Another County Cork Connection!

Between the research my uncle has done on the Dwyer/Kenny branch of the family tree and what I've found for the Murray/Coleman side, I've learned that my ancestors come from all over Ireland. We've traced people to Counties Down, Tyrone, Sligo, Roscommon, Galway, Tipperary, and Cork. Even with that, there are still a few branches that we only know were from Ireland. The Kennys on my maternal side are still a bit of a mystery. For my paternal side, it's been the Mannings and Mullanes that have left me wondering where in Ireland they came from.

Recently I discovered that the San Francisco Examiner had been added to Newspapers.com. Even better, it's the ENTIRE run of the Examiner from it's beginnings in 1865 to present day. Accessing archives after 1922 requires a different level of subscription which I only recently obtained as my original subscription level expired in February. Since I hadn't had the chance to look at the Examiner before, I decided even the limited 1865-1922 access would be a useful resource and I started searching on some of my early San Francisco ancestors.

One of the first people I tried searching for was my great great grandfather Timothy John "TJ" Mullane. I knew he died in 1888 as I had found his burial record and a brief notice in the San Francisco Call, but hadn't been able to find out much more than that. Once I ran the search in the Examiner, however, I had a little bit of more information. An obituary (or more properly a death notice) appeared in the December 10th issue which read:

In this city, December 8. Timothy Joseph, beloved husband of Mary Mullane, and father of John and Mary Mullane, a native of County Cork, Ireland, aged 41 years, 3 months, and 19 days.

Friends and acquaintences are respectfully invited to attend the funeral to-day (Monday) at 1 o'clock p.m. from his late residence, 25 Belcher Street, off Fourteenth, between Sanchez and Church. Internment, Holy Cross Cemetery.

I was a little puzzled by his name being listed as Timothy Joseph as his voter registrations had his name as Timothy John and that it only listed two of his seven children, but the date was correct as was his home address. I'm guessing the children who weren't named were left out because they were all under 18 at the time. The part I was most interested in was that he was "a native of County Cork" -- finally a link to a specific area in Ireland! While it doesn't narrow down exactly where in Cork he was from, it is much closer than I was with just Ireland as a place to search. It means he likely emigrated from Cobh (then Queensland) to where ever he entered the United States, so a bit of a narrowing down for his immigration record.

This also makes the sixth great great grandparent I have traced back to County Cork, which definitely explains the heavy presence of connections to Cork in my Ancestry DNA test. It also leaves only two paternal great great grandparents with only a country of origin for a birthplace.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Discovering the Rosses

When I started working on my paternal family tree research in early 2012 I found a lot of information about the Murray and Mullane branches of my tree. After a while, I turned my attention to Ireland to investigate the Colemans and O'Learys which included learning my great great grandfather Jeremiah O'Leary married a woman named Mary Looney. I managed to discover quite a bit of information about the Colemans, O'Learys, and (O)Looneys, but for some reason I never dug into the Ross branch of the tree.

My great great grandfather John Coleman was married to a woman named Ellen Ross. All I really knew about her was that she had died in childbirth and John eventually remarried which led to my great grandfather Daniel Coleman to join the English navy at fourteen. By finding baptismal records for John and Ellen's children and then a record for John's second marriage, I was able to determine Ellen died sometime between 1861 when her last child was born and 1865 when John remarried. I rather left things like that for quite some time with the only new information I uncovered being John and Ellen's marriage record in 1850.

While talking with one of my Coleman cousins recently, she mentioned she had some information on the Ross tree that she had discovered by checking out another family tree on Ancestry. I usually stay away from those trees as many of them are poorly sourced and just link in circles to other trees with no supporting documentation, but I went and checked out the tree she had mentioned and found it to be reasonably well sourced. Upon close inspection, it identified one of her brothers as Alexander Ross. I had seen that name before in Ellen and John's marriage record. That gave me reasonable confidence that this was the right family, and I started going through the details.

Ellen's parents were named Coleman Ross (go figure!) and Mary Walsh and she was one of ten children. (The tree I found on line listed eleven children, but one sister wasn't sourced like the others and I have yet to find any information about her, so I've deleted her from my tree for the time being.) The children I was able to identify with baptismal records were:

• Alexander Ross (b Mar 1828)
• Patrick Ross (b Feb 1829)
• John Ross (b Jan 1830)
• Michael Ross (b Feb 1831)
• Daniel Ross (b Dec 1834)
• Ellen Ross (b Dec 1835)
• Anne Ross (b Mar 1837)
• Clement Ross (b Aug 1839)
• Catherine Ross (b Jan 1841)
• Elizabeth Ross (b June 1843)

That's a lot of new people to follow up on and see what new information I can find. The only thing that gives me pause is Ellen's birth year in 1835. That would mean she was fourteen and a half when she married John Coleman in July 1850, which is a little young. However, that date coincides closely with the Great Famine (or Irish Potato Famine) that ran through the late 1840s, so that may have played a role in things.

I haven't spent a lot of time on this branch of the tree yet and will need to dig into Ellen's siblings to see if I can learn more. So far, I have only discovered Ellen's sister Elizabeth's marriage record to a man named Thomas Ogden.

