Posting Member: Jenn
Topic: Margaret Moynaugh
Family Name Associations: Moynaugh, McKenna
Location: Barrie, Ontario
Mood: I’m good to go 🙂 I ♥ peanut butter cookies!
Music:
A little home grown talent today… Love this more than the original, and adore this talented group, they’re called Walk off the Earth! My kids highly recommend them.
Where to start… Okay! Hello everyone 🙂 Hope your week is going by quickly so we can all get to the weekend and relax a little! Personally I think this week calls for a pint of Harp at some quiet pub somewhere.
Blogger has changed their interface, so my pictures aren’t working right. My deepest apologies for everything that turns up sideways and or upside down, Jake’s going to fix it all up when he has a moment.
I’ve been working with cousin Joan and Jake a lot over this last few weeks trying to answer some questions about who Thomas McKenna and Margaret Moynaugh were, and who their children and descendants are. I know cousin Patrick had a few ideas as to who the siblings were, but the closest I’ve ever come to proving siblings is with Michael Joseph. I contacted a possible cousin named Patsy this past month and through the research I’d compiled and her insight, I’m a lot further with having tracked down Michael’s line, but not really any further with proving the relationship between our Thomas and Michael. The lone solid connection is Michael’s death certificate naming his parents as Margaret and Thomas McKenna, which admittedly is more than we find for some lines. However without confirming Michael’s mother, Margaret McKenna as Margaret Moynaugh, I don’t feel like we’ve really done our job.
Michael Joseph was born in 1841 and immigrated from Ireland in 1849. He married Mary Hollaran in 1866. He lived in the Washington DC area until about 1883 when he moved to Chicago. They had 10 children, who we’ve tracked and attempted to follow in hopes of finding more information. All of this points to him being Thomas’s younger brother. Actually, my biggest problem is that I can’t disprove they’re siblings at any point, I tried to do that a whole lot. The McKennas traveled and relocated all over the place… I’ve got to keep an open mind to everything, discount nothing, and always, always keep digging! I think my personal issue is the sheer concept of what these people accomplished in their lifetimes. The moving, the populating, the relocating… I simply can’t imagine what it took to have this sort of life in that time period.
According to possible cousin Patsy, Ephriam McKenna was a witness for Michael’s marriage. Again bringing in the suggested connection to more McKenna siblings… Ephriam was a Civil War soldier. He married in 1865 to a woman named Johanna Corbett. In the 1880 Census, Ephriam is 37, making his birth year approximately 1843 and he was born in Ireland so he could have also immigrated in 1849, assuming the family came together. Ephriam is living next to James Corbett in this census, possibly his Father-In-Law who had suffered an arm amputation, perhaps also a Civil War Veteran. We haven’t even touched the cusp of researching this line…
But nothing so far has disproved the possibility that all of these people are related… Beyond that Ephriam, Felix, and maybe Andrew which aren’t traditional names for our families so far, if at all. The change in naming trends suggests there had to be some sort of mass cultural change in Ireland surrounding the time of these births and naming, but there was with the famine and the mass of people emigrating trying to find a way to live, and I think that’s reflected here. And because these children all would have been the youngest, of what could have been a family of 20 children, it explains why the names might not have been used in the older children’s familial traditions, as they were much more inclined to stick with the Irish naming rule.
Other possible siblings… Sarah who possibly married our James O’Neill and lived in New York, John, Edward T (Probably Thomas which would coincide with our own family lines) and of course Bridget. These are some of the McKenna names in North America in the early to mid 1800s. They’re very common names.
Ultimately, I’d hoped we’d find graves to prove the connection. Records haven’t been panning out. So we’d focused on looking in Chicago, as the last census we have Thomas and Margaret on was in 1870, living with Thomas Jr and his wife Bridget O’Neill. Anyone who deals with Chicago Cemeteries knows what I mean, when I say this isn’t an easy job.
Last night, on a vague Ancestry.com search, I finally got a hit. It was not what I was expecting to find.
That is a death record from Montreal, Quebec. It’s from Notre Dame, in 1876… Death number 1953. The 11 June, 1876 Margaret Moynaugh, wife of Thomas McKenna died at the Hotel of God. Upon googling the title, Hotel Dieu we found out that it was a teaching Hospital in Quebec. Margaret died just two months after her son did. I’ve made no progress in trying to track down Thomas Sr. He does not appear in 1901 with the family of Bridget O’Neill McKenna. Did he return to the US, perhaps to live with one of his other sons? Or is it simply another matter of Quebec and the Cemetery of Doom?
There is no record of Margaret Moynaugh’s grave in Notre Dame des Neiges that I’ve been able to locate so far, but they’ve updated their search function and its bringing up results I’ve never seen before. And that’s saying something given the time I’ve poured over those records… I hate to say it, but I wish they hadn’t fixed what wasn’t broken. That cemetery is bad enough without anything adding to the confusion.
Where does this leave us?
There is still no proof one way or the other. Thomas McKenna could be buried in Canada or the US. Locating him is going to be one of our top priorities… If we can manage it.
Oy! And I forgot to post this earlier, the day just got away from me! So I’ll update you all now before bed, and these 5 e-mails that I’m in the middle of sending out will have to wait until I’ve had a few hours sleep 🙂 More to come when I can manage it folks.
