Tag Archive for Galligan

Photographs

John Killeen (about 1828-1906)

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I found this photograph attached to a family tree at ancestry.ca, and contacted the owner for permission to post at my site. The owner kindly granted my request.

This is John Killeen, son of Denis Killeen and Mary Ahearn.

John Killeen (1828-1906)

John Killeen (1828-1906)

John Killeen was born about 1828 in March Township, Carleton Co., Ontario.

On 20 December 1852, he married Margaret Fahey, daughter of John Fahey and Margaret Lahey. I believe he was the first in his family to marry a Lahey, but he certainly wasn’t the last. On 12 January 1858, John Killeen’s youngest sister Margaret Jane Killeen married John Lahey, son of James Lahey and Ann Armstrong, and first cousin of Margaret Fahey. And in the next generation, John James Lahey, son of John Lahey and Margaret Jane Killeen, married his cousin Bridget Loretto Killeen, daughter of Patrick Killeen and Bridget Galligan. Said Patrick was also a son of Denis Killeen and Mary Ahearn, and therefore a brother of John Killeen and of Margaret Jane Killeen. Confusing? Yes. You really need visual aids to figure out the Killeen-Lahey connections.

And then there are the Galligan connections. As mentioned above, Patrick Killeen, son of Denis Killeen and Mary Ahearn, married Bridget Galligan (1835-1861), daughter of Patrick Galligan and Mary Cullen. Meanwhile Denis B. Killeen, son of John Killeen and Margaret Fahey, married Bridget Galligan (1858-1938), daughter of John Galligan and Ellen McGee, and a cousin of Patrick Killeen’s wife Bridget Galligan.

John Killeen and Margaret Fahey lived first in March Township and then in Torbolton Township, Carleton Co., Ontario, where they raised a family of ten known children, at least four of whom emigrated to Minnesota. Margaret Fahey died on 5 November 1899; and John Killeen died on 6 November 1906. They are buried at St. Isidore Roman Catholic Cemetery in Kanata (formerly March Township).

Census Records, Census Substitutes, Irish Records, Land Records

“Some of the lands being misnamed, others not named”

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Irish Townland Confusion: 1664

One of the challenges of Irish genealogy is that of identifying and locating townlands, the names and spellings of which can vary across time, and, even within the same time period, from one source to another. For a discussion of some of the difficulties, see Dr. Jane Lyons, The Townland: How to Use In Genealogy.

In the seventeenth century, English government officials also had difficulty with Irish townland names, as the following item makes clear.

This is a summary abstract, dated 6 September 1664, from the Calendar of the State Papers, Relating to Ireland Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1660-[1670]: 1663-1665 (1907), and it concerns a petition by Robert Maxwell, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Kilmore who acquired extensive landholdings in the barony of Upper Loughtee, Co. Cavan. Maxwell apparently successfully petitioned the Crown to “better secure his title and estate;” and the granting of new patents to lands he had already purchased in Dromhill and Dromellan was meant to correct some “defects in the [original] grant, some of the lands being misnamed, others not named, and others named for less than they are worth and others for more, whilst some of the lands are pretended to be concealed.” Note the attempt here (click on the image to see a larger version) to clarify the names of various townlands by indicating the various aliases  by which those townland might also be known (but also note that the material in brackets [ ] was inserted by the modern [1907] indexer):

calendar state papers 1664 cavan placenames

Of particular interest to me here is the townland of origin of my Galligan ancestors: “Loghohennocke alias Loghoconnoge alias  Aghnyglogh alias  Agnagloype [Loughaconnick].” That’s a lot of aliases  from the seventeenth century; and in the nineteenth-century records, I’ve come across a number of other variant spellings too. In the 1821 census of Kilmore, Co. Cavan, this townland is listed with four different spellling variations: Loughahonogne, Loughahonogue, Loughahunge, and Loughahunoge. In The Tithe Applotment Books, this townland appears as Lougharonog. And in Griffith’s Valuation, this townland is called Loughaconnick, which is the modern, standardized spelling — it is this spelling which has been inserted in brackets by the 1907 indexer.

Irish townland confusion: not just a problem for 21st-century family history researchers, but also a problem for 17th-century post-Cromwellian colonial overlords!

