holy Cross Cemetery in Tramore, County Waterford.  The inscription reads:  

Erected By Nellie Crotty   Cullen Castle   In Memory Of Her Father David Died Nov 1st 1892    Her Mother Bridget Crotty (Nee O'Brien) Died Sep 11, 1878 Aged 57     Also Her Children Bridt Connolly Died April 15 1898 Aged 21   David Connolly Died May 3 1907 Aged 28   Patrick Connolly Died In America

     The picture, along with several others, was taken and sent to me by the obliging parish priest Father Michael.  The one below shows a full view of the stone from the side with the cross atop it and the church in the background.

     It's a nice stone, but like so many others erected years after the sad events, it contains errors.  The only David Crotty I could find in Civil Registrations died in 1886, not 1892 but the informant was "Ellen Crotty, daughter".  David was the brother of my third-great-grandmother Honora Crotty Power who immigrated to America as did her brother John Crotty.  The only Bridget Crotty I can find that comes close to fitting David's wife died in 1889 and was 78 years old, not in 1878 at age 57.  That's a big difference and may well be a different Bridget Crotty though it was an uncommon name in the Tramore area.  I didn't even set date parameters and still only eight hits were generated.  This lady passed away in the union hospital, there is no identifying information like an address and the informant was an employee but I have my doubts Bridget would have ended her days in the workhouse with a husband and her daughter Ellen, (aka Nellie), to care for her.  

     Ellen's children were a big stumbling block.  After searching for them for days I found nothing.  Which is odd considering their births and deaths were well within the time frame for civil registration.  I had an old baptism record for David Connolly, who was born to David Connolly & Ellen Crotty in April of 1876 in Cullen Castle, I'm sure he's my fellow, but not a thing for the other two children.  Using the dates on the tombstone I looked fruitlessly for their birth and death registrations.  Along with those for their parents Ellen and David Connolly-- nothing at all came up.

     Today, having run out of options, I did a search for Ellen's daughter Bridget Connolly using the surname Crotty, and up popped Bridget Crotty who died 1899 in Summer Hill, Tramore, aged 20.  That's pretty close to the "1898 aged 21" on the stone.  And, the informant was Ellen Crotty, mother. 

 I tried the same trick with David Connolly and found this--  David Crotty, died in Tramore May 18 1906 aged 29, instead of "May 3 1907 aged 28".  Informant?  His mother Ellen Crotty.  David and Bridget's registrations say they both died from tuberculosis.

     I made an attempt to find Patrick Connolly or Crotty in America, concentrating my search on the Farmington New York area his Crotty aunt and uncle had immigrated to but was unsuccessful.  I wonder if no death date for him appears on the stone in Tramore because he was still living when it was made but his mother wanted his name included?  I'm puzzled by all of this; I can't imagine why the children's surnames were changed, if indeed they were, and the dates for the older deaths are so off.  On the other hand, it appears Ellen was illiterate and it's easy to lose track of dates...