Thursday, March 21, 2013

One Big Circle Updates...Ireland, Scotland and Pennsylvania

The last few weeks have been amazing!!  

First I want to thank everyone from Geneabloggers for their kind support and the comments they sent.  If you have not checked out the great blogs at this site please do!! 

I am always willing to learn so I started looking for free Webinars online.  Legacy Genealogy program offers webinars at  http://www.familytreewebinars.com/ .  Some are paid but they normally will have them free for a week.  Ancestry.com users you can go to http://www.ancestry.com/cs/us/videos to see all their webinars for free. You can also search Youtube  and Cindy's list http://www.cyndislist.com/education/online-courses-and-webinars/ and find many great ones there as well.  After some searching I found what I was looking for Ireland and Scotland research.  

A few weeks ago I blogged about my Great Grandmother Annie Flynn.  I took the time to write down what I knew and what I didn't.  The didn't knows way out numbered the knows, so, I spent a few hours watching genealogist who research in the areas I want to become more knowledgeable.  

One of the great tips was that the birth dates on United States or Canadian records can vary greatly from Ireland because of a law in place to make people register the birth with in a short period of time.  Poor farmers could not go to town to report a birth so they would have the child baptized, which would give one date, then they would change the date of birth so the government would not be fined for not reporting the child's birth earlier.  I am pretty flexible when it comes to dates.  If some one is born in 1865 I will always search other dates just in case but I was unsure how off it would be in Ireland. I now know it can be off by up to 6 or 7 years between what we know in U.S census records and the original documents in Ireland.   

I visited http://www.rootsireland.ie/ before but really did not have enough information to use a paid site to research my Flynn's.  I didn't have high hopes of finding anything but to my surprise I found the marriage records for Richard Flynn and Bridget Butler, Annie's parents.  It had their fathers names and birth locations and with that I found both of their birth records (Richard was born in 1859 not 1865 and Bridget 1865 ipo 1867).  Richard's father Richard Flynn was born in a Workhouse in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland.  Not the nicest places to be born!.  Then to top it all off I even found one of the parents marriage records.  After a small (Okay, really big) happy dance across my living room!!  I have updated the records on my site with the new information.

Since it was just before St. Patrick's day and I had such good luck I decided to tackle a few more Irish names.

I started researching Elliott family of Schuylkill Co, Pennsylvania a little over 10 years ago.  I knew they lived in and around Pottsville and that a story had been passed down that 3 brothers (Isn't it always 3 brothers, never 4 or 2 lol!) had been kicked out of Ireland and had fled to Scotland.  At some point the family immigrated to Pennsylvania.  

Armed with the new information from a Webinars on Irish immigrants in Scotland I began looking for Irish Elliott's living in Scotland in 1851.  I knew by now that the immigrant ancestors Patrick Elliott and his wife Sarah Mulholland were married in Barony, Lancastershire, Scotland in 1845 and had one daughter in Scotland Mary in 1847.  It took a few searches but there was Patrick Elliot, the only one in the area and his parents Arthur and Sarah.  Next I search for Sarah Mulholland, I knew her parents immigrated to Pennsylvania, they are in the 1861 census living next door to her.  Andrew and his wife Mary were found in the same town in 1841 and 1851 as the Elliott's.  It seems Patrick and his wife immigrated 10 years before her parents.  

So updates this week to Flynn, Dunne, Bulter, Tobin, Elliott, Mulholland, Fallon, Burns, Correll and connecting lines.  Also large update on Anthony family of Hants Co, Nova Scotia.

Good free Irish things:

Amazing site on Workhouses, not searchable but very educational for all of the UK
http://www.workhouses.org.uk/

1st of a 4 part Free article from Irish Roots Magazine.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/73714137/Tracing%20Your%20Irish%20Ancestors%20Online%20Irish%20Roots%201.pdf

Cemetery Transcription of Ireland
http://members.iinet.net.au/~sgrieves/cemeteries__ireland.htm

National Archives of Ireland
http://www.nationalarchives.ie/

All I can do is recommend, no matter how much you think you know, there is always room to learn...

Wondering why there is almost a foot of snow in Maine when it is suppose to be spring, Oh yeah, because its Maine!
Michele