Finding Living Irish Relatives: Serendipity and Luck

By David Collins of Clinton, Massachusetts

This article first appeared in the newsletter of Tiara (The Irish Ancestral Research Association)

Openers

Before going to Ireland in March 1998, I wrote to a number of parishes to inquire about the availability of local records. The reference I used for parish and priest names was Ryan's Irish Sources - 1988.

One of the addresses was for Fr. John Murphy in Cappoquin, Co. Waterford. I wrote to Fr. Murphy and received the following response:

"Dear David,

Your letter of November 17th. to hand:

Fr. John Murphy is unlikely to reply to it: he died about thirteen years ago.

(signed ) Rev. Robert Arthure.

The rest of the letter wasn't as witty, but it was helpful. Fr. Arthure offered his assistance if I made it to Cappoquin, but when I got there, he was away. I told the story of the letter to locals; they laughed as hard as I had and told me that Fr. Arthure is one of the great wits in the area. I'm still laughing.

It was general knowledge in my family that my father's ancestors were from Cork and that my mother's ancestors were from Waterford. But that was all we knew.

When I began researching, I came across one of the problems that most of us deal with - the lack of reference to specific birthplaces.

I found only one such reference in researching the Quirks. It occurred in the Naturalization Record of my GG uncle, Thomas, who listed his birthplace as Mocollop, Co. Waterford. That one bit of information turned out to be a genealogical gold mine, and it's the only excuse I needed for a return trip to Ireland.

When I got to Waterford, I spent two days at the Waterford Heritage Center looking through Lismore Parish Birth and Marriage Records. The staff was excellent (I'm not sure what they would have done if more than two researchers had shown up at the same time - there was just enough room for the two desks in the reading room). Luckily, I was the only one there.

I found four 'new' GG aunts, one of whom had emigrated to Boston c 1865 and settled in Belmont.

Then I began looking for the townland of Mocollop. It isn't found on any maps, so I began with local post offices. The first one I stopped at had never heard of Mocollop, but they suggested heading west toward Ballyduff. That was good advice - the Ballyduff Postmistress was able to direct me. She told me that even though there was no such place as Mocollop, she knew of some Quirks about four miles from town.

Most of Waterford is still largely rural (long may it be so), and I drove for about 4 or 5 miles without seeing anything that looked like a house. I started to turn back when I spotted a farmhouse, so I took a chance and knocked at the door.

A man answered. When I introduced myself and told him my reason for being there, he invited me in for tea. His name is Jim Quirke which, besides being my GGgfather's name, was also the name of one of my mother's brothers and their father.

Jim is a retired farmer, and he and his wife, Kitty, live alone. Their farm adjoins his brother's, and his nephews run both. Kitty had recently had a mild stroke and was sitting in a wheel-chair in the living room. She hadn't completely recovered her speech, but she was alert, and Jim was able to communicate with her.

We visited for about two hours and talked about the farm and the Quirk(e) family. Like most of the Irish, he knew very little family history. Later, I heard or read the following: "You Americans are trying to dig up the past, and we're trying to bury it." But, also, like most of the Irish, he was eager to help.

Jim gave me the name of a likely resource, the Ballyduff parish priest, Fr. Kevin Mulcahy. Although Fr. Mulcahy wasn't able to offer much help, he gave me the name and address of a local historian, Patrick (Paddy) John Feeney.

By that time, I was due to fly home. When I got back to the States, I wrote to Paddy, and about 5-6 weeks later, he wrote back, apologizing for taking so long, but he had just buried his mother. He sent some local historical information (Guy's Postal Directory and Griffith's listings) and the names of a Quirke family in Cappoquin - Julia, Patrick, and Michael who are siblings.

I wrote to Julia without very high hopes because of the name spelling. I was surprised to get an answer within two weeks. Unlike those Irish who are 'trying to bury the past', she was interested in doing a reverse search - looking for information about her father who had emigrated ca 1890.

