Baker-Dorng Genealogy Hedgecoe-McKenna Update

Broken notes.

Posting Member: Jenn
Topic: Everything!  And broken notes.
Family Name Associations: O’Neill, Clement, McKenna…  O’Neill…  McKenna. These people are all related somehow, but I couldn’t tell you which end us up at this point.  Oh and Bandes.  An all round update on a few points.
Location: Barrie in the sunshine!
Mood: Getting better, almost done these antibiotics for my crazy cough 🙂  Then maybe I’ll get some energy back!  Although I did have crazy dreams last night.  Not cool.

Music:

Ooo… Live extended version. Who doesn’t love youtube?! 😀

Okay, I’m updating.  I think I’ve posted more now than I did before Jake took on the updates…  But I’m taking mercy on him because he’s been so busy.  He got the Chicago/DC McKenna branch from the Bandes family back to Monaghan, Ireland last night and he’s exhausted (That’s the Dorng – Agner Tree).  Family naming being true to itself, there are more Peter McKenna’s in the area than we can sort out, so it’s taking time.  And how those McKennas relate to Thomas and his family (McKenna Tree) is still anyone’s guess, but that trend of being from Chicago and going to DC obviously ran in the family.

So, where are we?  Well.  Notes are broken.  I don’t know why, we’ve got a message in to TNG that hopefully someone can help with, but I’m getting cranky about it.  I sure don’t want to have to re-enter every note in every tree, but the last upgrade didn’t go smoothly and really, re-entering notes is better than having notes written in invisible ink.  Patience isn’t a virtue I was blessed with.

We also still have the banner CSS for the names on the SkeletonGen.com site to work on…  But Tech support has been working so hard on the Tillery – Durnell lines he hasn’t had much time to do anything else.

So, firstly, there are updates in every tree we have.  And we’re not done by a long shot.  The Keffer’s alone have about a 50 obits and records just running rampant over here, and of course that involves the Lines and Dicemans.  We added a few names to the Carr family tree, because they were our Annie’s adoptive family…  But everything is still very disorganized and early, and we can’t find Annie on the 1910 census at all, and that’s been our focus.  We’ve been updating things on FindAGrave as well, but it’s slow working.

O’Neill’s in Quebec in the Clement line…  Are progressing.  I’m still trying to find graves, language barrier is making searching hard even if I can read the records once I find them.  A lot of the older parishes have been eaten up by the cities and mapping everything out has been hard.  We have Thomas O’Neill, and his brother Peter at the top of our tree from Carlow, Ireland but we haven’t managed to make any farther connections and we’re struggling with placing Arthur O’Neill and his Rachel Taggartt.  Our timeline looks like this so far:

Thomas O’Neill born in 1796 Carlow

Catherine Mulholland born in 1805 Londonderry

Peter born in 1808 Carlow

Arthur born in 1825 Ireland

Catherine 1829 to New York on the Fabius

Rachel Taggartt born in 1833 Ireland

Then Catherine Mulholland marries our Thomas O’Neill, and Rachel Taggartt marries Arthur O’Neill some time there after!  Assuming William is Catherine and Thomas’s first son, he was born in 1835 but we haven’t found any marriage records from 1829-1835, nor further travel documents, so we’re going to have to center our efforts there.

Arthur and Rachel’s own Kate was born in 1857, so that gives us a vague travel window from her birth in 1833-1857 but without records we really are sort of stuck trying to place Arthur.  We’ve wondered if Thomas might have had a first marriage, placing Arthur as his son… But a brother with a 30 year age gap isn’t working in my mind.  I think it’s time to get out the giant post-it board and start trying to sketch this tree!

From the McKenna tree we’ve put a phone call into Mount Olivet in Denver, Colorado trying to place Thomas Edward McKenna within their cemetery but have had little luck so far.  I’ve left a message for another woman who should be able to help me, so hopefully we’ll hear back from her.

From the O’Neills in that same tree, we’ve got a message in for further information on James E O’Neill’s plot in Mount Olivet in Chicago, Illinois.

We’ve also had no further progress with Margaret McKenna in Calvary Cemetery in Chicago.  We really need someone to just go into their offices and get copies of their records for who’s in the plot.  We’ve got an entire branch of Michael McKenna’s descendants waiting to be added to the tree, I’ll be working on that on and off.

We also heard from wonderful Cousin Joan, who is always an excellent extra brain to have focused on the O’Neills in Chicago!  She shared an amazing transcript of a letter between Sister Cornelia (Alice O’Neill) and her half sister Sara Benidicta.  In this letter, there’s written confirmation of a Rev. Edward O’Neill, who would be John and Bridget O’Neills sibling, who’s apparently buried in the old Mott Street Cathedral in New York.  So, road trip!  As we already had to go out there to try and get a picture of Sister Cornelia’s grave.  As soon as I’m done my filing…   And done the list of Cemeteries that are piling up even as I type this…  And and and.  But, a huge thanks to cousin Joan for sharing this exciting lead!

We also shared with her our on going struggle with exactly placing the name of the birth place of John O’Neill off the death certificate of Mrs. Mary Ann Victoria O’Neill Cleary.  Mollie, as she was called, has what looks like ‘Gara Mahulleary’ recorded as her Father’s place of birth.  Given the size of County Tyrone, and the Gaelic language, we’re still drawing an inconclusive blank as to the exact place this is referring to.  And if they were spelling the name phonetically, we are in even more trouble!  There’s an excel download from this site: http://cotyroneireland.com/ put together by Bruce E. Andrews, and as amazing as the listing is, it just brings up how complicated finding our O’Neills is proving to be.  Ultimately, finding records or ancestors will be the proof of which are is correct, but we were hoping for more than just a needle in a haystack here.  Ultimately, though, we still believe we’re looking for a place in either Urney or Longfield East of County Tyrone.

What else?

Morris branch is as crazy as ever, we’re putting together census records for them but we’re stuck in ‘John, Richard, John, John, John’ in early Kentucky at the moment.  They are Welsh though, and ultimately our focus will be on the Welsh Morris line and how it got here (Here being North America).  And I have to admit, I’m not even touching the Todds right now.  They scare me.  I think people could spend their entire lives doing that one family’s tree.  Really.  They scare me.  There might be just too much history there.

I hope this all hasn’t just sounded like mindless babble, I have to admit I’m a extra sleepy today myself!  We’ll write more as we have it, and try to keep everyone in the loop.  Any questions can be sent to Jake and myself through the usual channels 🙂  Wishing you all sunshine and clover on this fine spring day!

Jenn
Always one for making things pretty, Jenn is our resident artist. Métis, British Home Child Descendant, family historian and genealogist, she is always looking into some new branch of research and encourages historical preservation and education.

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