Census Substitutes, Irish Records

Tithe Applotment Books Online: Location Errors

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Cavan is Not Mayo

duty_callsIt’s wonderful to have online access to The Tithe Applotment Books, but there are some issues. The problems are described by Dr. Paul MacCotter, in a post that carries the rather ominous title “The Tithe Applotment Books Online: a health warning,” and are also addressed by John Grenham (“Problems with the Tithe Books”).

I have to agree with Grenham that “mistranscriptions are the price we have to pay for the convenience of researching online.” Whether it’s the Irish Tithe Applotment Books, the U.S. federal census returns, or the Ontario civil registration records, there will be transcription errors. And the National Archives does provide an online “Report errrors in transcription” function for names (for surnames and forenames, that is, not for place-names).

But the misplacing of townland entries, or, in this case, of an entire parish, strikes me as a more serious issue.

If you go to Browse the County of Cavan, you are presented with a list of Parishes in Cavan. You will not find the parish of Kilmore in this list, and that is because the townland entries for the parish of Kilmore, Co. Cavan have been mistakenly indexed as townlands for the parish of Kilmore, Co. Mayo (which county does have its own parish of Kilmore).

Here is a listing for Denis (here “Dens”) Galligan, townland of Lougharonog, parish of Kilmore, County of Mayo (which should be County of Cavan):

galligan denis tithe applotment listing

And here is the page to which the above listing links:

galligan denis tithe applotment book

So this is not good. But it’s not even as bad as it could be. In this case, we clearly see “PARISH OF KILMORE, DIOCESE OF KILMORE, AND COUNTY OF CAVAN” across the top of the two pages. But many of the books do not have that sort of heading at the top, do not have any identification of the county or the parish on the individual pages, so that, if a townland has been misplaced, the error may not be obvious to the family history researcher.

The National Archives has a notice about location errors:

Errors with regard to location of parishes in counties will also be rectified as soon as possible. Notification of these can be emailed to tab@nationalarchives.ie

So I sent them an email about the Kilmore confusion. Which is why I now feel like a geek in front of a computer who can’t go to bed because someone is wrong on the Internet. (But I do think it’s worth an email to point out such an egregious error, in the hope that someone might make the correction).

Census Records, Irish Records

Irish Census: What Was Lost

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If you’re lucky enough to find a family in the Irish census fragments, you will no doubt feel enormously grateful that that particular census return was preserved. And you will no doubt also realize the enormity of the loss of the nineteenth-century census returns.

What was lost?

Millions of records, covering the period from 1821 to 1891, which looked something like this:1

Household of Dennis Galaher, 1821 Ireland Census

Household of Denis Galaher, 1821 Ireland Census

The name listed here is Galaher, with Dennis, age 40; his wife Ann, age 36; and their sons Patt, age 14; Mich, age 12; Dennis, age 8; and Danl, age 2:

galaher denis 1821 census inset

galligan griffithsmap loughaconnick

The townland is given as Loughahunogue, in the parish of Kilmore, Co. Cavan. This is presumably the townland of Loughaconnick — a townland which contains a lake, Lough Aconnick, and which, according to the Ordnance Survey map of 1857, also contained a good deal of land that was “Liable to Floods.”2

I suspect the above census record is a listing for Denis Galligan and his wife Ann Kelly, who emigrated to Canada from the parish of Kilmore, Co. Cavan in the late 1830s to early 1840s. In addition to the four children listed above (Patrick, Michael, Denis, and Daniel), they also had Thomas (born about 1824), John (born about 1826), and Anne (born about 1827, and the only known daughter for this couple).

galligan bridget headstone

And here is the source which first gave me the parish of Kilmore, Co. Cavan for this family (and yes, that is snow in the background! I took this photograph about six years ago, on a cold, wintry day in January, when my father and I went to St. Michael’s to look for headstones). This is the headstone for Bridget Galligan, daughter of Patrick Galligan and Mary Cullen and granddaughter of Denis Galligan and Ann Kelly. She apparently died of complications from childbirth, two days after giving birth to my great-grandmother Bridget Loretto Killeen.

