Category: Genealogy

If you use Ancestry.com to research your Irish ancestors, you’ve probably encountered civil registration records that list three-month or one-year time-spans for an event such as birth, marriage or death. Believe or not, that date doesn’t show when your ancestor was born, married or died.

For example, I found an Irish Civil Registration Births Index record for Sabina Gallagher, which noted show was born in April, May or June of 1884, but she was actually born on 4 March 1884. The thing I skipped over when I first encountered this source is the data label “Date of Registration.” Believe it or not, that date is when Sabina’s birth was registered with the state, not when she was born.

So why did it take so long for her birth to get registered?

In 1864, England passed a law requiring that all births, marriages and deaths be reported to a local registrar, typically for the local Poor Law Union—a geographic division within Ireland. If the event wasn’t registered, you would be fined.

Put yourself back in 1865: you’re a poor Irish farmer, subsisting off a tiny parcel of land in a rural townland when your wife gives birth to a baby. Assuming you even know about the new law—which you probably don’t, because news is spread only through word of mouth—the Poor Law Union register is ten miles away by a dirt road. It’s a day’s journey roundtrip when the roads are dry, but spring rains have turned that road into mud a foot deep. You’re busy planting crops for the next few weeks, so you put it off. Then maybe you get sick and put off the trip again. It might be months before you make the journey to register the birth of your child.
Or maybe you’re a midwife in 1880 who delivers a dozen or more babies a month, and you make the trip once a month, rather than every time a baby was born.

On top of that, you’re Roman Catholic, and you’ve been treated little better than a serf for hundreds of years, so you really don’t want to cooperate with the English anyway. Maybe you delay reporting it for as long as you can without risking the fine.
Back to you and me and today. So… what do you do with the index? If you haven’t watched my first video on Irish Catholic genealogy, you have to assume that there are multiple people with the same name, and if you’re trying to match your ancestor’s birth date recorded on a U.S. document with an Irish document, the index isn’t going to cut it. You have to see the full document.
Now, just a few years ago, this meant filling out a form and mailing it in to the General Register’s Office in County Roscommon. Sometimes the folks at the GRO would catch your mistakes. There were two Sabina Gallaghers born in County Mayo in 1884. I ordered the wrong one, but the GRO noted my error and sent me the right one. But generally, you pay for your mistakes, receiving documents you don’t want.

Now, if you’re looking for records from the Republic of Ireland, it’s all digitized at irishgenealogy.ie.

If you’re looking for Northern Ireland, though, you still need to order the originals.

If you are an American of Irish Catholic descent like me, you have probably hit a wall once you reach Ireland because it’s so easy to find people with the same name as your ancestor. Or, perhaps you’ve found it too easy for the same reason, and haven’t look as closely as you should.

When I try to connect my Irish-American ancestors to their family in Ireland, I try to do three things:

1. Remind myself that every name will have multiple individuals.
2. Narrow it down to one townland.
3. Find at least one fact with both Irish and U.S. records.

First off, the names. Let’s take my great-grandfather, Patrick Valentine O’Neill. Family oral history puts his hometown as Coalisland in Northern Ireland. In 1996 we visited this teensy little town with police stations that reminded me of the Israeli police stations I saw in occupied Palestine. There was a museum to accommodate the Irish diaspora visiting the old country, and the docent cheerfully asked us our names. When she heard we were O’Neills, she rolled her eyes and said “Ach, I was O’Neill before I got married.” Her point seemed to be that half the town were O’Neills.

Back to Patrick. He was born in 1877 to Patrick O’Neill Sr. and Mary O’Neill. That’s right, Mary’s maiden name was O’Neill. That has to be pretty unique, right, even in a town where everyone was an O’Neill? I found a civil marriage certificate for Patrick O’Neill and Mary O’Neill from Porteglenone, 30 miles north. Woot! And then I found birth or baptism records for five children the couple had together, most in Coalisland, but one in Portglenone in 1871.

Then I found a problem. My great-great Aunt Mary Ann was born in June of 1871, while her “brother” Charles was born just five months later in November of 1871. This was biologically ludicrous. The only answer is that there were two different Patrick O’Neills who married two Mary O’Neills at about the same time, and that both couples lived just thirty miles from each other.

This brings up the second point: finding the townland, which is the smallest geographic entity recorded in civil records. A townland is roughly equivalent to a U.S. neighborhood or subdivision. Most of the time. If you can find the townland, you can find the ecclesiastical parish, and from there, you can find baptisms and marriages—assuming the parish register still exists.

Patrick and his siblings were all born in Annagher townland and baptized in Clonoe Parish. Charles was born in Lisnahunshin, and Hugh in Newmarket.

