Genealogy, so time consuming, much to look at, and often nothing to find. and then hurray, a little treasure of information presents itself. In my case it was discovering that my Irish Greenwich based Bartholomew Sugrue was godfather to another families child. Bartholomew the Godfather. Godparents are never, as yet, included in transcriptions, for which this was really quite a find. Getting to such a find involves a whole lot of detective work which could lead nowhere. Here, it was from looking at the lives of those who had been godparents to Bartholomew's own children and looking up their own family records. The Graney family, also from Ireland and settled in Greenwich, had been godparents in 1860 to Bartholomew's daughter, Catherine, registered in the baptisms of the Roman Catholic records of Our Lady Star Of The Sea, at Greenwich, when she was just over a year in age. And then, such joy for me, like really, to find that the very next year, in 1861, our Bartholomew was in turn a godparent to the Graney's son, William Joseph Graney. Of this Graney family, friends to the Sugrues, the head of the household, John Graney, worked with Bartholomew in the building trade, and his wife, Mary Graney, née Kane, I saw that by 1881 she was a widow, just about surviving as a hawker on the streets, and interestingly her place of origin was listed, maybe being another clue to the Sugrue families own origins, all being from County Kerry, her hometown being Castleisland at the beginning of the Vale of Tralee, a town surrounded by hills and boglands, atop a vast cave system known as Crag Cave, within which were the underground waters of the Green Lake. Ah, I have tried and tried, and yet have never found a baptism in Ireland for Bartholomew Sugrue, for which I wonder if his family were travellers, not bothering with the system and its obligations; like it's so that Bartholomew never bothered legally registering his children births when living in Greenwich, even though by law one had to do so. And then again, some of the Irish settlers appear to have used alternative names, such as Garrett London, who was a godfather for Bartholomew's son Daniel in 1857 and yet called himself Garrett Barry in the 1851 census. And at the time of the marriage of Bartholomew's grown up son, Thomas (my ancestor), instead of giving his fathers name as Bartholomew Sugrue, Thomas said he was James Seagrove, although we can surmise that by then Thomas wished to disassociate from his fathers scandals. This family continues to fascinate me, and the next day I happily found out more about the Sugrues. I'd not realised it before, but Bartholomew's close friend, Patrick Reardon, who had been best man at his wedding to his first wife Ellen Sullivan, was actually his brother in law, Ellen being none other than Bartholomew's sister, Ellen Sugrue. This and more I was finding out by grace of the Roman Catholic records of our Lady Star of the Sea on FindMyPast, which I had paid a lot to join for a year, but which was yielding anyway these delightful finds for me. Bartholomew's sister, Ellen, was a few years older than him, and this sibling connection explains how it is that these two families were so entwined. It was in looking at a baptism of Patrick and Ellens daughter Mary Ann Reardon, that I saw a side note saying sub-conditional, which at first I though meant handicapped in some way, but actually it referred to a child that may or may not have been previously baptised. Well, it was on that baptism, that I saw Ellen Reardon's surname prior to marriage revealed: she was a Sugrue. I next found that Bartholomew Sugrues first wife, Ellen Sullivan, was a godmother to Patrick and Ellen Reardon's first child, Helen (Ellen) in 1846. It was three months after that baptism that she and Bartholomew married, and then, as I know, having had one child together, Ann, Ellen became very ill in the summer of 1849 with cholera and died. And as for another of Patrick and Ellen Reardon's children, Catherine, Bartholomew's second wife, Catherine Sheehan, was the baby girls godmother in 1855. I happened now to find the Roman Catholic version of Bartholomew Sugrue's marriage to his first wife, Ellen Sullivan, which had more detail than the official certificate, on account of it giving the names and locations of the couples parents. Ellen Sullivans parents were John and Ellen Sullivan of County Kerry. Bartholomew's parents were Thomas Sugrue (I'd already known he had Thomas as a father) and Joanna, which I had not known, they being of County Kerry. So for all of this I could add two new people to my tree, Joanna as Bartholomew's mother and Ellen as his sister. Sad it was to see that his sister, Ellen, died in 1865 aged 45. Interestingly, in one of the census's Ellen gave her place of birth as Church Hill in County Kerry, at last the best clue yet as to where Bartholomew himself may have been born. The Roman Catholic residents of that village, at the time when they would have been there, attended an old and dilapidated chapel, in nearby Chapeltown.. This was due to the original medieval Roman Catholic Church of their own village, on its splendid old hill, with its fine views of the sea, having been long been supplanted by a protestant church. Back in the 1700's, this whole area had been a place of smuggling and the village itself was a protected archeological site. Eventually Church Hill would have a Roman Catholic Church again , but not till after the Sugrue's would had left for England, the church to be St Marys, Star of the Sea (like the church in Greenwich). Tralee, from where was the lovely folk song I used to sing on the piano, was the nearest sizeable town, 10 klms away. Patrick Reardon himself was from Waterville in County Kerry, and we see now another of the family friends, Mary Kane was from Castleisland. And it's fine enough to piece together information once these folk were in England, but Irish records are still as vague and untraceable as ever.
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I was still filling in all my known ancestors onto FindMyPast, almost complete, but for the masses of my Shetland family, this being rather complex for their many intermarriages back to the times of royalty. I at last got one line going back to King James V, leading up to James's lover, Elizabeth Carmichael (some say her name was not Elizabeth but Catherine). The other line I have leads to another of his lovers, Euphemia Elphinstone, with more intermarrying of her descendants, and I had yet to tackle that. Both these lovers of the king were my ancestresses, the kings real sweethearts, rather than his later royal wives.
