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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AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Categories
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