Tracing the Irish Side of the Family

The difficult thing about doing genealogy, if you are an American, is that you are likely to find yourself heading off in half a dozen different directions, to half a dozen countries where your ancestors once lived.  To trace my husband's family I must look to Croatia, Czechoslvakia, Switzerland and England.  To trace my family I must access records from Germany, Belgium, England, and Ireland.

I have done fairly well with English ancestors, who have been in America the longest - since colonial days.  And I have found a book with the genealogy already completed for the Swiss branch of my husband's family.  I have hired a Croatian researcher, have the name of a Czech genealogist, and am starting to look at the German branch of my family.  And while I have had information on my Irish relatives going back to my 2nd great grandparents, I've hit a dead end on anything in Ireland before that, which has been quite frustrating. 

In some respects, however, I've been lucky with the resources I already had. In my father's files were several aides to my quest.  There was a story of my great great grandparents, Ned and Mary Brennan, and their migration to America,  and a book with the title Irish Diary.  Both were written by Ned and Mary's grandson, a Catholic priest who has often visited Ireland.  There was also the local newspaper of the town in Ohio where my great great grandparents settled, giving me much information on their descendants.  And there were the notes and records my father kept, including a family tree.

Still, I knew nothing of my great great grandparents' families who had once lived in Ireland, or the remnants of the Brennan family who currently live in Ireland. Most of the census records were destroyed by the Irish government or burned in a fire in 1922.  However, I did have the name and address of a man who was a distant relation and who lived in County Laois (formerly Queen's County), the area where the Brennans, Faheys and Finns were from.  So I wrote to him and asked him to tell me about the family, specifically about his branch, which went back to the sister of my great great grandfather, Ned Brennan.

He wrote back, telling me about Mary Brennan, Ned's sister, who was his great grandmother.  He gave me names of Mary's children, and some of their spouses, though he had no names of their children and only a few dates.  He did, however, give me an idea of how many children each of Mary's children had produced. 

Obviusly, there were large gaps and nothing prior to Ned and Mary. 

Then, at the genealogy conference last weekend, I learned that the 1901 and 1911 Irish censuses had survived the fire of 1922, and they were now available online.  So I got to work and, putting together the clues from all of my resources I was able to find Mary Brennan and her husband James Clooney in the 1901 census.  They were 80 and 92 respectively, though by the 1911 census they were gone.  I had the names of their children and based on location and the number of children each had, I was able to find 1901 and 1911 census records on each of them. 

There was only one thing about which I was skeptical.  Was James Clooney really 12 years older than Mary, and did they really live to such an advanced age in the early 1900s?  So I went searching and found something that answered the question.

I had read in Irish Diary that James Clooney and his wife, Mary Brennan Clooney, were buried in the Aghaboe cemetery, so I googled "Aghaboe cemetery, Ireland" and found a blog discussing an ongoing project to index all the graves, many of which have unreadable headstones. The group doing the indexing had posted pictures of all the headstones, with the names of the ones that were readable.  I clicked on the one for James Clooney, hoping it was Mary's husband.  It wasn't.  It was the headstone for their grandson James and on it were listed the names and death dates not only for James, but for his father and mother, his two brothers, and his grandparents, James and Mary Clooney.  Indeed, James was 12 years older than Mary, and they did live to the ripe old ages of 92 and 84.

At the conference, I also learned that I may be able to access Irish church records from the 1700s and 1800s through the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, or one of its local branches, and I will be looking there next.