Hi Clara,
On seeing your message and your thoughts that Lawrence may have been born in County Cork, I decided to carry out a check of all Doyle baptisms and marriage in County Cork from 1800 to 1850. We can only check Church records for this period as Civil Records did not begin in Ireland until 1864 with just a few exceptions.
My first check was for all of the Doyle family name in Cork County without including first names and including both sexes. This brought up just over 592 Baptisms and 102 marriages.
The name Lawrence was used quite rarely in Ireland and as often as not was spelled Laurence and appears in many records as just Lauce, especially in baptismal registers where I have seen it many times over the past years.
Consequently, I used the Laurence spelling as a filter and again checked all of Cork County. This filter dramatically reduced the number of Baptisms to Just one Doyle marriage and six baptisms where the surname Doyle was mentioned. What was even more significant was that all the entries were in the Parish of Kilmurray in County Cork. Again, quite significantly, the name Lauce appears in every one of the entries but particularly significant is the baptism of a Lauce on 30 March1816. This is the only Laurence/Lawrence,/Lauce Doyle baptised in Cork & Ross Diocese from 1800 - 1850 and which would make him about 30 years old in the mid 1840s when the famine was at its height and many thousands left Ireland to escape it and make a better life for themselves in the USA, Australia and many other lands. The fact that the Doyle family records all appear in Kilmurry is highly indicative that all were related to each other. Lauce's father was named as Con Doyle and his mother was Mary Cross. There was a marriage of a Lauce Doyle and Norry Brien in the same Parish in 1814 and the name of Lauce Doyle appeared as a sponsor or a witness in all other documents.
If you are interested in this information or feel that its relevant to your family, you can contact me on my personal email address, frankfahy@eircom.net and I will send you the documents or links to them. I have tried and failed for some reason to attach them to this message board reply but you can reply to me on this board and I will help in any way I can.
Hope this is of help to you,
Frank Fahy
