Book: The Dublin Saga by Edward Rutherfurd

Edward Rutherfurd wrote a pair of historical fiction novels called The Dublin Saga: The Princes of Ireland (2004) and The Rebels of Ireland (2006). I don't generally enjoy non-fiction, so these types of books are my way of learning some history and, more enjoyably, getting an historical setting for people and places in my family history.

The Princes of Ireland begins with mythical peoples and progresses through the druids, Christianity, the Vikings, conquest by England and subsequent centuries of rule. The Rebels of Ireland continues from about 1600 with the powerful animosity between Catholics and Protestants, the constant back and forth between British rule and Irish independence, takes us through the horrible Great Famine, the schism between Ulster and Catholic Ireland, rebellions, the rise of Sinn Fein, and through the partition of Ireland. I found especially interesting the intertwining of the American Revolution, relationships with France, massive emigration to America, which were occurring in about the same time period as the emigration of our Irish and French ancestors to America. The descriptions of the religious animosities between Catholics, Protestants, and Puritans added context even to the earlier emigration of Puritans to the New World, also part of our family history.

Though the saga is principally located in and around Dublin, the famine takes place mostly in Ennis, in west Ireland, and some of the stories include other counties. In Princes, Rutherfurd explains origins of many place names and families. Written very recently, he explains that the historical context that he portrays includes the current understanding of Irish history. I enjoyed these books immensely.

Caseys in Galbally, Limerick, Ireland; Research resources

I recently made a DNA connection to a Casey family, and now am fairly certain that what I had suspected from census records, that Patrick Casey (b. ca 1801 in Ireland, married Hanora Norris in Galbally, where most/all of their kids were baptized) was a brother of Catherine Casey Cussen. This is just a note about some resources.

I've spent a lot of time going through church register images for the parish of Galbally, on the National Library of Ireland site ( https://registers.nli.ie/parishes/0264 ). The images are not indexed, so searching is like what we used to do when searching through census and newspaper films at local libraries. Except I can do this on my computer at home. I thought this would be a fairly quick job, but it turns out to be enormous. I'm looking for all Cushing and Casey entries to get a pool of candidates for the family in Ireland. It turns out there are about 500 images, most containing two pages from a register. I'm finding about two or three of interest per image. A baptismal record is typically a date, the child, two parents, two godparents, a page number, sometimes a note about the father's profession or town of residence, or that the child was "illegitimate", so typically about nine fields of information, often difficult to read. A marriage record is the married couple, two witnesses, a date (three fields), with occasional notes and a page number. At the end I add a film numbers, too, so that I can easily find the record again, so the whole is typically eight fields of information. That comes out to an estimate of about of about 2500 records and 20,000 recorded fields of information. So I should have expected a lot of work. I think I'm about halfway done.

The interesting part of this near drudgery is seeing all the names, something of a directory of neighbors of my Casey & Cushing ancestors. Many of the names are familiar as spouses of marriages that took place after immigration to the US, so I wonder if many of the Cushing & Casey kids and grandkids married into families the parents knew from "the old country". I've also seen some of these names in DNA matches to my dad, which opens some paths of searching for common ancestors. Some of the names that were very common in the Galbally register were Barry, Blackburn, Bourke, Brien, Butler, Byrrane, Carty, Casey, Clancy, Condon, Connor, Cronin, Cummings, Cunningham, Cussen/Cushen/Quishian, Dalton, Dawson, Dea, Donohoe, Dunn, Dwyer, Fitzgerald, Fogarty, Fraher, Fruin, Gorman, Grafton, Halloway, Hanrahan, Hayes, Heffernan, Henebry, Hennesy, Ivory, Kiely, Kirby, Landers, Lynch, Mahoney, Mara, Martin, Megrath, Moloney, Mullins, Murphy, Neil, Noonan, Picket, Power, Quain, Ryan, Sampson, Sheehan, Slattery, Sullivan, Walsh. And many of these added an O (O'Brien, O'Neal, O'Sullivan ...) or a Mc (McCarthy, McGrath, ...).

Another site I found interesting is the Irish Placenames Database at https://www.logainm.ie/en/s?txt=galbally&str=on . My browser identifies this as Dublin City University, but I don't know what exactly the project is. Often a register record would have a place name associated with a groom or a father, and the strange name and difficult-to-read writing made it difficult to record a meaningful place name. I didn't have a lot of success, but I found the resource interesting for locating on a map Irish place names more generally. This seems to be related to a project to preserve Irish culture by identifying and officially recognized places.

At the top of web page are links to what seem to be (a brief glance) other Irish collections. Above and to the left of the map is a link to "Meitheal Logainm.ie", which seems to be a place for people to submit local place names that may not be officially recognized, yet. But it's also searchable. I don't see any descriptions, but there are lots of places identified if you zoom in close. Some of the site are in the Irish language. ainm.ie seems to be a collection of biographies, but only in Irish. https://www.duchas.ie/en/ is a site collecting items to preserve Irish culture, through stories and photos. For example, I found this in their schools collection: https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4922055/4848074/5009531 giving a local explanation of Galbally, which apparently means "town of the strangers".

