Genealogy Expert & Author of Who Do You Think You Are?
The Essential Guide to Tracing Your Family History
This post first appeared in The Huffington Post in May 2011 and is reproduced here with permission from Megan whose EXCLUSIVE interview with Alannah Ryane will be featured in an upcoming NEWSLETTER. I have always been in awe of Megan's genealogy tenacity and here is an example. As we know now The President's May 2011 visit to Moneygall was celebrated as "the greatest day this village has ever had..."
President Obama Embraces Megan
Courtesy of Megan Smolenyak
With the President's Irish sojourn on the horizon, I thought that this
might be a good time to share the sleuthing that led to Moneygall in the
first place. Ultimately, it was a pair of tombstones in Ohio that
steered me there, but finding them was only one of many steps in the
quest.
How It Began
Just before St. Patrick's Day in 2007, a press release went out
announcing that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was part Irish.
In fact, on his mother's side, his Irish third great-grandfather,
Fulmoth Kearney, is his most recent connection with any old country
ancestry. When Fulmoth arrived in New York in 1850, all of Obama's
other maternal ancestors were already here.
I was quoted in the press release, and as I have an unusual name,
it's not difficult to locate me -- and that's exactly what a number of
Irish journalists did. The general gist of all the inquiries I received?
So he's part Irish, but where in Ireland did his ancestors come from? I
both welcomed and dreaded the question. Why? I like a challenge, but
those with Irish heritage know how difficult it can be to identify a
place of origin in Ireland. Frankly, I wasn't sure I would succeed, but
it was worth a try.
Finding Fulmoth
Obama's maternal roots are what I regard as typically presidential in
the sense that they extend back deeply -- in most branches for centuries
-- in America. Because of this, the preliminary research proved to be
straightforward. I relied heavily on census records to methodically
march back generation by generation on his mother's side of the family
tree.
As I did so, I scanned for any evidence of foreign births, and made
my first such find in the 1870 census for one of his
great-great-grandmothers, Mary Ann Kearney. Her father was from Ireland.
He was listed as Falmoth or Fulmoth (a little hard to make out) and 38
years old. His name would turn out to be the proverbial mixed blessing.
As my research progressed, I would find him as Fulmoth, Fulmouth,
Falmouth, Fulmuth, Falmuth and so forth -- a bit of a nuisance though
not unexpected. Kearney offered its own complications with spellings
such as Kerney and Carney. But ultimately, it was worth the hassle
because his name was distinctive and made him comparatively easy to
pluck out. On balance, I was grateful to be dealing with a Fulmoth
Kearney, rather than a John Murphy.
The Fulmoth Trail
With his unusual name, it wasn't difficult to locate his arrival record
in the U.S.. Experimenting with various versions of Fulmoth and Kearney,
I found him as Falmouth Carney. He had arrived on the Marmion in New York on March 20, 1850.
While most arrival records from this timeframe furnish just the
basics, this one gave Fulmoth's destination as Ohio, so it made sense
when he showed up several months later in the 1850 census residing in
Fayette County, Ohio. I noticed others in the same household named
Carney, Cleary and Canada. No relationships were provided, but the
Clearys would
resurface later in my research.
By 1860, he had a family of his own and appeared in Deerfield, Ross
County, Ohio with his wife Charlotte and several children. A little
digging at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City popped up his
1852 marriage to Charlotte Holloway. Around 1866, Fulmoth moved from
Ohio to Tipton County, Indiana. This is where I had first spotted him in
the 1870 census when I searched earlier for his daughter, Mary Ann. By
the time of the 1880 census, he had passed away, so the documents I had
gathered to this point briefly outlined Fulmoth's life in America -- but
now I needed to cross the pond. Fortunately, these same documents
provided me vital clues for doing just that.
Connecting the Dots
One of the most effective techniques for research is what I refer to as
"surround and conquer" -- also known as collateral research. When you
can't find what you're looking for by focusing on the paper trail of a
particular individual, it's a good idea to broaden your search to
include the trail of others associated with him or her, especially
relatives.