It is John Stewart who was Elizabeth Carmichael's son by the king, illegitimate, although later legitimised, his sister being the famous Mary, Queen of Scots, who apparently found him adorable for his 'leaping and dancing' in all those noble pursuits with which the aristocracy and royals entertained themselves at the time, like in the equestrian game 'running at the ring', especially popular with the Tudors, and in most of these games it being the way to dress up as colourful characters, whether that be men dressing as women, or as people of foreign lands, or the wearing of masks. John Stewart and his friends were ones to get up to mischief. One time, being denied entry to one house, to which they had come wearing masks, they broke the door down, for which the following day a brawl broke out in the market place. Mary Queen of Scots gave John a big telling off for this. Sometimes John went on trips to France, accompanying either Mary Queen of Scots or his stepmother Mary of Guise. The French king, being well disposed to him, even gifted him an abbey, the Abbey of Flavigny en Auxois. I found something of interest, looking again at Roman Catholic baptisms for my Sugrue family in Greenwich, which I'd formerly at last accessed from, yes, FindMyPast at Kew Record Centre. What I now found was another baptised child of the family, hitherto unseen, Carmelita Jane. This baby must not have survived so long. What a super name Bartholomew and Catherine had chosen for her, Carmelita, which derives from Mount Carmel in the Holy Land, which means a beautiful lush garden, essentially the beauty of nature. I do wonder if they had been inspired by the lovely grand gardens of Greenwich, the Greenwich hill being nicknamed by them, and maybe others of the Irish community, Mount Carmel, or so I imagine. Even the godmother chosen for Carmelita had an unusually colourful name, Concetta, a name referring specifically to the immaculate conception.
I at last got immersed in genealogy work once more setting up a family tree from scratch, on FindMyPast which I had just joined for a year. For now I was focusing on my Welsh people, getting back to my centenarian ancestresses of Wonastow, and finding new information, by grace of Findmypast, which was that my Molly Morgan, who had lived for 103 years had the maiden name of Elias (I had not known that). Molly had been born in 1763, in Wonastow, her parents being William and Ann Elias. I found her wedding at last, now that I knew her maiden name, it being in 1784 that Molly, with her official name of Mary Elias, married Thomas Morgan, on 29th December, at the church of St Winaloe in Wonastow. It was in contemplating this new information, that I wondered if Mollys grandmother would then be another aforementioned centenarian of Wonastow, written of in the papers, even from one of the same articles in which Molly's story was shared, this older ladies name being Ann Watkins. And so what connections may I find out in regard to this? Well, Molly's mother, Ann Elias, someone had transcribed her own maiden name to be Haskins, upon her marriage to William Ellis in 1762, and one could not see the original from which this had been taken, but this was similar enough to Watkins, which in the rough handwriting of the time may have looked the same. And the paper had mentioned Ann Watkins being buried with another related centenarian, a Mrs James, so was this her mother or a sister? Even I see from church records that Molly herself had a sister, known as Mrs James, she being Elizabeth Elias, born in Wonastow in 1770 who married a Richard James in 1794. Although we would be looking at an older Mrs James here. Molly Morgan of Wonastow, known now to have been born and raised as Mary Elias, there had been plenty of newspapers about her great age, as I have written of before. I'd found her home even, Gorse Cottage at Treowen, this being the cottage she had been born in, and would later die in, working even when old from there as a midwife. Now, suppose Molly's granny was indeed the written of Ann Watkins. Well, her life story was written of in that same newspaper article, stating that she had died in 1823 at the age of 104, meaning she would have been born in 1719. As the paper had also shared, she had spent her married life in England, at Brinsop in Herefordshire, on account of this being where her husband was from, and not until she was a widow did she return to Wonastow, her son William Watkins being close by, he being the miller of the Wonastow Corn Mill. I found that indeed there was a William Watkins, born in Brinsop to a Thomas and Ann Watkins, in 1763. During her life she'd had nine children and had long been a tenant to the family at the grand Wonastow House. Her 'relative' with whom she was buried, Mrs James, was said to have already died at the age of 101. With my own Welsh grandfather, their descendant, having lived till 100, this was an interesting long life phenomenon worth looking into. As for Molly's daughter, Ann Morgan, also my ancestress, her married surname being Thomas, she herself lived for 104 years, and I was now finding out about her grown up daughter's families, all living in and out of one another's houses, swapping their children and grandchildren around. In 1851, according to the census of the time, when Molly Morgan and her daughter Ann Thomas were widowed and elderly, living with one another, they were residing next to other close family members, the Matthews and the Potter families, which Ann's daughters had married into, with a related Jones connection showing up as well. The present miller at this time, on account of William Watkins having having long died, was Thomas Potter, the husband of Molly Morgans granddaughter, Esther. I now found a newspaper article I'd not seen before for the death of Ann Watkins in 1823. An interesting note is made of a strange coincidence for both the burials of Mrs James and Ann Watkins, it being that the river Trothy both times had flooded its banks so that the procession with the bodies to the place of burial was not an easy task. Ah, yes, I was once more immersed on genealogy, my favourite hobby.
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AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Categories
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