This post, and and later ones, will refer to information in my online genealogy pages. Those pages are back, but only a few of them so far.
The MeagherCavanaugh(1862) page summarizes information about the James Meagher family. Included on that page is a link to the Meagher YDNA surname project. That project has taken on a fascinating life of it's own. Unfortunately, it's yet to prove anything in my line. My mother's cousin took the test, establishing that our Meaghers are in the I haplogroup. (Most of Irish ancestry are R's, with the I's a distant second.) Because the I haplogroup is relatively rare, the test should prove convincing for a connection (or lack of it), if I ever manage to convince a presumed distant cousin to take the test.
In the meantime, there is the vexing problem of a missing baptismal record for my great-great-grandfather James Meagher (see footnote #11 on his parents' family page). Sometime in 2009 I happened to find an email address for the parish priest at Cappawhite. Later that year I sent an email explaining the situation. For awhile I did not hear anything. Then last April a letter arrived from Cappawhite. The parish priest enclosed a copy of the original record for 1837, carefully trimmed to a thin strip, thus excluding records immediately before and after.
The original record, at the top of the image, can be compared with the extracted information (bottom of image) provided by the Tipperary Heritage Unit, Family History Research Centre in June of 2000. The original record clears up one minor discrepancy. The townland is in fact spelled Clonganiff, with two n's, not Clongariff. The double n spelling agrees with the ca. 1850's standardization of the spelling as Clonganhue. (Another of the earlier variant spellings: Clonganhve.) It's still unknown whether Conor
(Cornelius) became James, or whether the record for James is just missing.
Exactly 150 years ago, the following advertisement appeared in the Boston Pilot, a Catholic newspaper with national circulation.
Actually the image above is a copy of the advertisement as reprinted in The Search for Missing Friends. It would be interesting to check a microfilm copy of the original issue. (Online searches indicate that microfilm of the originals may be available at Notre Dame and at Catholic University of America.) The timeline in the ad makes sense if Mary left home
before visiting her brothers. So she probably left home 8 years before the ad (She would have been 23 years old in 1853; James would have been about 16-18 that year.) As explained in footnote 4 on the MeagherCavanaugh(1862) page, James could have left Ireland as late as 1856. There are many interesting James Meagher scenarios yet to explore both in Ireland and in America.