A last resource, not new but perhaps you haven't seen it, is built around Matheson's statistics (published in a book that people have found very useful) about the Surnames of Ireland. I don't want to go look up the book right now, but from memory he summarized an enumeration of the births that took place in about 1890 throughout Ireland, and it is widely used to find to find families to help focus genealogy research to more likely areas of the country. The country had been decimated by famine related emigration, so the numbers and distributions of names aren't the same as they were in the 1830s and pre-famine 1840s, when most of my Irish ancestors lived there, but it is a valuable resource. Many of us bought the book to look through the tables of names, but now it is searchable online at https://www.ancestryireland.com/family-records/distribution-of-surnames-in-ireland-1890-mathesons-special-report/ . I had to try several spelling variants for Cushen to find the entry in their table, so you might not find your name on a first try. The book will show you all the variants that made up the head count. The book also has some explanation of origins of some names.

I'll post other resources as I come across them. Please post your own in the comments.

Enjoy!

Irish Origins

If you're Math-phobic, skip this article.  It will explain and demonstrate a proposed method to assist in locating Irish ancestors.

A valuable resource used to trace families back to Ireland is Sir Robert Matheson's Surnames in Ireland (1909). One of my first posts showed how common (or rare) some of the Irish surnames in our family tree were in Ireland in the 1800s, when all of our known Irish ancestors came to the United States. The bulk of Matheson's report is a table showing the number of births registered for every surname (family name) in Ireland in 1890, and the distribution of these births by province (Leinster = eastern Ireland, Munster = southwestern Ireland, Ulster = northern Ireland, Connaught = mid-western Ireland).  Some of the important things to know about this index are: (1) related names are combined and reported as the most common name; (2) 1890 is after the Great Famine (aprox. 1845 to 1852) and deaths and the enormous exodus of emigrants from Ireland in the mid and late 1800s had decimated the population (Population was growing very rapidly before the Famine, peaking somewhere around 8 million people, but was down to about 3.5 million at the time of Matheson's data in 1891), so this data may not accurately portray the distribution of families in the early 1800s; and (3) rare family names, for which less than 5 births were registered throughout Ireland, are not included. In spite of the limitations, because of the sparsity of census-like information in Ireland, this is a valuable resource.

I have used this book from time to time to give me a general idea of where a branch of my Irish ancestors came from. Because comprehensive searching of data has not been easy (at least in the past), I have not actually found any of my ancestors using this data.  But I hope to.

It has occurred to me that this information can be used mathematically to narrow a search for an ancestor. The listings in Matheson's table are essentially the probability of finding a family with this surname in the various provinces.  Using Hogans as an example:

Surname    Births in:        Ireland              Leinster             Munster            Ulster            Connaught
Hogan                              193                    59                     115                   5                     14

can be recalculated as

Surname    Probability of birth in:  Ireland      Leinster         Munster            Ulster            Connaught
Hogan                                          100%          31%              60%                 3%                   7%

[Because of rounding, numbers don't add to 100.] So I would expect that my Hogan family was most likely from southwest Ireland, but may also have been from eastern Ireland. It is unlikely they came from northern or western Ireland.

I recently found a marriage record that Mrs. Hogan's maiden name was Rice. Matheson's data for Rice is:

Surname    Births in:      Ireland              Leinster             Munster            Ulster            Connaught
Rice                                 99                     33                     18                   48                     0

and can be recalculated as

Surname    Probability of birth in:   Ireland        Leinster       Munster         Ulster         Connaught
Rice                                               100%           33%            18%             49%               0%

Nearly half of the Rice families were in northern Ireland, where there weren't many Hogans, but there were many in eastern Ireland and several in southwestern Ireland. By combining this data, multiplying the probabilities that both families were present in the province, and normalizing:

Surnames    Probability of marriage in:   Ireland      Leinster     Munster     Ulster      Connaught
Hogan-Rice                                           100%         46%           49%         6%              0%

Note that this method assumes that the bride and groom were actually from the province in which they were married. In this case, a Hogan and Rice married in Ireland were likely from eastern or southwestern Ireland, only slightly different from the conclusion I would have drawn from considering Hogan alone.

Applying this to the other families in our family tree for which I know both surnames:

                   Probability                                                                                                        Start in
Surnames   of marriage in:   Ireland      Leinster      Munster       Ulster       Connaught      counties:
Hogan-Rice                        100%          46%           49%            6%              0%             Dublin

Donnelly-Larkin                  100%          38%            7%           50%              5%       Dublin, Armagh

Cushing-Casey                   100%            6%           87%            0%               8%       Cork, Limerick

Casey-Brady                      100%          60%           12%          20%               8%            Dublin

Shannon-McHugh              100%            5%            2%            56%             37%             ?
Waters-Murphy                  100%          24%          76%             0%              0%          Wexford
Murphy-Stafford                 100%         78%             9%           13%             0%       Wexford, Dublin

Unfortunately, I don't think the underlying data for this table still exists.  If it did, we could further analyze this data by county.  In Matheson's table, he also indicates in which counties the most births occured.  Using these (unquantified) indicators, I estimated the most likely counties in my table, above.  The only test I have on this method is that the Cushing-Casey family is known to come from Co. Limerick, near where it joins Cos. Tipperary and Cork. The table above tells me that the family was very likely from Munster province (correct), and the county notes would have sent me to Cork and Limerick counties.

Unfortunately, at this time, there are very few couples in my tree that were married in Ireland and for whom I know the wife's maiden name. In the table above, only three are direct ancestors, and for the one most strongly placed (Cushing-Casey) we already know where they're from.  The other four families are parents of in-laws in my tree to help others connect to our family, but not of enough interest to search their origins.