Saturday, July 11, 2015

Irish Catholic Records: ODonnell and Gallagher in Donegal

If you have not heard, you can now access digital images of Catholic records on the website of the National Library of Ireland.

A lot of these images are not (currently) indexed.  Some parish pages have links to potential indexes.  You need to know where in Ireland you want to search.  The map is great.

For my maternal grandmother's Irish lines, I only know the origins of her paternal grandfather, Patrick Francis ODonnell:  County Donegal.

I clicked on Donegal and the parishes appeared.  I had to make a further selection.


I chose Ardara based on a poem written by a cousin.  In the poem, Father Charles Leo ODonnell (1884-1934) wrote that his father (Cornelius ODonnell, a brother of Patrick Francis) was from Ardara and his mother (Mary Gallagher) was from Killybegs.  I hoped that Margaret Gallagher, the mother of Cornelius and Patrick ODonnell, was from the same area.

Before you jump into a batch of records without an index, you should map out what it is you are looking for.


Over the years and through many research efforts, this is the little family cluster so far discovered.

Parents:  Peter ODonnell and Margaret Gallagher.  Born suppose about 1820.  (No direct records of them.)

Five Children born in Ireland from around 1840 through 1860:
*Cornelius "Neal" ODonnell, married Mary Gallagher; lived in Indiana.
*Kathryn ODonnell, married Charles Mason and Mr Kennedy; lived in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and California.
*Patrick Francis ODonnell, married Delia Joyce; lived in Bayonne, New Jersey.
*Rose ODonnell, married James Kenny; lived in Bayonne.
*Charles Mhici ODonnell; was living in Altnagapple, Ardara, County Donegal in 1923.

All of the children, except Charles, were probably in the United States by 1880.  I do not know if Peter and Margaret left Ireland.

The records for review for Ardara were:  Marriages 1867-1875 and Baptisms 1869-1880.  These were not years conducive to my little group, but I looked through all the images anyway.  Nothing jumped out at me.  There were lots of entries for ODonnells and Gallaghers, but little information beyond names of the parties and sponsors.

Neighboring Killybegs was my next choice.  These records were for Baptisms 1850-1881.  I was more excited for this collection because these years would contain the five children of Peter and Margaret.  Yet I found no children baptized with parents named Peter ODonnell and Margaret Gallagher.  Again, plenty of people with these surnames.

I found two baptism entries for the year 1855, listing Peter ODonnell as a sponsor.  Margaret ODonnell was also a sponsor for one; Margaret Byam for the other.  "Peter" is not a common name in this collection.



March 23, 1855:  James, son of Patrick Mc[?] and May [?Boyle?];
sponsors Peter ODonnell and Margaret ODonnell.

September 9, 1855:  Mary, son of Denis ODonnell and Mary Byam[?];
sponsors Peter ODonnell and Marg Byam.


From this information, we don't know if we have the correct Peter ODonnell and Margaret Gallagher.  These records may place the couple in the area.  Perhaps their marriage record and their children's baptismal records are in a neighboring parish, if those years are available.

Of note is that these records from Donegal did not contain any entries for some of the other Irish surnames in my lines:  Preston, Joyce, Sheehey, reflecting Ireland's areas of surname concentrations.

Friday, July 10, 2015

First Close Relative for Haas and Zolder lines

A close match appeared at Family Tree DNA among my maternal uncle's matches.  This is the first close match from his father's side of the family.  The common ancestors are Samuel Haas (1867-1945) and Mary Zolder (1870-1948).

Use of a full name is encouraged at Family Tree DNA.
Unlike 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA testers do not have to "consent to share genomes" to view the matching DNA segments,
while AncestryDNA does not show shared segments.

The only information about this match is his name, email address, and the amount and location of identical DNA.  This was enough to figure out how he is related to my uncle:  they are first cousins, once removed.  This cousin is the generation after my uncle, though my uncle is younger than this cousin.
Family Finder Chromosome Browser

Here is a graph that Family Tree DNA can create for a physical representation of the identical segments shared by relatives, called a Chromosome Browser.  (23andMe also creates such graphs.  AncestryDNA does not.)

The orange lines are the segments shared by my uncle and his first cousin on his mother's side of the family- ODonnell and Preston.  The blue lines are the segments my uncle shares with the first cousin, once removed, from his father's side- Haas and Zolder.

Note that in some areas, such as chromosome 11, that both cousins appear in the same areas.  This is because every person has two pairs of chromosomes numbers 1 through 22.  One came from the mother; the other from the father.  Current DNA analysis does distinguish which side the segment is on.

For distant DNA cousins, usually only one or two segments are shared.  Other people will often share the same spot on a chromosome.  If they do not match each other, this means that one is from the mother's side and the other from the father's side.  (Unless the segments are too small to report, or there is an error in reading the DNA in that spot.)

Samuel Haas and Zolder were from what is now Slovakia.  They spoke German.  There do not seem to be many of their relations in the DNA matches of my uncle.  Family Tree DNA provides and "in common with" tool.  Out of the 400+ matches to my uncle, only three also match his new close paternal cousin.  In comparison, seventy matches are shared by my uncle and his maternal first cousin on their common Irish lines.  Certain populations are more numerous than others in the DNA databases.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Cousins in Common

The prior article concerned DNA cousins in common.  Finding DNA cousins who match you and some of your other DNA cousins is not uncommon.  You must be careful in drawing inferences in these situations.

Finding cousins in common is a tool at FamilyTreeDNA and GedMatch.  You can manually compare cousins at 23andMe to ascertain if someone matches your cousin- as long as everyone is sharing genomes.  The glitch arises when two of your cousins match each other, but not on the same segments of DNA where you match each of them.

The query:  If three people share different segments of DNA with one another, are they related through a common ancestral line?

Answer:  Maybe, maybe not.

Unless the match is very close, I don't pursue cousins in common.  Early on in my genetic genealogy pursuits, I was overwhelmed with my mother's DNA matches.  They matched her and her other DNA cousins, though not on the same segments.  To this day, I have no direction in this undocumented branch of her family tree.  These cousins either live in or have recently immigrated from Eastern Europe.

Two years ago, my maternal third cousin appeared among the matches at 23andMe.  We share a pair of great great grandparents, John Preston (1857-1928) and Bridget Sheehey (1857-1916).  John was born in Dutchess County, New York to Irish parents.  Bridget was born in Ireland.  (I have no idea where in Ireland they lived.)

Here is the graph of his shared DNA with my mother- three segments:




With this new close cousin's DNA, I compared him to my mother's distant DNA cousins to round up some people that we could place in the Preston/Sheehey branch.


Comparison of my mother's distant DNA cousins from Eastern Europe revealed that this Irish Preston/Sheehey cousin matched a lot of them on multiple segments.  Lots of cousins in common, but from different branches of their respective trees.  To date, no DNA cousin from Eastern Europe matches my mother and this Irish Preston/Sheehey cousin on the same segments.


The point is to be cautious when looking at cousins in common who do not share the same DNA segments.