Cosgrove of Clady Beg, Kilclooney, Armagh

Roger, Thanks! Yes, I'd seen those records.

I want to try to prove a connection between my James and the person who is his father, Francis. I hope to locate birth records or baptismal records; the dream is that I'll find a record of a James being born to a Francis. It would appear they followed naming conventions, so that may help.

Cheers, 

Laura

Laura,

I am a Cosgrove also. My ancestors, as best I can determine, were from Cladybeg but left there in the mid 1840's after the death of their Father and the expiration of their leases on Lord Charlemont's Estate. (Estate records, family stories). The naming protocols can be both a blessing and a curse. The Coskery/Cosgroves were a prolific bunch and it appears that there were cousins around the same age with the same names which happened when brothers named their children in the same way. makes it very confusing. My GGrandfather and his brothers were Arthur, Francis, James, Cornelius, Bernard, Thomas, William, Phillp or Henry, and Terence. (the youngest and my GGrandfather). If you look at the estate records(FHL) you can see their numbers increase and the amount of land available for each family shrinks. The few baptismal records that I found are not particularly helpful. Info is incomplete and, in the case of the women especially, you are never sure if the name used on the record was the name they used everyday or should be preceded by a Mary or was a Mary but they went by a second name. Also how many of the men went by middle names or nicknames on a dailey basis to avoid confusion. My Great Grandfather and his male sibings were born between 1817 and 1830. I do not know if there were sisters. Their parents names were John and Mary (per records here in the states),They were probably born in the 1790's. I believe that John died in the early 1840's. Mary died en route to the US. The brothers first went to Buffalo via Canada but Terence was the only one to remain there. Francis went to NYC with Bernard and their families. I have connected with a cousin decended from Francis. Arthur went to Indiana, Michigan and ended up in Chicago. Not sure of the fate of the others.

I keep hoping that more RC church records for the area will suface. I have looked at most of the records for Armagh available on line but without much success. May have gotten as far back as I can get.

Laura,

I am a Cosgrove also. My ancestors, as best I can determine, were from Cladybeg but left there in the mid 1840's after the death of their Father and the expiration of their leases on Lord Charlemont's Estate. (Estate records, family stories). The naming protocols can be both a blessing and a curse. The Coskery/Cosgroves were a prolific bunch and it appears that there were cousins around the same age with the same names which happened when brothers named their children in the same way. makes it very confusing. My GGrandfather and his brothers were Arthur, Francis, James, Cornelius, Bernard, Thomas, William, Phillp or Henry, and Terence. (the youngest and my GGrandfather). If you look at the estate records(FHL) you can see their numbers increase and the amount of land available for each family shrinks. The few baptismal records that I found are not particularly helpful. Info is incomplete and, in the case of the women especially, you are never sure if the name used on the record was the name they used everyday or should be preceded by a Mary or was a Mary but they went by a second name. Also how many of the men went by middle names or nicknames on a dailey basis to avoid confusion. My Great Grandfather and his male sibings were born between 1817 and 1830. I do not know if there were sisters. Their parents names were John and Mary (per records here in the states),They were probably born in the 1790's. I believe that John died in the early 1840's. Mary died en route to the US. The brothers first went to Buffalo via Canada but Terence was the only one to remain there. Francis went to NYC with Bernard and their families. I have connected with a cousin decended from Francis. Arthur went to Indiana, Michigan and ended up in Chicago. Not sure of the fate of the others.

I keep hoping that more RC church records for the area will suface. I have looked at most of the records for Armagh available on line but without much success. May have gotten as far back as I can get.

Research Gal, 

I found them!! I was able to locate both the baptism of James Cosgrove (1862, not 1863 as he consistently reported) as well as the marriage of his parents Francis Cosgrove and Margaret Quinn (I did not have her identified earlier!) in 1857.

We are definitely cousins; I believe that your Bernard and my Francis may have been 1st cousins. I'd love to work with you to determine, more definitively, the connection. I can be contacted at archivalbiz@gmail.com. 

Hope to hear from you soon!

Laura

Laura,

While these may be cousins they are not my ancestors, since my family left Cladybeg in the mid 1840's. Here's hoping

some more older records will turn up. Thanks..

