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.