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Archiver > Scotch-Irish > 2009-09 > 1253337045


From: Martha El-Maguid <>
Subject: Re: [S-I] Thomas Rooney, County Louth, Ireland,Parish of Carlingford & Family
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:10:45 -0700 (PDT)
In-Reply-To: <1144998297.4717121253278915117.JavaMail.root@sz0165a.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net>


Dear Linda & Eileen:
Thank you both for your assistance. I will study more of what you wrote me.
Hopefully it might help me find more of my Scotch-Irish ancestors, tho I am not
sure where in Ireland the rest are from. But this is a good starting point.
Tho I do have one more question maybe one of you can answer.
I have a GrGrGrandfather Samuel Boyd. Tho born in Ireland...
Came to NY married, had a child, then they go to Ontario, Canada.
My question is this: in the 1861 Canadian Census, they list their regligion as
W. Methodist. I have never heard of a W. with Methodist.
Does anyone know what this could be? And where could I look for records?
They finally did come back to the USA (ND to WI) to live, (tho we cannot seem to find
any record of their deaths anywhere). Are there any such religons like that in WI?
Thank you for your kindness and assistance.
It's much appreciated.
Martha

--- On Fri, 9/18/09, <> wrote:


From: <>
Subject: Re: [S-I] Thomas Rooney, County Louth, Ireland, Parish of Carlingford & Family
To:
Date: Friday, September 18, 2009, 6:01 AM


Hi Martha,

There are both message boards and lists on Louth. You can find some at www.rootsweb.com . You can find others by using www.genuki.co.uk and googling. Google for genealogy Louth.

To learn when they arrived in the USA you do immigration research. There are several free courses at
www.genealogy.com/university.html. Far more information is there than can be put into an email. Sometimes you win out big, but often it's tough. There's naturalization records as well as ship lists. It may take a research project (not a 2 second lookup) to locate them.

There is much that can be done but you'll need to learn a lot to do it. Church records in Ireland usually start around 1820 or so. Of course there are Church of Ireland records as well. You don't identify the religion so I can't look up in my book to tell you when this parish started. Of course there are two types of parishes: Church of Ireland and Catholic. Other types of Protestants are NOT organized in parishes, so the parish information give the locale but not where the church records are).

It is also possible to use the pre 1850 census records in the USA to determine if they may have had children or not. Again, it takes time to learn how to do this well. There are a lot of free resources at www.rootsweb.com.

Also check obituaries. Check obituaries of ALL people with the surname in the area or areas they moved to -- the obituaries of children and grandchildren might identify the parents and/or grandparents. If they moved west and were early settlers in new communities, check county histories for those area. Check death records as well, again focusing on the surname. If they bought land at any point, check all deeds, not just the first and last. They may have given portions of land to children as they married.

Someone wrote a whole book on how to find daughters -- I can't transcribe it here, but if you want to find daughters and have little success, obtain the book. There's also a lot of information free like this:
http://genealogy.about.com/od/women/a/female_ancestor.htm

Things like death records, marriages, births -- these are maintained by the states and vary. To learn what records were kept at the timeframe you are searching in the locale, use various books like the Redbook (found in your library) or www.usgenweb.com which maintains a webpage for each state and county.

Many Irish church records are indexed and can be searched free on the Internet. You pay to view the details. See
http://www.irish-roots.ie/ . The Louth page is here:
http://www.irish-roots.ie/louth.asp . Only Catholic and they start in 1835. If not Catholic use a book like
Ryan "Irish Records" to identify start dates. Or you may have success with googling for Fianna Louth as well as googing for Carlingford Church Records and other things that come to mind.

Sometimes on the third or fourth try of googling, I get a huge hit. If you don't google (over and over), try ing different things out, you will not find these things. This is where creativity and patience become important. No one else can google like you google, so don't rely on stuff people google and find for you. This happened to me yesterday -- I shifted a few words in a google and won big.

The final word -- Irish genealogy is both different from American (actually every country is different from the rest!), and you must learn how to do it. If you attempt to limp along using lists and boards, you will not get far. You may of course acquire a bogus family tree because you don't know how to evaluate free information that is hogwash and that you mistakenly think is true. The records are not like the records we have in America and frequently they don't exist at all. It is frequently said in Irish genealogy courses (which we of course don't attend <grin>), that it is very very difficult to trace Irish before about 1820 because church records usually start about then.

Wheter iit is impossible or not depends on a number of factors such as survival of records, the religion and economic status of the ancestor, etc. However it is DURN HARD. How do you overcome difficulty? By learning. If you don't do a lot of learning, you don't succeed. The learning is fun.