She and her brothers are in their sixties and never married. They have no relatives other than the cousins of their own generation. And, I suppose, over the years, they had come to accept the fact that they were the end of their line. But along comes an American with Quirk connections.

She was, to say the least, eager to find out anything possible about her father who had 'gone out' in the 1890s.

She knew very little about her family's history, including that of her father, Patrick, except that he and at least one of his brothers (Thomas, for sure, and possibly John) had emigrated to America in the 1890's. She didn't know where they had gone and knew virtually nothing about their lives in America. However, she did know that he had married, had had a daughter, Mary Josephine (Jo), had lost his wife, Julia, and that he and Mary Jo had returned to Ireland ca 1930.

Patrick remarried in 1932, and he and his second wife were the parents of Julia and her brothers. He died in 1939, and Mary Jo died in 1949. Julia doesn't recall ever hearing any stories about Patrick's and Mary Jo's lives in America, including where they had lived.

She asked for my help finding any trace of her father and uncle. I tried to prepare her for the chance that it would be virtually impossible to find Patrick if he hadn't come to Massachusetts and nearly impossible even if he had; but that didn't phase her in the least.

I wasn't reluctant to do a search, but I wanted Julia to understand that the odds weren't in her favor. What was in her favor was that there was enough information for the start of a search at the Division of Vital Records because Mary Jo's birth and her mother's death had occurred during the 1920s.

The luck was with us. The Birth, Death and Marriages records were there They had been married in 1917 at St. Bridget's Church in Framingham.

I phoned St. Bridget's to ask for a copy of the Church record. The pastor asked for a letter stating the reasons for such an unusual request. The circumstances were, apparently, compelling enough, because I received the Church Record within the week. (Thanks to Msgr. Strahan).

Now that there was proof that Patrick had lived and married in Massachusetts, the next step would be to check naturalization and census records at the Federal Archives. The vital records had provided addresses, and sure enough, Patrick showed up in both sets of records. He had arrived in Boston in 1898 and had been naturalized in 1905.

Patrick's brother, Thomas, was also in the records, and I was able to track down his grandson through his grandmother's 1950 death certificate which had listed her son as informant. He was the father of the man I had contacted. Thomas, had died in 1907 after being married for just four years. He lived to see his first two sons but died before the birth of the third. The first of the sons (the father of the man I eventually contacted) was born in 1904 and died in 1997.

I got in touch with Julia to tell her about her cousins and sent her copies and originals of the found records, as well as copies of the family tree which I also forwarded to her new-found cousin. They have been in touch with each other a number of times since then.

During my stay in Mocollop (before I had been put in touch with Julia), I had visited the old cemetery in Mocollop and had taken photos of a number of stones one of which was a large white marker. It was inscribed to Patrick Quirke, Mary Jo, his daughter, and his brother, Michael - Julia's family.

I sent a copy of the picture to Julia's cousin, and Julia has asked his permission to include his grandfather's name on the stone - he is buried at New Calvary, Boston - and she plans to hire a stone worker to change the spelling of the family name on the marker from Quirke to Quirk.

The past year has been a blessing for Julia and her brothers. They have spent a lot of this summer at the old cemetery cleaning some of the markers and making more discoveries.

A couple of months ago she hired a professional genealogist from the Waterford Heritage Center to do some serious digging. Last week she sent me a package of the research results to date. She has found not only her grandfather, Thomas, but his parents.

The most serendipitous part of this story is that her grandfather, Thomas, was the son of my GGgrandparents, John Quirk and Elizabeth Condon, ie, my Ggrandfather, James, and her grandfather, Thomas, were brothers.

Just as incredible and revealing - Julia is finding out as much about her Irish family as her American family - is the fact that Julia has found out that Jim, the Mocollop farmer, is her 3rd cousin, and that his wife is also a Quirk and is a distant cousin to her own husband and, therefore, to Julia.

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Moral: Sometimes skepticism just isn't worth the trouble.

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Obviously, the story isn't over. Julia and I correspond regularly and are looking forward to a family reunion in Mocollop.

>More is sure to follow<

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