Using Google Maps: Where is Spink, Co. Mayo, Ireland?

I've always been a fan of using Google maps for genealogy, but recently found another way they could help my research. My O'Hora family lived in Co. Mayo in the second half of the 1800s, and they were typically recorded as living in either Spink (children's baptismal records, Petty Session court records) or Tawnyshane (Griffith's Valuation, 1901/1911 Census). I assumed that they were two words referring to the same area, or that one was a smaller subdivision of the other.

Tawnyshane is easy to find on Google maps, very near Crumlin and the Crimlin National School that the O'Horas attended.

Spink is not.

I e-mailed the always-helpful Mayo County Library in Castlebar, and they sent me an image of an 1814 map that identified Spink as an elevated place near the modern town of Shanvalley. That's about 6 miles away from Tawnyshane, which seemed far, to be referring to the same place. Could the O'Horas have lived in one place and farmed in another? Could they have moved back and forth over the years? Or was I conflating two O'Hora families?

I decided to ask a local about Spink, and sent a message to my cousin Mary, who grew up in nearby Tawnykinaffe. She's been a huge help to my Gillan family research, but luckily my O'Horas lived in the same area, so I could draw on her expertise.

I created a Google map of the area, dropping a pin on the area labeled "Spink" on the 1814 map (blue, near the top), and another one on the area of Tawnyshane where the O'Horas had held land, according to Griffith's Valuation (yellow). She identified the yellow marker near Tawnyshane as the Spink she was familiar with, and was able to put me in touch with other locals from the Spink/Tawnyshane area for some additional context and local color.



I've used Google maps, frequenty, to look up places that Google recognizes; I've used it to create maps to plot places that my ancestors would have lived or interacted with, or to figure out where to look for records. But I had never realized how useful it could be to create personalized maps for asking questions of people who know an area better than I do, when we're in different countries and can't sit around the dining room table poring over maps together.

The Kings of Cloonsunna, Mayo, Ireland

My great-great-grandmother was Mary Ellen King, who married John O'Hara, probably in early 1890s Brooklyn.

Her death certificate gives her parents as Patrick King and Bridget Fadden, and her birth date as 3 December 1875. (The 1900 Census records her birth as being in May 1872.)

A John King lived with the O'Hara family in the 1910 Census. He is recorded as a boarder. John's death certificate gives his parents as John King and Bridget Fadden. His death certificate and WWI Draft Registration Cards record his birthday as being 8 November 1881.

A Martin King also lived with O'Hara family in 1910, but I can't find him anywhere else after that. According to the census, he would have been born c. 1885.

When the O'Hara family returned to Ireland in the early 1900s, they lived in Castlebar. Mary's husband was from the area near Castlebar. Her son John married the daughter of other Castlebar-area natives. I had a strong suspicion that she was from the area near Castlebar, but couldn't be sure.

An index search showed up no Patrick King and Bridget Fadden couples, but did return a John King and Bridget Fadden, from Cloonsunna, Co. Mayo. A page-by-page search of the Catholic Parish records for the area (Castlebar Parish) turned up the following children with parents by those names:

Thomas King, 24 Nov 1856
residence Cloonsinn[?] 

Catherine King, 27 May 1859
residence Cloonsumma 

Michael King, 19 Sept 1861
residence Holy Hill 

Patt King, 29 Feb 1864
residence Ballyhean 

Anne King, 5 Feb 1868
residence Cloonsunna 

John King, 14 Nov 1878
residence Cloonsuma

NOT in the parish registers - and I've double checked - is the Bridget King whose birth 12 Dec 1874 birth was registered on 6 Feb 1875 to John King and Bridget Fadden of Cloonshinnagh.

Also NOT in the parish registers - because they stop at 1880 - is the Martin King whose 26 Jan 1882 birth was registered to John King and Bridget Fadden on 14 June 1882.

Civil records don't begin until 1864, can't be browsed, and mothers' maiden names are not typically indexed, which means that I can only find the children I know to look for. Searching for these particular children yields:

Pat King, 29 Feb 1864
residence Holy Hill 

Anne King, 10 Feb 1868
residence Cloonsheennagh 

Bridget King, 12 Dec 1874
residence Cloonshinnagh

Martin King, 26 Jan 1882
residence Cloonsheenagh

NOT in the civil records - at least not showing up when I search - is the John King recorded in the parish registers as being born 14 Nov 1878.

