Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The Roches

Posting about Johanna Roche Madigan and Loretta Madigan Rickett recently reminded me of something that has always struck me as odd, but that I've never looked into - not that I would even have the slightest idea of how to go about "looking into" it. We're told that Matthew Madigan's second wife was named Johanna Roche. We're also told that his youngest daughter from his first marriage, Margaret, married a man named [?] Roche.

Thoughts:

1) Pure coincidence. How uncommon a name could Roche be?

2) Someone got their information mixed up, and only one of them was actually a Roche. A name may have been mistranscribed or misremembered because it was familiar.

3) Margaret Madigan met and married a relative of her step-mother's.

I don't know how, if at all, we could go about verifying any of these hypotheses, but all of them are possible, and some more intriguing than others.

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