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Looking for help with Peter John O'Reilly's family

Cavan

My grandfather, Peter John O'Reilly was born to Michael O'Reily and Mary Anne (maiden name Cassidy) in Shercock, Cavan, Ireland on May 17, 1901. Michael owned a tavern according to a census I found and my father's explanation. My father indicates that Mary Anne died giving birth to their second child, likely a boy around 1903 and Michael remarried within a few years to a woman named Mary. My father also said that the tavern was taken along with a delivery truck used to make deliveries after a fight at the bar between two british soldiers resulted in the death of one of the soldiers. Peter John O'Reilly immigrated to the United States in 1928, arriving in New York and settling in Chicago where he married my grandmother, Nora Hughes.

I haven't been able to determine concrete birth or death dates for Michael O'Reilly or Mary Anne Cassidy that could help me find their parents or relatives.

What would be my best place to start? Any direction you can provide is appreciated.

pjm.oreilly@gm…

7 replies

Pete:

Welcome to Ireland Reaching Out!

I will send an e-mail to our Shercock parish liaison to alert her to your message.

Roger McDonnell

Castlemore RoscommonIrelandXO Volunteer

 

Assuming yr grand parents are Catholic you can check for births on www.nli.ie. Also, try to find a web site which will enable you to check out births in Northern Ireland. You may have to get a family history group to do this for you and they wil lrequire payment. For deaths in US I'd try ancestry. com and vital records (thats how birth/death records are referred to in US) for Chicago.  

Mike

Mike Dunphy

Elwyn,

Thank you for finding this.  Where would be the best place to get a copy of the marriage registration from 1906?  I would like to see if Mary Ann's maiden name or either Michael or Mary Ann's parents were listed.  

Would parents be listed with babies who died in 1903?  I believe the following is my Grandfather's brother who died shortly after birth but I don't know for sure.  My dad said his father never really talked about it other than to say his mother died and his father remarried someone who didn't like him very much.  An aunt from my grandmother's side told my father about his uncle who died as a baby and that his grandmother died around the same time.  I've exhausted what ancestry.com appears to have on this side of the Atlantic for my grandfather and I'm trying to get started searching in Ireland as effectively as possible.

Name:Joseph O'Reilly

Estimated birth year:abt 1903

Date of Registration:Jan-Feb-Mar 1903

Death Age:0

Registration district:Cavan

Volume:3

Page:52

FHL Film Number:101602

pjm.oreilly@gm…

The 1903 death certificate says Mary Ann died of stomach ulcers which she had had for 2 years. On the face of it, it doesn’t sound to be directly related to childbirth.

The 2nd Mary O’Reilly’s maiden name was O’Reilly. (So she might be a cousin, or it might just be a coincidence). If she were a cousin, they’d have needed a bishop’s dispensation to marry and that would normally be recorded in the parish register, along with the degree of consanguinity. However the registers for 1906 are not on-line so far as I am aware. The only copy is held by the parish priest so you would need to check with him.

The 1903 death you enquire about relates to a Joseph who died on 11.12.1902 in Lahard. He was a farmer’s son. So not your family. (The death was registered late on 20.2.1903. That was common. If you lived some distance from the registrar, you waited till you were in town on other business before getting around to it).

Parents names are not routinely recorded on Irish death certificates, but sometimes with children it does say “son of X”. And sometimes the informant was a parent, and that may be noted. (In the 1902 case it was the grandfather who was the informant).

There were 3 Reilly households in Lahard in 1901:

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Cavan/Corr/Lahard/

I also looked for a birth for a Joseph around that time, in Shercock, but could not see one.

You can see her death certificate, Joseph’s death and the 1906 marriage free on the irishgenealogy link I gave you.  (Click on civil records).

The O’ and Mc prefixes in Irish names are detachable and many families often disregarded them, as in this case. So always search under Reilly as well as O’. 

Elwyn, IrelandXO Volunteer ☘IrelandXO Volunteer

Thank you for your help. I appreciate the time you took to clear this up.  I'll look into contacting the parrish about the marriage record.  Is that the same way to go about determining Michael O'Reilly and Mary Anne Cassidy's birth dates and parents?  My father said he thinks Michael died during the 1930s in a public hospital, but he was going to look for letters his father received that they kept.

pjm.oreilly@gm…

You should be able to search for the births on the irishgenealogy site I gave you. You could ask the parish priest but firstly they get a lot of genealogical requests and aren’t very keen to spend a lot of time trawling through parish records, so you might not get a reply. Also, the priest can only search that parish. If someone was born and baptised somewhere lese, he won’t find it. Whereas the birth records cover all Ireland.

You can search for the 1930s death on the same site as well. There’s plenty of Michael Reilly/O’Reilly deaths in the Cavan area to work through. If you can narrow the date in any way it’ll make the search easier.

Elwyn, IrelandXO Volunteer ☘IrelandXO Volunteer

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