There is no Mary, but the dates for Bridget are close. The John King born 14 Nov 1878 is a good candidate for the John King I'm interested in, although the lack of a civil record makes me wonder if he survived long enough for his birth to be registered. (Though I find no corresponding civil death record, either.) Patt King born in 1864 is far too young to be Mary Ellen's father, if the parents' names on her death certificate are, in fact, correct.

For most of these births and baptisms, the Kings lived in either Clonnsunna or Cloonshinnagh. They are technically two different townlands, but are only about half a mile away as the crow flies, practically right across the road.

Google sure does send you the long way, though! N.B. There appear to be 2 different Cloonshinnaghs in Mayo, about an hour apart. Google apparently chooses at random which to send you to.

Ballyhean is 2.5 Kilometers, or about a mile and a half, from Cloonsunna. I can't find anywhere in Castlebar parish called Holy Hill, but given that the Kings lived in both Holy Hill and Ballyhean at the same time when Patt was born, I assume it was a place name that referred to the same area.

I should note that neither index searches nor paging through these records revealed any other likely candidates for Mary Ellen King, but Bridget shows that the registers are missing at least one birth in the 1870s.


And that's where we stand.

What would you suggest to confirm or deny that Bridget and Mary are the same person, or that Mary was also part of this family?

Good fences make good neighbors: Using Griffith's Valuation

During a recent weekend when FindMyPast offered free Irish records, I spent some time looking through the records of the Irish Petty Sessions Court for Castlebar. I found that my 3x great-grandfather, Patrick O'Hora, spent a lot of time there in 1878, always as the complainant. On four separate occasions, his neighbors James and Thomas Blean let their sheep get into his fields - twice into the turnips, and twice into the oats. I found myself surprisingly aggravated on his behalf. Fix your fences, already, Mr. Blean! The Bleans are listed as residents of a different townland than the O'Horas, though; they are from Crumlin, while we are from Spink.

July 1878, Court of Petty Sessions, Castlebar
O'Hora v. Blean

The O'Horas are alternately listed in Spink and in Tawnyshane, which I believe are two names that applied to the same area. More on that soon.

But in using Griffith's Valuation and maps recently, I got a very good idea of just where the O'Horas were living - or at least, where their oats and turnips were growing. There's only one Patrick O'Hora listed in Tawnyshane; he and two other O'Horas, Michael and Anthony, are all listed in Lot 1, and they each have a house listed, so it would not be unreasonable to suppose that they all live there. I can't actually find the letters indicating houses on the map, so I don't know about the arrangements of the buildings. Then, I noticed, on another page, the enumeration of the townland of Crumlin. A James Blain occupied Lot 5.

To the maps I went, and although they took a lot of figuring out, I eventually located Tawnyshane, and Lot 1, held by the O'Horas. Sure enough, whose land was immediately adjacent to it? James Blain's, right over the border in Crumlin.

Griffith's Valuation map. Crumlin/Tawnyshane
askaboutireland.ie

You can see both lots towards the center of the map, with a bold red line between them, marking the border between the two townlands. Crumlin Lot 5 is long and horizontally oriented, and Tawnyshane Lot 1 is just beneath it, a sort of irregular square. As it turns out, Mr. Blain's lot is significantly larger than the one shared by 3 O'Horas, which makes me even more annoyed about his marauding sheep. Keep them on your own land, if you have so much of it! Don't destroy our meager crop!

Most of my previous attempts at using Griffith's Valuation have consisted of staring blankly at the page and saying, "But how can I tell if that John Smith is MY John Smith?!" I knew there was a lot of potential there, but this is the first time I've systematically cross-referenced multiple sources to actually be able to interpret it, and the first time I've really been able to use it to tell me something. I'm so excited to see what else is there!

Brooklyn Catholic Churches Map

I recently added a new Brooklyn Genealogy Resources page featuring, among other things, a map of Brooklyn Catholic churches. I created it a number of years ago, to assist in my own research, but I've always hoped it could be useful to other people, too. I've featured it in posts in the past, but thought I'd like to have it more prominently featured and more readily accessible. A number of people have told me they've found it helpful when I've linked to it on mailing lists and elsewhere, so here it is, permanently accessible. I am not the most tech-savvy person, so it had literally never occurred to me that I could embed it, other than in a post, until a couple of weeks ago.


View Brooklyn Catholic Churches in a larger map

The map currently includes the Brooklyn Catholic churches founded through 1900, though I hope to one day update it to include younger parishes.

