The NLI's Catholic Parish Registers is pretty much the most amazing Irish genealogy site I have yet to come across. I could spend hours browsing its digitized images (of the microfilm images) of actual parish registers; and I have to admit that I sometimes do. And if you browse through the parish registers, every once … Continue reading Batch baptisms: Loughgilly, Co. Armagh
John J. Vallely (1861-1935), son of Michael Vallely and Mary Ryan, was born 21 January 1861, in Lanark Co., Ontario, Canada. He emigrated to Grand Forks, North Dakota about 1882. Anna Lillian ("Lila") Moran (1861-1915), daughter of Alexander ("Sandy") Michael Moran and Mary Ann Leavy, was born 17 May 1861, at Huntley township, Carleton Co., … Continue reading The Children of John Vallely and Anna Lillian Moran
Sometimes the records just don't add up. Oh, I don't mean numerically or arithmetically: genealogical research is not double-entry bookkeeping, after all. What I mean is that sometimes the information found in one record will directly contradict the information that is found in another record. A case in point: Here are George Vallely and his … Continue reading Death of George Vallely
... and those 10 children the offspring of 3 separate (but related!) marital pairs. I've written about this before (see, for example, "Blended Families"): the blended family is nothing new. When a widower married a widow, and one or both parties to the marriage had children from a previous marriage, the resulting new household might … Continue reading One Household: 2 Adults, 10 Children …
The 1842 Census of Canada East (Quebec) is available at ancestry.ca (subscription-only), but also at FamilySearch (free of charge). At FamilySearch, the database is titled Canada, Lower Canada Census, 1842. At both sites (and it appears that FamilySearch is the source of ancestry's census database), the census is searchable by name, and the search engine seems … Continue reading 1842 Census of Canada East (Quebec)
John Vallely was a son of Michael Vallely and Mary Ryan. He was born in Lanark Co., Ontario in 1861, and emigrated to Grand Forks, North Dakota about 1882. In 1889 he married another Canadian emigrant to North Dakota: Anna Lillian ("Lila") Moran (1861-1915), daughter of Alexander Michael Moran and Mary Ann Leavy. This photograph … Continue reading John Vallely (1861-1935)
Returning to the French-Irish theme (see Strange Surname Spellings: Hohanlan for O'Hanlon) with respect to surname spellings, here are three surnames which sound somewhat similar, and which are often misspelled in the 19th-century records in ways that make them look even more alike: LAVALLEE is a French, and French-Canadian, surname. And just to complicate matters, … Continue reading Surname Confusion: Lavallee, Lavelle, Vallely
As I've mentioned before (e.g., in Spelling Doesn't Count! [in Genealogy]), it’s extremely unlikely that an ancestor had a strong attachment to a certain spelling of his surname, if that ancestor never had occasion to personally spell his own name. If my ancestor James Moran, for example, was not literate (and I'm pretty sure he was … Continue reading Strange Surname Spellings: Hohanlan for O’Hanlon
