In our family, I am the traditional source of genealogical effort. That means that I work away on my family, but I also spend significant effort on my wife’s family. I always thought she had German ancestors (and she does), but more recently, we learned that she also has some Irish ancestors.
We came across this one day when her mother launched into singing an Irish ditty that we had never heard before. She followed this up with chatting away with an Irish accent. Who knew?
This intrigued me since my paternal ancestors originated in Ireland and I had done some significant research there. So, I launched a new research project to unearth my wife’s Irish families.
My project began with a visit to a cemetery in Marmora, Ontario where we found the single tombstone of Wendy’s great-great grandfather, John Alexander Plunkett. From marriage records, we learned that he had been married twice. From his death records we learned that he had died rather young (40 years old) from malaria.
Malaria in Canada? We have lots of mosquitoes that is true, but I always believed that Malaria was a disease of the tropics.
His parents were Robert Plunkett and Rebecca Henry from County Fermanagh in Ireland. At this stage, we were stuck. With merely, “Ireland”, that was insufficient data to track down the family. So, I began looking for similar families on Ancestry and Family Search.
Family Search provided me with some “clues”. Pursuing these I found a strange anomaly. A potential ancestor of Robert Plunkett had a wife whose name was Mary Conyngham. However, another “clue” led me to believe that this person’s mother was also named Mary Conyngham.
A mother and a wife with the same name? Possible! But not likely.
I contacted both contributors of these family trees to see if they could provide source records to validate the names. The first chap I contacted, replied to me the next day, and he just sort of blew me off. “That is all I have”.
However, a week later, the second author responded and said, “My only source is a handwritten family tree diagram that hangs in my mother-in-law’s kitchen.” Karen Libra, bless her soul, promptly sent me an image of the diagram. Wow!
There was the entire family of Robert Plunkett and Rebecca Henry and all their children (not just John Alexander Plunkett). And, also, Robert’s first wife and their children. In addition, we could see Robert’s siblings, his parents, and grandparents. Amazing information that would have taken ages to uncover via Ireland’s rather poor records of the time.
Also, we could see Robert’s first wife and their children. Fascinating enough, several of the children (from both wives) were designated as “To Canada”, meaning that they likely emigrated to Canada.
The tree included one gentleman who was described as the “Lord Chancellor of Ireland”. I currently have no idea what a Lord Chancellor does for a living, but it sure looks impressive. Now, Wendy wants to know if her ancestors had a castle. I hope not as they are incredibly expensive to maintain.
This small investigation has yielded a host of Wendy’s folks who also emigrated to Canada. In addition, we were able to move backward in time. Now, we are working our way through this list of immigrants to learn where they landed and what communities they settled in. We had seen some of them in nearby cemeteries but were missing the connections.
Thank you so much Karen!
Ron Gilmore
Email: rvg3@me.com
Website: https://rgenealogy.ca