Google has unfortunately rather gutted the functionality of this map since I originally created it. It used to be possible to take a custom map like this one, and then search for an address, like the address where you've found your family in census records. That address would then show up on the custom map, surrounded by the markers for the nearest churches. Now that searching for an address brings up that marker on a new map, you have to use two different tabs, or otherwise make sure that you're looking in the right neighborhood, rather than being able to plot the addresses against each other. It's still useful, I think, and I return to it frequently to work on different family lines, so I hope that my readers with Brooklyn roots will find it helpful, too - along with the other resources highlighted on the Brooklyn Genealogy Resources page.

This map was compiled using information from the Local Catholic Church and Family History & Genealogical Guide by Ann Mensch as well as the page Roman Catholic Churches of Brooklyn, N.Y. by Tim Desmond.

52 Weeks to Better Genealogy - Google Maps - Brooklyn Draft Board Locations

I'd been having some trouble locating my great-grandfather, Joseph Mulcahy, and his brothers in Ancestry.com's WWI Draft Registration Card database, so I figured I should try browsing the records. They're alphabetical, so it should be easy, right? Not so fast. To browse the collection, you have to first choose a Draft Board. These draft boards have incredibly helpful (not!) names like "23," "24," and "25." Names that tell me nothing about them and offer no clues as to which I should be browsing. Luckily, the Italian Genealogical Group at italiangen.org has an archives newsletter that lists the addresses of all the the WWI Draft Boards in New York City. I used the information there to map the locations of the Brooklyn Draft Boards so that I could better approximate which one Papa and the Mulcahy brothers would have registered with. Unfortunately, I was still unable to find them. I know they served. Perhaps they enlisted before they had to register with the draft board? I imagine - though I'm not sure - that do so would have prevented their appearing in these records.

Though it didn't help me find records of the Mulcahy brothers, I'm hopeful that it will be useful for other researchers trying to find military records of Brooklyn families. Please distribute the map - found on Google maps here - to other researchers who might be helped by it!

View WWI Draft Board Locations, Brooklyn in a larger map

This post is part of the 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy Challenge at Geneabloggers by Amy Coffin of We Tree.

52 Weeks to Better Genealogy - Google Maps - Brooklyn Catholic Churches

In trying to find sacramental records - baptisms, marriages - for my ancestors, I ran into a roadblock that must be common for people researching families who were from big cities: too many churches. Way too many churches. From what I've been able to find, upwards of 70 Catholic Churches had been founded in Brooklyn by the end of the 19th century. It's easy to know where to look in the early days; in the 1840s and '50s, there are only a handful of churches to choose from. But then, as the Catholic population expanded hugely in the second half of the century, due in large part to immigration, so too did the number of Catholic churches. Sometimes, these churches are mere blocks from one another; it's not as if each neighborhood had only one church.

In order to facilitate my own search for sacramental records, I realized I needed to know not only where my relatives had lived, but also what churches were in their neighborhoods, and how long those churches had been there. So, using information from sites like this and this, I created a Google map of all of the churches in Brooklyn that had been founded through 1900. I aim to try to add younger parishes, too, but I haven't gotten there yet. I figured 1900 was a good-enough stopping point that the map had become something I could share, and that others researching families in Brooklyn would be able to find it useful as well. The information included is fairly basic; I haven't been able to add details such as the historic ethnicity of a parish, or its mailing or web address, though I know that these would have been helpful. (A shocking number of churches still don't have websites, actually!) I hope that in its current form, though, it's nonetheless useful. Please share the map - available here - with other researchers!

View Brooklyn Catholic Churces in a larger map

This post is part of the 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy Challenge at Geneabloggers by Amy Coffin of We Tree.

52 Weeks to Better Genealogy - Google Maps - Brooklyn Family Homes

I had had these addresses plotted on other Google Maps before, but as I thought about the best way to share them, I realized it would be best to have them on their very own map. Because of the way you can look at multiple Google Maps at once, this works best for comparing them to the places on other maps I've created. I'll be sharing those maps this week, too, in hopes that they'll be as helpful to other researchers as they've been to me, so stay tuned! Without further ado, though, here is the Google Map I've created of my family's homes in Brooklyn, 1880-1930!

View Where We Lived in a larger map

The primary families mapped are:

Madigan

Mulcahy

Mulvaney

Toner

O'Hara

Quinn

Gatto

This post is part of the 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy Challenge at Geneabloggers by Amy Coffin of We Tree.