Let’s take another example of why the townland matters: Michael Shiel and Bridget Kennedy. I know their names from the Irish civil marriage license and Philadelphia death certificate of my 2nd-great-grandmother, Mary B. Gallagher nee Shiel. I also have a whole bunch of facts that point to Swinford, County Mayo.

So when I found a 1903 civil death certificate for a Michael Shiel near Swinford, I said “woot!” The person reporting his death was even “Bridget Shiel, widow.” I’d found my guy!

Except… I hadn’t. I looked up Michael Shiel in Griffith’s Valuation, and found one in Carrowreagh townland, which is where Mary’s civil marriage license noted her father lived in 1871, and a second about 20 miles away in a townland adjacent to the one listed in the 1903 civil death certificate.

I had two men named Michael Shiel of about the same age, both married to Bridgets, and living within twenty miles of each other. If I hadn’t checked the townlands at two different points in time, I would’ve thought they were just one man.

Let’s get to the third point: a second supporting fact. Ideally you want to match a birth date from a U.S. death certificate with a baptismal or birth record from Ireland. But you could also have a marriage year from some U.S. source, so a marriage cert from Ireland could work. Or you could find a brother or sister who immigrated with your ancestor but has better records in Ireland than your ancestor.

Take Mary McGirr nee Powers. Her 1902 death certificate notes she was 75 when she died, so she was born around 1826 or 1827. The 1900 US Census says she was born in May 1826. A 1907 book, Past and Present of DeKalb County, noted that Mary was born in County Waterford about 1825. Family oral history tells us her parents were John Powers and Catherine Quinlan, and that they came from Dungarvon in County Waterford. I can’t prove the parents or city, though. Finally, my grandfather identified several Powers in his hometown as cousins, and I’ve traced them back to Mary’s purported siblings.

I’ve got a County, I’ve got a month and a couple of years, and I’ve got names of parents for Mary and her siblings. Now I’m ready to search in Ireland, and low and behold, I found several baptismal records for Mary’s younger siblings from Stradbally Parish, which is just south east of Dungarvon. They all name the parents as John Powers & Catherine Quinlan. Victory!

I did find a 20 May 1826 baptismal record for a Mary Power, born to John Power and Catherine Power, from Tramore parish close to Waterford. That’s pretty good, though I have some nagging doubts. The parish is fifteen miles from Stradbally, Powers is a pretty common surname in the area; and John, Catherine and Mary are very common Irish forenames, so it’s possible that this was for a different family. Still, I’ve proved who Mary’s parents were, and where they came from by connecting information from U.S. documents with Irish documents.

If you have Irish Catholic ancestors like me, you have probably hit a wall once you reach Ireland.

When Conan O’Brien had “Who do you think you are” producer Lisa Kudrow as a guest on his show in 2015, Kudrow said “Irish Ancestry is tough, because… you all have the same name!”

She wasn’t joking. Take one of the most common surnames in Ireland, Byrne. It wasn’t just the fifth most common surname in 1891, but the entire clan is centered on the east coast around Dublin.

I’m Mike O’Neill and I’m a big data professional and amateur genealogist who has made tons of mistakes since I picked up genealogy as a hobby in 2011. I want to help you avoid some of my screw-ups.

Before we get to surnames, if you didn’t already know, the biggest challenge in Irish Catholic genealogy is the lack of a census before 1901. It’s not that the English didn’t take a census of their subject, Roman Catholic population. They did.

But during the Irish Civil War, in late June and early July of 1922, pro- and anti-treaty forces clashed around a Dublin government building complex, the Four Courts. As part of the fighting, the Irish Public Records office—including the 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881 and 1891 censuses along with nearly a thousand years of other Irish records—went up in flames.

Back to surnames. In 1894, the Registrar-General of Ireland, Sir Robert E. Matheson, tabulated surnames from the 1891 census, and published a Special Report on Surnames in Ireland. The top 50 surnames in Ireland amounted to 22.4% of the population. In comparison, in England, the top 50 surnames amounted to 17.8% of the population. Scotland was worse, though, with the top 50 accounting for over 28% of the population.

Surnames in Ireland also tend to be condensed in particular areas. Matheson also looked at surnames from birth records in 1890 to show where. For example, 78% of Murphys, the most common name in Ireland in 1891, were in southern Ireland.

Pick any surname in Ireland, and you’ll probably see similar patterns. The Gallagher surname, concentrated in County Donegal, is fairly common around northwestern Ireland. O’Neill is more distributed, with three concentrations—one in Ulster in the North, a second around Dublin, and a third County Cork. And Kelly appears just about everywhere.