If these folk were Catholic, this is not the best place to ask for help. The American ethnic group named Scotch Irish were Presbyterian and from Ulster, not Louth and the other 3 provinces. Our area of expertise is Protestant records. Just about any other Irish list knows more about Catholic records and Catholic families than we do. If they were Protestant in Louth, that's good news as there were not many there and there are additional types of records that Protestants may appear in but Catholics are unlikely. If you identify the religion of the family, we can help direct you better.

The given names as well as the surnames and their location suggest to me they're Catholic or were Catholic but I might be wrong! Even if they were Protestant, I'd check Catholic records (which is pretty easy -- see above), since they have Irish names. I recall once someone asked about a surname in Louth saying they could find no other mention. They were Protestant. However another lister produced a long list of hits -- in Catholic records. I took this seriously to heart <grin>. People did and do change religions even in Ireland, difficult a pill as that can be to swallow. What is often true is that the one group may not know of the other. You get 'written out' of the family history.

Example -- in a certain district up in Antrim, there lived an important couple once. The wife was in the district history is described as a devout Catholic who lived and died as such. The husband was a well to do farmer. They had a very large family who intermarried with all the other Protestant families so in the end all the Presbyterians seemed to be descended from this Ur-couple of great and hoary local veneration. Descendents emigrated. The Australian ones did very very well becoming very rich.

A few years ago I met a Catholic lady at a conference who descends from the Catholics in the same district. She had done extensive research in Antrim with the cousins. She had no idea, nor did her cousins, that they had Protestant relatives. But in truth, everyone they met on the street was probably related to them. They had a hard time accepting thi. They had avoided genealogy for fear of learning they might be related to an Anglo-Irish family in Monaghan. However the last laugh (that I heard, perhaps more have happened but no one informed me <grin>) is that DNA showed that family could be North West Irish -- related to the O'Neill tribe that had ruled much of Ulster for a thousand years.

You'll also want to connect in with any Rooney family genealogists you can locate. They may have extracted many records pertaining to the surname from difficult to get archives and libraries. Especially these days (Dan Rooney - current US ambassador to Ireland) -- Rooney is a popular family, especially here in Pittsburgh. Probably lots of people researching Rooney right now!

Good luck,

Linda Merle

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martha El-Maguid" <>
To:
Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2009 11:51:10 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: [S-I] Thomas Rooney, County Louth, Ireland, Parish of Carlingford & Family

Eileen:
Thank you. I can't remember when but it was around 1860 or shortly after that Bridget & John married.
Thomas Sturges was born in 1873.
I was hoping to find out if Thomas and Rose Rooney had any more children other than Bridget.
Also when did they arrive in the USA?
As Bridget was born abt 1837 in Ireland.
Are there any resources available?
Also are there any Irish boards in Louth that I could use?
Thank you.
Martha


--- On Thu, 9/17/09, Eileen Coyle <> wrote:


From: Eileen Coyle <>
Subject: Re: [S-I] Thomas Rooney, County Louth, Ireland, Parish of Carlingford & Family
To:
Date: Thursday, September 17, 2009, 8:02 PM


Martha,

I'm afraid this won't be much help. The only record I found, on Ancestry,
which showed Thomas Rooney, was the 1850 census in Varick, Seneca, NY.
(Varick was the P.O. address for Romulus)

It shows Thomas Rooney b. 1810 in Ireland and his wife Rosa b. 1811 in
Ireland. There were no children listed.

The 1870 census for Romulus, NY has a John Sturges b. 1835 in England and
his wife Bridget b. 1837 in Ireland.
Children:
Mary b. 1864
Helen b. 1867
Elizabeth b. 1870
There was no Thomas listed.

If there is anything else I can look up for you on Ancestry, let me know.

Eileen

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martha El-Maguid" <>
To: <>
Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2009 8:05 PM
Subject: [S-I] Thomas Rooney, County Louth, Ireland,Parish of Carlingford &
Family



Hello:
I am hoping some kind soul from this list can help me find Thomas & Rose Ro=
oney.
Thomas was b: abt 1810 in County Louth, Parish of Carlingford.
Rose was b: abt 1811.
Thomas died 1857 in Romulus, Seneca, NY.
Rose died 1871 in Romulus, Seneca, NY.
Their daughter Bridget is my GrandGrAunt. Bridget Sturges b: 1837 Ireland d=
: 9 Oct 1909 in Romulus, NY, this six months after her husbands death.
I am hoping to find out if they might of had more children, besides, Bridge=
t.
And any and all family information on them.
John & Bridget's children :
Elizabeth Sturges d: 1919 in Romulus.
Ella d: 1949 in Romulus.
Mary A Bannan d: 1925.
Thomas d: 1946. All in Romulus.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Martha






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