McGuigan andDoran

You may already be aware of this, but there are records at the FamilySearch database [https://www.familysearch.org] for John and Jane, as well as three of the children you mentioned:  Charles, Elizabeth, and Jane.  If you create a (free) account at the site, you can find John at ID #LCZJ-K1C, and can access the records for the others easily from his record, as you will see.

Unfortunately, the creator of those records does not appear to have more specific info about their birthplaces in Ireland.  Her screen name appears to the right on each record which she created or modified, though,  and you can send a private message to her through the site, so you could compare notes (if you don't already know one another).

Irish surnames (particularly those of Gaelic origin) are often peculiar to a specific region or county (sometimes even a part of a county), and that can help with genealogical research.  The surname McGuigan (in Irish Mac Uiginn) originated in County Tyrone, in what is now Northern Ireland, and is still found mostly there and across the border in County Monaghan, so that may help narrow down your search.  It has also been anglicized in a number of other ways, such as MacGoogan, MacGookin, MacGuckian, MacQuiggan, MacWiggin, Wigan, and Maguigan, and in County Monahan as Pidgeon or Fidgeon.  Different anglicized forms were sometimes used within the same family, so don't be put off if you find potentially relevant records with any of the variations. One of the documents attached to the records at FamilySearch also shows the name as McGurgan.

I noticed at the NLI church records site that there is a Catholic parish in Tyrone called Termonmacguirk.  I have no idea whether that name is somehow related to your surname, but it's not far from the border with Monaghan and the parish records go back pretty far, so if you want to do some searching around there, you can find the records at this link:

https://registers.nli.ie/parishes/0196  ; (at that site, there's an interactive map which allows you to move on to neghboring parishes as well)

There is also a civil parish of the same name, with what look to be the same boundaries (which is not always the case), and you can find more info about it at this site:

https://www.townlands.ie/tyrone/termonmaguirk/

At that site, there's a list of all the townlands in the parish, with links to more info about them, so if you manage to find a baptismal record which indicates the townland where the child was born, that list might be useful (it has maps of the townlands, and links to other records as well).

Thanks Kevin. Yes, I know about Family First and I've been the one that has corrected some of the information there. It really wasn't any help. I've known that Tyrone is the main county for my McGuigan name. So far, not much luck. However, I will try the link for the parish you mentioned as I know that they were R.C. I'm still hoping that some undiscovered relative might pop up and show me the way back to Ireland, The experts all say that you should exhaust all the records in North America first, in order, to find at least the County and better yet the Townland. One of my DNA matches has been doing it for 20 years and hasn't broken the brickwall.

Thanks so much for the suggestions.

Barb

 

Sometimes there's lttle choice but to search through the parish registers, and I have a concrete suggestion for you, based on my own experience.  In many locations, the given name Elizabeth was not very common among Catholics in the mid-1800's, especially in rural areas, so I suggest searching for Elizabeth MacGuigan's baptism in 1841 in each of the parishes which has records going that far back.  The parishes in the northern and western parts of the county don't generally seem to go far back enough, but there are at least a dozen in the southern and eastern part of the county which do.  If 1841 doesn't work, then you could try 1840 and/or 1842.  Peoples' memories of their birth year in the early- to mid-1800's were often unreliable, because the family generally had no written record of it.  In the case of Elizabeth, they may have just recalled that it was not long before the Great Famine.  If you find Elizabeth, then you'll know in what parish the family lived and, if the register goes far back enough, you can look for the other family members.

It isn't really very hard to search a years' worth of records in most parishes.  You go to the link I gave you and follow the instructions to get to the point where you can download pages, and then just download them one after the other fairly quickly, then review them at your leisure.  I downloaded them as jpg's, which I think is the default, and then zoomed in on each page in turn (which helps you to read faint or poorly written writing).  In most cases, you don't have to read much.  The general pattern is for the child's name to be at the left (sometimes preceded by a "B" or the word "Baptized" in Latin), then the parents' full names, and on the next line the names of the sponsors and (in most cases) the name of the townland where the family lived.  You can basically skim down the left side of each page and just look for "Elizabeth" (or "Elizabethum" or some other latinized form) on every second line, and it's a name which is surpisingly easy to spot, so you can finish a page rapidly and then move on to the next one (it's much harder to look for names lilkes James, John, and Joan, which can all look alike when skimming a page).  If the priest has arranged things differently, then you just have to figure out the pattern he used and skim accordingly..

I used this approach to find a great-grandmother named Elizabeth, and it was very successful.  It helped that I knew the names of several siblings (as you do), and I was able to find them all once I had found her.  That was in Cork, and I was surprised to find that there were very few Elizabeth's at all in the target area, and only one in the entire search period who had a brother named Patrick (which was also surprisingly rare in some places in those days).

I went ahead and checked out Termonmacguirk for you using this approach, and Elizabeth is not shown as being baptized there in 1841 (I didn't look in other years).  For that entire year, though, there were only a half doxen double-paged images to search, and there was only one Elizabeth bapized in the parish.

 

 

Thanks again Kevin. Your strategy will certainly help me to advance in my search. I really appreciate your explanation of how the records are set up because when I was looking at the parish that you gave me, I was having a hard time to decipher between parents and sponsors. You’re so right that the documents are not clear. Hopefully, I will find something in the area where there are baptism records.

When I was in Ireland, I visited the National Archives of Ireland and spoke with a genealogist. Unfortunately, my time was cut short but I did get to share with him a document that I thought was Charles’ baptism. However, it turns out that Charles was a witness and when he put Charles McGuigan into his database, he didn’t find a baptismal certificate. Oh well, one can only try.

Barb

 

 

Just an update here. As Charles went between Essex County in southern tip of Ontario, Canada and across the Detroit River into Michigan, U.S.A., he would change his name from McGuigan to Goodwin. His children would retain the Goodwin name. However, when Charles died in Canada, he used McGuigan.