Catholic forenames were also heavily reused. In a study examining how Irish immigrants stopped using traditional names for their foreign-born children, 11% of first generation Irish males in England in 1881 were named Patrick, while ~9% of females were named Bridget.

So… if you’ve got a Patrick Murphy or a Bridge Gallagher in your family tree, it’s a safe bet there will be at least one other person with the same name and of the same age in the county you’re searching.

Already watched my Genealogy 201 video about Find-a-grave? Here’s a tip about how to assess the validity of Find-a-grave’s “non-cemetery” burial memorials, as well as an advanced technique to crack into Ancestry.com’s search indices.

There is one type of Find-a-grave memorial that I almost always reject: non-cemetery burials, which includes deaths at sea and cremations. Why? You’re completely reliant on the quality of the submitter’s research, and you almost never see supporting citations so you can verify the submitter’s research yourself.

I do have a few exceptions to this, though.

Take William Butten’s find-a-grave memorial. He died on 16 Nov 1620 aboard the Mayflower, a fact which you can easily validate with a Bing search.

Another example is Captain Samuel Chew, who died on 4 Mar 1778. He was the Captain of the brig Resistance during the Revolution and was killed in action at sea north of Barbados.

Generally speaking, there’s going to be some form of record when someone dies at sea in military action or drowns when a ship capsizes, whether it’s a newspaper article, military record, or book.

Another example is Joseph Patrick O’Neill, my father. We cremated his body, and over the past decade, have left small amounts of his ashes at various places that were important to him, or are important to us. In this case, the recent death and note of cremation are a good sign you can trust the information in the memorial.

Now let’s have some fun, and turn this around. If you’ve encountered an old genealogy mistake, you may notice how difficult it is to get people to change their view. I also suspect that new family historians will listen to the crowd, choosing the answers that everyone else picked, rather than taking a closer look at a contrary opinion.

Find-a-grave actually offers a way for you to get your alternative information into Ancestry.com’s search indexes. It’s not guaranteed to change people’s minds, but having your contrary information appear as a hint in someone else’s tree from a source that carries authority… well, that’s going to cause some people to look closer.

I did this a year ago for George Schlauch of Pelham, Ontario. Many of George’s descendants were resistant to acknowledging the blatantly obvious error in the accepted genealogy, let alone accepting of an alternate, evidence-based genealogy that Liz Tice and I painfully pieced together.

I spent close to two years researching the Schlauch/Slough family in colonial Pennsylvania, and I didn’t want to close out that work without doing my best to put it in front of future family researchers. So, since none of these Sloughs appeared to have been buried in a cemetery with a tombstone, I decided to add George Slough and his parents to Find-a-grave (as well as memorials for the George Slough of Northampton County with whom the Pelham George was confused) as non-cemetery burials. Now, when anyone searches for George Schlauch of Pelham Ontario, Ancestry.com returns an authoritative source. It looks like it the accepted genealogy vs. Find-a-grave & Ancestry.com. Even though it’s really just me.

Please don’t do this lightly. If you enter in wrong information and leave it live for more than a few months, your mistake will live on for years in the family trees of others, even if you correct your mistake.

If you do, it may take a few days for your memorial on Find-a-grave to appear in Ancestry.com’s indices.

Also, you should be aware of Find-a-grave’s policy about memorial ownership. If you are not a direct relative within four generations of the deceased, you can be forced to transfer ownership of a memorial to someone who is.

In summary, a good genealogist should give extra scrutiny to Find-a-Grave’s non-cemetery burials. At the same time, however, a good genealogist can help others out by taking advantage of non-cemetery burials by sneaking their high-quality research into Ancestry.com’s indices and hints system.

Here’s an advanced tip to determine the quality of data from a Find-a-grave memorial by examining the memorial’s creator.

In my Find-a-grave Genealogy 201 video, I recommended you only consider information inscribed on a gravestone as fact, since you can’t know the source of any of the other information on the memorial.

Unfortunately, a lot of Find-a-grave memorials don’t have pictures of a gravestone. But there is a way to assess the reliability of such a record, and that’s by taking a hard look at how data is added to Find-a-grave.

Find-a-grave is probably the largest, crowd-sourced genealogy tool out there. What do I mean by crowd-sourced? It means a huge crowd of people contributed to its creation—in this case as volunteers. Of course, every crowd is made up of individuals, and when you encounter a record without a gravestone, you can try to assess the validity of the memorial by looking at person who created it.

Think about who Find-a-grave users are.

The simplest are family researchers, looking for information about their ancestors. These users leave no footprint on Findagrave.