The online tree also identified Coleman Ross's parents and siblings, but they are not sourced like Coleman Ross's family, so while I copied the names to see if I could find matches, I am taking the information I found with a big grain of salt. Per the online tree, Coleman's father was named Alexander Ross and was born in Scotland. That does match up with some family lore that Ellen's family was originally from Scotland, but there is no evidence supporting Alexander's birth or arrival in Ireland, so it's still supposition. Still, if the information in that tree is correct, Alexander and Ellen had six children:

• John Ross (b 1785)
• Coleman Ross (b 1789)
• Margaret Ross (b 1792)
• Alexander Ross, Jr. (b 1798)
• David Ross (b 1800)
• Mary Ross (b 1801)

The birth year for Coleman appears to be correct as I found a death record for him from 1873 indicating he was 84 when he died, but there are no records to document anything about the siblings. Since they were all born in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it may be difficult to find much about them. I have managed to find a little bit of information on a couple of Coleman's siblings thus far. Both Alexander and John appear in the Irish Tithe Applotment Books between 1823-1837 and are living in the same area as where the rest of the known Ross family appears. I actually found two records for an Alexander Ross in the 1825 Tithe Applotment records which indicate they leased land within about a mile of each other. That leads me to believe one may be Alexander, Sr. and the other is Alexander, Jr. That is reinforced by the notation for one Alexander as "Alex'r Ross (No. 2)", though it is possible it could just reference two plots of land leased by the same Alexander Ross. Alexander Ross, Sr. would likely be in his mid-60s or early 70s in 1825, so not out of the realm of possibility. John Ross's plot of land appears on the same record as Alexander Jr.'s, so I'm guessing they were nearby each other. I haven't found any maps to indicate where any of the plots of land are, but I haven't dug into that much yet either.

So, I have some leads on the Ross branch of the tree and that looks like it will be my 2019 project. It will be interesting to see what I can and can't prove based on the information gained so far. With dates going into the late 1700s, it may be challenging to find anything one way or the other with out actually going to Ireland, but I have found a few records so far that are helpful and may give me some more insight to others. If I can connect Alexander Ross, Sr. back to Scotland, that may be promising as there are more Scottish records than Irish in the time frame I'm interested in.

DNA Update

At the end of 2017, my father asked that I get an Ancestry DNA test for him and since that was something I had been wanting to do myself I also got a test for myself. When the results arrived early last year, they turned out pretty much as expected -- Dad and I are pretty definitively Irish.

The test results were broken down into regions, and my test came back with the following breakdown:

• 83% -- Ireland/Scotland/Wales
• 13% -- Great Britain
• 2% -- Europe South
• 1% -- Europe West
• <1% -- Caucasus
• <1% -- Scandanavia

Recently, Ancestry updated their databases which resulted in revising areas and adjusting the test results accordingly. My new breakdown looks like this:

• 97% -- Ireland and Scotland
• 3% -- England, Wales, and Northwestern Europe

Gone are the trace regions and I'm even more Irish than I "used to" be. Again, none of these results are surprising. The three percent that covers England, Wales, and Northwestern Europe is likely the French and German parts of my ancestry as the regions my ancestors came from are covered in the regional map Ancestry uses. The most interesting breakdown is in the 97% Irish segment. In the original breakdown, it indicated that I had a strong connection to the Munster region of Ireland. Munster is the southern province of Ireland and encompasses County Cork where I know quite a few of my ancestors were born. The new breakdown, is more specific about which areas of Munster I am connected to -- North Munster, North and East Cork, North Cork, North Kerry and North Cork. The "North and East Cork" bit encompasses the area around Kinsale and Ballincollig which is where I know my great grandfather Daniel Coleman and great grandmother Lizzie O'Leary were born. The "North Munster" bit encompasses Tipperary, which is where my great great grandfather James Dwyer was born. The "North Kerry and North Cork" bit is interesting since as of this writing I haven't identified any ancestors from County Kerry. My great great grandmother Margaret McAuliffe was born in County Cork, but I don't know exactly where, so that might be her branch of the tree. It could also be a hint to the Mannings or Mullanes since I haven't determined where in Ireland they came from yet. The Kennys are also a branch that hasn't been narrowed down beyond Ireland, but I've not spent much time on that branch of the tree.

Along with learning about these breakdowns, several of my aunts, uncles, and cousins have taken the Ancestry DNA test as well. It's fun getting notices about a "close relative" match and sending a text or email off to the matching person with a joking "I guess we are family." However, because of this my mother's older brother, who has been researching the Dwyer/Kenny side of the family for the last 25 years, sent a note to those of us who have taken the test explaining who some of the matches are. One match is a descendant of Winifred Gallagher who was the younger sister of my great great grandmother Elizabeth (Bessie) Gallagher. Winifred married a man named Robert Coleman, and when my uncle discovered this he contacted me to see if there might be a connection to my Colemans. The Gallaghers are from County Roscommon, which is in the northwestern part of Ireland -- nowhere near County Cork where my Colemans are from. Still there was an outside chance Robert Coleman was connected to my Coleman ancestors, so with the new information from the DNA tests, I hopped over to my father's test results to see if there was a match to the same person. No such luck, but even a no match is a good result. Now we know my Colemans and Robert Coleman aren't related (though, admittedly, it's still possible there's a much further back connection than the tests can identify at this time.)

Finally, I did check my father's new results to see what change might have popped up for him. Since his initial results showed he was pretty much Irish, I didn't expect to see a whole lot of variation, and I didn't. His original test results came back as:

• 93% -- Ireland and Scotland
• 3% -- England, Wales, and Northwestern Europe
• 1% -- Finland/Northwest Russia
• <1% -- Scandinavia
• <1% -- Middle East

The new results are:

• 98% -- Ireland and Scotland
• 2% -- England, Wales, and Northwestern Europe

So, yep, Dad is still about as Irish as you can get. His Munster province breakdown is similar to mine, only adding "Southwest Munster" which is mostly the southern parts of Counties Cork and Kerry, which gives some hint that there is a possible link to County Kerry in the Manning/Mullane part of our family tree since we know the Murrays are from Galway, the McDonoughs are from Sligo, and the Colemans and O'Learys are from Cork. Perhaps somewhere down the line the DNA test will find a match with one of my Manning/Mullane relatives and we can figure out where everyone came from.