There are several Galligan/Gallaghan headstones at St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Cemetery (Corkery, Huntley, Carleton Co.), but there are also a number of Galligans who are buried there without headstones. As I’ve mentioned before, the headstones in a cemetery do not give you anything like a complete picture of who is buried there. You can fill in some of the blanks by consulting the parish registers — but for the Ottawa Valley area, many Catholic registers do not have comprehensive burial records until at least the latter half of the nineteenth century.

  1.  1821 Census of Ireland, County Cavan, Kilmore, Loughahunoge, house 14, Dennis Galaher household, digital image, National Archives of Ireland (http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie; accessed 28 March 2015). ↩
  2. OS map, Cavan, Kilmore, Loughaconnick, Sheet No. 25, map reference 2; Griffith’s Valuation (www.askaboutireland.ie). ↩

Catholic Records, Migration

Irish Counties in Fitzroy Harbour Mission Marriage Records, 1852-1856

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From 1852, there was a Catholic Mission at Fitzroy Harbour (Carleton Co., Ontario). A stone church (St. Michael’s) was built in 1861;1 but the mission did not become the independent parish of St. Michael until 1917.2 The Fitzroy Harbour Mission served Catholics in the Fitzroy Harbour area, of course, but also, in its early years, Catholics from across the river in the Quyon, Onslow area of Québec.

Marriage of Patrick Killeen and Bridget Galligan.

St. Michael (Fitzroy Harbour, Carleton), Register of Baptisms and Marriages, 1852-1863, 28 February 1859, image 49 of 80, M. 9, Patrick Killeen-Bridget Gallagan marriage, database: FamilySearch.org (http://www.familysearch.org), Ontario, Roman Catholic Church Records, 1760-1923.

From 1852 to 1865, the Fitzroy Harbour Mission was served by the Rev. Bernard McFeely. His handwriting was the opposite of neat; his spelling was idiosyncratic at best; and his practice of recording the Irish counties of origin of the parties to a marriage was a gift to future genealogists. It is thanks to Father McFeely that many of the descendants of these Irish Catholic emigrants can begin their family history research with a specific Irish county, rather than just “Ireland,” as the starting point.

To the right is the marriage record for my 2x-great-grandparents Patrick Killeen and Bridget Galligan. Patrick is given as “son of age of Denis Killeen and Mary Hearn formerly of the County Galway Ireland;” and Bridget as “daughter of age of Patrick Gallagan and Mary Quilean [Cullen] formerly of the County Cavin [Cavan] Ireland.” Patrick Killeen was almost certainly born in Upper Canada, whereas Bridget Galligan was certainly born in Ireland (parish of Kilmore, County Cavan). But this distinction is not made clear in the marriage record (I have this information from other records). Father McFeely’s “formerly of the County [Irish county] Ireland” refers to at least the parents of the bride or groom, but in some (probably quite a few) cases, will also refer to the bride or groom as well.

Below is a list of some marriages recorded in the parish register of Fitzroy Harbour Mission, from 1852 to 1856. I have only included marriages where one or both parties are identified with an Irish county (the vast majority of marriages recorded in the early register for Fitzroy Harbour). These Irish counties include: Kerry, Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, Clare, Galway, Mayo, Sligo, Leitrim, Cavan, and Tyrone.  

Please note that the Rev. Bernard McFeely continued his practice of recording Irish counties well into the 1860s; I only stopped at the end of November 1856 because my tabular data was getting a bit unwieldy for a blog-based table. I may do 1857 to 1861 or so in a future entry. 

As usual, I have resisted the urge to “correct” the spellings. In more than a few cases, I could not “correct” the spelling even if I tried: at least a few of the surnames transcribed below do not really make sense to me even as variant spellings of a surname. I have attempted to transcribe what I read, but in a few cases, Fr. McFeely’s text is all but unreadable.