Research Gal

Although it cannot be trusted as completely comprehensive, there was only one Francis Cosgrove recorded as a tenant in Cladybeg (or neighbouring Cladymore) in the valuation records from the 1860s. The house was sub let by a Patrick Cosgrove (nicknamed Fad to differentiate from other Cosgroves, which would tally with recent local recollection of this piece of land). It refers either to a building that stood in this corner of field or alternatively at the the site of this current house at the lower, opposite end of the same plot of land. The Patrick above lived in one while Francis was in the other.

There is a baptism record for a Francis Coskry on 1st May 1825 to Pat Coskry and Elen / Alice Toner. This Francis had a brother Pat (1828) and sister Mary (1830), so perhaps the Patrick and Francis above were two brothers? As is mentioned, there were quite a few Cosgrove/Coskery familes in the area in the 19th century so there is no way of being sure. Also tenancies are not always recorded under the name of the person actually living there, so your Francis may have been elsewhere.

There is only one baptism in parish records with the father's name John from the 1820-30 period, which is of a Pat on 16th August 1829 at Cladymore to John Cosgrove and Mary Sherry. Sherry is a surname common in a neighbouring part of the parish. There's always the chance that, if the mother was from another local parish, the children may have been baptised there.

Hopefully that is of some help.

THANK YOU for posting, @carraige! Can you tell me where the baptism record of Francis of Pat Coskry/Toner is located? Is it online yet or a record in a repository? 

Since I posted this, in 2014, I've found so much collateral material online and in 2017 I was in the Armagh County Museum Archives for a day looking at the records of the Earl of Charlemont. I am confident that the Francis Coskery/Coskry/Cosgrove who married Margaret Quinn in 1857 and is the father of my James, born in 1862, is the Francis you found in the baptism records, so having that record is VERY important to me!

It's interesting...if you read the comments from "Research Gal", it turns out we ARE related; my father (James Cosgrove) and her brother (Arthur Cosgrove) are YDNA matches. The DNA has been extremely helpful in providing additional information and I'm constantly reviewing any additional matches to see if I can locate others in these branches of this family.

If it's possible to provide a link to that baptismal record here and/or send it to my email at archivalbiz@gmail.com, I would be eternally grateful!!! I also appreciate the additional insight of the John Cosgrove/Mary Sherry union; while I was in NI I stopped in at the Ballymacnab Chapel where the priest suggested I go to see John Cosgrove...which I did. I was so overwhelmed by the whole experience I didn't think to get additional information from him, other than his grandfather and/or greatgrandfather was a John Cosgrove who married a Margaret Gollogly (that surname, along with Vallely and Toner were ubiquitous in the records of the Earl of Charlemont). Anyway...can you tell I'm excited by your post?

Thank you again, have a great evening!! Cheers, Laura

Laura, for some reason when parish baptismal records were originally scanned (back in the 1950-60s, I believe), they failed to do this with the earliest book in the Kilclooney (Ballymacnab) parish that covers 1820-1844 baptisms. Those scans were used to create the National Library’s (NLI) Catholic Parish Register website. With permission from the parish, contact was made with NLI a few years ago to see if they would be able to add images from the older book, but, unfortunately, they do not have the resources for adding to their system at this time. Some of the earlier images are very difficult to read in their present state anyway and would require work done on them.

It appears that the 1844-1880 dataset is used by most genealogy websites. However, at some stage the complete records, including the earlier ones, were digitised for an Armagh Diocesan records database. This database is available to consult through the Cardinal Ó Fiaich Library and also from local genealogy resources in a digital format. The paper records lie at the parish office in Ballymacnab, but they have no search facility.

Earlier tenancy maps and the Griffith Valuation shows there were around 13-14 different houses within about one mile of one another which were Coskery/Cosgrove households at some stage during the 1800s. They weren’t necessarily close relatives as the name was present in the area from at least 1664. Local tradition has the Cosgroves that you met coming from a particular house in Cladybeg, with Mary Gollogly's father-in-law possibly being the first, though this would have been prior to birth records.