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Monday, February 9, 2009

Richard Toner and Mary Cullen Toner Baptisms?

A few weeks I joined a group called Irish Relatives on the Groupbox.com website. It's a group where people help you find information on your ancestors in Ireland, based on information they have as well as by doing voluntary research in person that you can't get to from your respective continent. I posted that I was looking for the Richard Toner and his mother Judith in Maynooth, County Kildare, based on the information I'd gotten out of Judith's obituary in the Brooklyn Eagle.

This is the branch of the family that I've been able to trace back the farthest. However - and this is a big however - it's also the branch that appears to break around 1880. In other words, we're pretty sure that this Richard Toner is our Julia's father and Judith her grandmother, but we're not positive, because we haven't been able to find any evidence of the family in the later 1870s and 1880s - in other words, no proof that our Julia was ever actually born. Everything else just fits so well, though, so I'm going to keep going, and if it turns out it's not our Toner family, well, I'd hope to be able to find the actual descendants of this Toner family and let them know all this information about their ancestors. For the moment, though, I'm reasonably sure that our Julia would have been born to this family in the 1870s.

Anyway, I got a response back from a man who does research at the National Library in Ireland. He had looked up the parish registers for St. Mary's Catholic Church in Maynooth, and found these, and translated them from the Latin:

(Baptisms)
24 Sept 1818 Mary, (of) Patrick Cullen and Mary Carr godparents John Carney and Judith Scully.

3 Nov 1821 Richard (of) William Toner and Margareth Walsh godparents Charles Kearns and Mary Cushion.

(Marriage)
15 Jan 1850 Richard Toner to Mary Cullen witnesses Edward Hackett and Mary Boland


Those are pretty damn exciting! My only two little problems: 1) I'm a records kind of gal - comes with the work at the Archives, I'd imagine - so I tend not to trust anything unless I'm seeing it with my own eyes and filing copies with my own collection of family records. But this is good to go on until I can get myself to Dublin ;-) and 2) Richard's mother's name was supposed to be Judith, not Margareth. It was Judith Toner who brought us back to Maynooth, so why isn't Judith Toner in Maynooth? I looked around, and there's no connection, etymological or otherwise, between the names Judith and Margaret(h). It's not like one was Latin for the other (like Jacobus and James) or that one was a nickname for the other (like Peggy and Margaret). The very helpful gentleman who found these records for me said he would double check the records the next time he was at the Library to make sure he hadn't transposed the names Judith Scully (Mary Cullen Toner's godmother) and Margareth Walsh (Richard Toner's supposed mother).

Either way, it's definitely some exciting information giving us some new things to look at!

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