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  1. This stone church replaced a wooden church that had burned to the ground in 1854. The suspected cause of the fire was anti-Catholic vandalism. See Marion G. Rogers, “St. Michael’s Church Fitzroy Harbour,” The Ottawa Journal, 29 July 1972. ↩
  2. “St. Michael’s Fitzroy Celebrates 150 Years,” Catholic Ottawa Newsletter, Spring and Summer 2010, p. 11. ↩

Canadian Records, Local History

Our Roots/Nos Racines: Canadian local histories

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Our Roots/Nos Racines is an online collection of Canadian local histories in both English and French. Well worth searching if you are looking for ancestors in Canada. I have certainly found a few good leads in a couple of local Ottawa-area histories that I’ve discovered at this site.

A word of caution on local histories: while local histories can be extremely valuable (they can help to establish or confirm the whereabouts of an individual or a family, for example), their information can be a bit loose and vague. Wherever possible, you should verify the information by consulting church records, vital records, census records, and so on.

But on the other hand: the vague and possibly inaccurate information that you find in a local history can offer valuable clues, which can point you in the direction of more reliable sources to pursue.

For example:

When I first found a reference to the marriage of Pat Killeen and Bridgit Gallaghan in Garfield Thomas Ogilvie’s Once Upon a Country Lane: A Tribute to The Gaelic Spirit of Old West Huntley, Carleton County, Ontario, Canada (which I discovered at Our Roots/Nos Racines), I didn’t even know that the surname Gallaghan (Galligan) belonged in my family tree. I was searching for Killeen; and Galligan/Gallaghan hadn’t yet crossed my radar screen. And while the approximate marriage date (circa 1846) given in Ogilvie’s local history was off by about 13 years (Patrick Killeen and Bridget Galligan were married on 28 February 1859, as I was later to discover), that reference to a Bridgit Gallaghan opened up a whole new line of inquiry, and led me to the discovery of another branch of my family tree.

Marriage of Patrick Killeen and Bridget Galligan.

Marriage of Patrick Killeen and Bridget Galligan. Fitzroy Harbour Mission, 28 February 1859. Ontario, Canada, Catholic Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1747-1967 at ancestry.ca.

Btw, Appendix H (“Irish Proverbs, Folklore, Maxims and Humour”) of Ogilvie’s Once Upon a Country Lane includes a maxim that my dad (a father of four daughters, but no sons) sometimes used to cite: “Your son’s your son ’til he takes a wife; your daughter’s your daughter all of your life.” However, I’m pretty sure my dad used to render it as: “A son is a son ’til he takes him a wife; but a daughter’s your daughter all the days of your life.”

 

Census Records, Civil Registration, Death and Burial

Patrick Galligan/Gallaghan: Three Records of Death/Burial

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I have not yet found an RC burial record for Patrick Galligan/Gallaghan, who was born about 1807 in Co. Cavan (probably parish of Kilmore), Ireland, and who emigrated to Canada about 1843. I have checked a number of Roman Catholic parish registers (e.g., St. Michael’s, Corkery; St. Michael’s, Fitzroy Harbour; St. Peter Celestine, Pakenham), but so far, no burial record. It may be that I am overlooking something obvious; it may be that I am overlooking something obscure. Or perhaps his burial was recorded and the record was subsequently lost, misplaced, or destroyed. Or perhaps his burial was never recorded in a parish register at all.

In any case, despite the lack of a church burial record, I do have three different records of the death or burial of Patrick Galligan:

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Census Records, Migration

Irish (also English and Scottish) Origins, Canadian Sources: William Pigott’s enumeration of Fitzroy township (1851)

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Here are my Moran ancestors in the 1851 census of Huntley township, Carleton County, Ontario (Canada West):

James Morin household, 1851 census of Canada West (Ontario), Carleton County, Huntley, p. 85, lines 44-50.

James Moran (here Morin), Farmer, born Ireland, religion R. [Roman] Catholic, age 54 at next birthday; with wife Margaret [Jamieson], also born Ireland; and children Thos [Thomas], James,1 Mary, Margaret and Alexander (my 2x great-grandfather, who married Mary Ann Leavy), all born Upper Canada.

Place of birth “Ireland” (no Irish county specified) for Irish emigrants to Canada is pretty much the standard for the 1851 (and 1861, 1871, and so on) Canadian census enumeration.

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  1. James Moran, son of James and Margaret Jamieson, had recently died, at the age of 27. His death is listed under column 30 (Deaths during year 1851), with cause of death recorded as “collara” (cholera). ↩