In Fulmoth's case, I accidentally did this without even trying simply
by finding his arrival record. I was fortunate that such an early
record showed the intended destination of the travelers, and more
fortunate still that Fulmoth -- and only two others, William and
Margaret Cleary -- were headed to Ohio. Typical for the time, most of
their fellow passengers were heading for New York, but this troika stood
out. Why were these famine-era immigrants going to Ohio? I didn't know,
but I was glad of it -- and even happier when I realized that William
and Margaret were also in the same household with Fulmoth in the 1850
census. Clearly, there was a connection.
I decided to focus of William and Margaret Cleary and easily found
them in the 1860 census living with an older couple named Joseph and
"Pharb Kearny" (Phebe Kearney). Hmmm... maybe Margaret Cleary was
Fulmoth's married sister and Joseph and Phebe were his parents. That
would certainly explain why he had named his first daughter Phebe. It
would also be a serious bonus as I hadn't expected to find his parents
in America.
Fulmoth's Family
Using this notion as my hypothesis, I looked for records pertaining to
all the people in this emerging family tree and started piecing together
a likely family for Fulmoth -- parents Joseph and Phebe, sisters
Margaret and Mary/Mary Ann, and a brother named William.
Particularly helpful was a website by a researcher named Roger
Kearney. This site was tantalizing in that it included mentions of what
appeared to be pockets of this same family -- but Fulmoth was nowhere to
be seen. Still, I badly wanted to believe my blossoming theory because
Roger's site included a tombstone transcription for Fulmoth's possible
father that gave his birth place in Ireland. In the hope that there
might be more clues, I commissioned an Ohio-based genealogist to go to
the cemetery and photograph all the graves. Roger had transcribed most
of them, but I needed to see photos of the actual tombstones myself.
In the meantime, I continued to mine his site for clues and that's
when I spotted another interesting transcription -- the will of a
Francis Kearney, dated January 28, 1848. In it, he left land owned in
Ross County, Ohio to his brother, Joseph, "if he comes to this country."
Could that have been the spark for the departure of Fulmoth's family
from Ireland? I had assumed it was the famine, but could it have been
that Francis was Fulmoth's uncle and that his promise of land had lured
the family to America?
Coming to America
I decided to see if immigration records could support a will-triggered
migration and quickly found the evidence I was seeking. Fulmoth's
probable father, Joseph, had arrived in New York on April 25, 1849 on a
ship called Caroline Read. As I had discovered earlier,
Fulmoth, his sister and brother-in-law had followed in March of 1850.
His likely mother, Phebe, arrived in New York on August 28, 1851 on a
ship called Clarissa Courier with her children Mary and William.
Yes, this all meshed nicely. Francis Kearney had died only a week
after making his will in 1848. Allowing time for his brother back in
Ireland to get the word and make appropriate arrangements, the family had left for Ohio in annual waves in 1849, 1850 and 1851 with Fulmoth riding the middle one.
Better yet, when the tombstone photos arrived from Ohio, it was
possible to piece still more of the puzzle together. Parents Joseph and
Phebe had died in 1861 and 1876 respectively. I already had an idea of
what had become of Margaret, but the stones revealed that brother
William had died in 1855, just a few years after arriving in America,
and sister Mary Ann in 1866.
To Ireland!
Thanks to the cemetery photos, I finally had the information I had hoped
to find -- the place of origin in Ireland. The tombstones for Fulmoth's
father Joseph and brother William both indicated that they were born in
Moneygall in Kings County (now County Offaly).
Although I was confident about Moneygall, the logical last step was to
locate the family in records in Ireland. Countless articles have covered
this home stretch of the search. A number of churches were approached
with a list of names and dates for likely baptisms and marriages in the
Kearney family, and it was Canon Stephen Neill who found the
corresponding entries in the records of the Templeharry Rectory of the
Church of Ireland. Now I had substantiation from both sides of the ocean
that the family hailed from Moneygall.
Note: Much of the preceding is excerpted from Who Do You Think You Are?: The Essential Guide to Tracing Your Family History.
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