There are also casual contributors, who update the memorials of people in their family tree.

Finally, there are the cemetery transcribers. These Find-a-Grave power users—who consider it an enjoyable hobby to transcribe all the graves from cemeteries close to them—are what make Find-a-Grave such an amazing resource.

If I find a user who has made so many contributions from a particular cemetery, I begin to believe they weren’t documenting their family, they were documenting the cemetery. And that means all they know about each deceased is what was written there.

Take Bernard Joseph Dougherty, who is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery just outside Philadelphia. There’s no photo of a tombstone, and the information is pretty basic: name, date of death, and cemetery. Bernard’s memorial was created by the user F. Priam and when I look at this user’s profile, I can see a whopping 43,000 memorials added. Wow. That’s a lot. There’s no way F. Priam is related to all of those memorials. This user must have a passion for transcribing gravestones. A note they added to their profile professes a love for genealogy, and shows that F. Priam is an active and passionate member of the find-a-grave community.

This all makes me feel pretty confident that F. Priam recording just the facts on Bernard’s memorial, and that I can rely on what’s there.

That said, other users can contribute additional information to these entries, and there’s no way to look at what’s changed.

Consider Ellen Haggerty nee Humphreys, created by the user So Little Time. This user has added nearly 8,000 memorials, most from Chicago- and Philadelphia-area cemeteries. But someone (me) suggested changes to the memorial, including listing Ellen’s mother’s maiden name, Meehan. I speak from experience when saying that Mary Humphreys’ maiden name didn’t appear in any records relating to Ellen’s death—it took me months to figure that out. But… just looking at Find-a-grave, you would have no idea of my source, and whether it was reliable.

In other words, a simple memorial created by a find-a-grave power user is a safe bet.

When using Find-a-grave, only rely on information you can see on a picture of the gravestone. Why? A gravestone is a primary source document: shortly after (or before) the deceased passed away, someone who knew them, probably a close family member, ordered the tombstone. Everything in a Find-a-grave record that isn’t on the tombstone came from another, unknown source, and is potentially unreliable.

Find-a-grave is probably the largest, crowd-sourced genealogy tool out there. What do I mean by crowd-sourced? It means a huge crowd of people contributed to its creation—in this case as volunteers. No corporation such as Ancestry.com paid people to transcribe the information.

At its root, Find-a-grave collects transcriptions from gravestones or grave register, and even the most basic record should give you three key pieces of information: name, year of death (or burial), and place of burial. Depending on the gravestone (and how much information the volunteer transcribed from the gravestone) you may get birth dates. Occasionally, you’ll even get a place of birth and/or a relationship such as “wife” or “son” to a person buried close by.

The catch is that Find-a-grave doesn’t distinguish between information transcribed on a tombstone, and information that a user has added from other sources.

Let me give you an example: James Fitzgerald, who is buried in St. Mary’s cemetery in Maple Park Illinois. His gravestone notes that he was born in 1867 and died in 1929. But Find-a-Grave gives exact dates, places of birth and death, and links to his parents and wife—information which isn’t on his gravestone, and probably wouldn’t be recorded in the cemetery’s files.

How do I know that information is accurate? I don’t, unless I find other documents related to James.

When I look at a Find-a-grave record, I make two assumptions. First, the person who created it had good intentions, so they’re not fabricating facts out of thin air. Second, despite their best efforts, they’re human and will make mistakes both honest and careless.

Someone must have known enough about James Fitzgerald to fill in all these details. Now, James is my great-grandfather, but if he were unknown to me, I would only enter in the information from his tombstone as facts, and the rest of the information as notes to help me accelerate my search.

This may seem overly cautious, but let me show you a few examples where this matters.

Consider the Find-a-grave entry for Elizabeth Ironmonger, who died in 1675. There’s a lot of detail in the record, but I am immediately suspicious, not only because there is no picture of a gravestone, but I know from experience that the custom in Colonial Virginia was to inter family members in a plot on the family land. Don’t believe me? Consider Hugh Jones’ 1724 book The Present State of Virginia, which notes that

“The parishes being of great extent (some sixty miles long and upwards) many dead corpses cannot be conveyed to the church to be buried: So that it is customary to bury in gardens or orchards, where whole families lye interred together.”

But let’s put custom aside: Maybe Elizabeth was an exception. Then I have to ask whether the church was even in existence in 1675 for Elizabeth to be buried there? The church’s website suggests the parish was founded around 1652, but that the current structure, which dates to sometime between 1690 and 1718, wasn’t in the same location as the church Elizabeth would have attended. All that’s left of the original structure is the remains of a brick foundation and a single gravestone. On top of that, according to the website’s notes about the cemetery, the first known burial at the church was in 1723, nearly five decades after Elizabeth died, and several years after the current church was completed. Some family cemeteries were later moved and re-interred on church grounds, but the earliest such re-interment was for a man who died the 1690s.

