Thursday, April 27, 2006

Pilltown, County Waterford, our home in Ireland

It has taken more than a few dollars and a lot of time, but every once in a while , genealogy provides sweet discoveries about your past and your family. Today was a highlight for sure. In the end, we found several important items by connecting various bits of research to make sense of it all.
We learned:
1) Our great great grandmother was named Alice Fitzgerald, not Bridget as we previously thought
2) Alice Fitzgerald married William Foley on February 11, 1817, in Clashmore Point
3) Children were:
Brigid, baptized on January 16, 1818
Michael, my great great grandfather, baptized September 16, 1822
John, baptized April 9, 1825
(There were other children including Ellen, Patrick, Edmund and Mary but these baptisms were not recorded or perhaps they had moved.)

4) The children were all baptized at Clashmore, likely at St Cronin's pictured here, but the village where the family lived was named Pilltown. It is near Waterford on the Suir River.

Here is a link to the story of Pilltown

To discover these facts took a membership in the New England Heritage Society which includes access to Heritage Quest Online, a search engine. This helped me validate the marriage of Ellen Foley and Patrick O'Donnell. Our written family tree includes a mention of this marriage. Ellen was the sister of Michael Foley, the namesake of this blog.

The marriage record of Ellen and Patrick, in the township of Randolph Massachusetts, on June 9, 1859 contained a mention of her parents as William and Alice. When I read this it rang a bell with another piece of information I had uncovered. I asked for the Waterford County Heritage Services to find Michael Foley born to William Foley and Bridget Fitzgerald. They were unable to do that but they did send information about William Foley and Alice Fitzgerald. This record was very close but, at the time, I thought William had been married to Bridget and dismissed this as inconclusive. With the added find of Ellen's marriage record, I know believe I found the place in Ireland from which we all have come.