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...
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