It’s possible that Elizabeth Ironmonger was buried at Ware Church, but the odds are exceptionally long. So… back to assuming good intent, I’ll assume that whomever created this record was just trying to make an educated guess—maybe they have some evidence she attended that church, and assume she was buried there. But… if they were willing to make this educated guess, how many other guesses are here. Were they guessing about her place and year of birth? Her father, spouse or child?

Who knows, but I’m not going to rely on the record.

Of course, sometimes you can’t rely on the tombstone. Take Jacob Slough, buried in Norristown, Pennsylvania in 1826. Find-a-grave has two tombstones. One is faded and barely readable, though a DAR report of the inscription supports the birth and death dates. The other—with the inscription Private 8th Class, 2nd Battalion, Northampton County Militia—looks brand new, and doesn’t even have grass growing around it’s edges. It must have been added by living relatives to honor Jacob’s military service in the Revolution. Except that this Jacob Slough didn’t serve. Norriton is about forty miles from Northampton County, where another Jacob Slough appears in contemporary military records. I know forty miles doesn’t sound far, but it took George Washington’s troops most of the night to trudge 13 miles from Trenton to Princeton in 1777.

My wife and kids aren’t directly related to any George Sloughs, but after all the work collecting every single Slough record I could find in Pennsylvania so I could prove my wife’s ancestry through one of twenty Jacob Sloughs, I probably have the most detailed collection of raw data about the Slough family.

Elizabeth Tice contacted me a while back to see if I could help her untangle confusion surrounding her ancestor, George Slough of Pelham, Ontario. I believe I’ve been working on the problem for at least a year–when I started, it looked like there were just a few less George Sloughs who had lived in Penna. prior to 1800 than there were Jacob (about 20). I probably would have given up, but every time I ran out of ideas, Liz had uncovered something new I’d never seen before that unblocked me (I hope I did the same for Liz).

Working with Liz has been the best genealogy collaboration I’ve had, by far, since Uncle Jim accidentally started me on this hobby over five years ago. While I’m happy I’m nearly done, I’m going to miss working with Liz.

Anyway, I have finally finished off my analysis of all the records I could find with the name George Slough, breaking them down into eleven individuals.

While that may be done, I still have a little bit more work to do polishing off my hypothesis about the ancestry of Liz’s George Slough. And maybe one of these days I’ll finish my defense of P. Daniel Gross, a step-father to quite a few Slough children from the 1700s.

Coming soon…

Sorry for the background noise–that’s the dishwasher. This few minutes of video is just a sample of the past hour+. A typical night with Quinn.

A typical night with Quinn from Michael O’Neill on Vimeo.

While researching the ancestry and descendants of twenty Jacob Sloughs, I uncovered a great deal of information about all men with that surname who were born before 1800 and lived at least part of their lives in the Colony and State of Pennsylvania.

One of these men, a Philip Slough born in Northampton County, Penna. around 1750, was particularly confusing, as another man with that name appeared living in the North Carolina backcountry in the 1790 and 1800 U.S. census, as did another Jacob Slough. Rather than make my analysis of Jacob Sloughs more complicated, I simply wrote off North Carolina, assuming there was no connection between the families.

Then I started working with a descendant of a Christian Slough who seemed to have close connections to my wife’s branch of the Slough family in Macungie, Penna. While this was orthogonal to Christian, she had DNA matches to people who claimed descent from people with the surname Slough who lived in North Carolina. Looking at the DNA results for my wife’s mother, I also found a couple ties to North Carolina families who married Slough women in the early 1800s.

So I went back and took a closer look at the records on the Philip born in Pennsylvania and realized that a well-researched analysis of his father (also named Philip) made an assumption that Philip married while underage, something I had since learned was extremely rare in Pennsylvania Dutch communities of the day. Instead, it was just as likely there were two Philips born in the mid-1700s to two brothers, Philip Sr. and the Jacob Slough who founded my wife’s branch of the family in America.

If you have a Philip Slough in your family tree, please take a look.

At least twenty. Who lived in Pennsylvania before 1800.

After 1800? I shudder to think.

My paternity leave project this past winter was to figure out the mystery of my wife’s third-great-grandfather, William Slough. Or more accurately, that of his father, Jacob Slough. I think I figured it out, but the record was so slim, I could not feel confident of my conclusions until I had eliminated all of the other Jacob Sloughs.