Trying to find were my gg grandfather comes from.Patrick McElroy with his brother James arrived in Australia on the George Fyffe on 23 July 1841. He was born 1818. He married Mary Fitzpatrick in1843. On brother James death certificate it has his parents as John McElroy and Catherine McAloon of Rosslea Fermanagh.Cannot find anything about him.
Rosslea is in the RC parish of Clones. Unfortunately they have no baptism or marriage records before 1848, so if that’s where Patrick was born and married, then sadly there is unlikely to be any documentary record in the parish.
I looked in Griffiths Valuation for 1862 to see if there were any McElroy households in the Rosslea area then. There were 2 listed. One was Patrick McElroy in Lacky townland where he had a farm labourer’s cottage (Plot 1b). The other was Ellen (probably a widow) in Stralustrin. She had plot 1, an 18 acre farm. There were also 11 McIlroy which is an alternative spelling.
There was just 1 McAloon household, in Clontivrin. That was a Patrick, living in a labourer’s house (plot 1c).
You can see where they are in relation to Rosslea by using the maps on the Griffiths site.
http://www.askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/index.xml?action=nameSearch
Possibly DNA testing may be a way of matching with others who have additional information about where the family originate. Family Tree DNA reportedly has more people with Ulster roots than any other company. That obviously increases the chances of finding a match. You might want to try them or, if you have already tested, you can transfer your results to them for no fee.
The North of Ireland Family History Society are running an Ulster DNA project and can offer FTDNA testing kits at a reduced price. http://www.nifhs.org (Go to DNA project on the website).
My thanks Elwyn, Interesting about name as the immigration had it spelled with an I .But everything has an E in Australia so I thought it was wrong on immigration papers.
Minette,
The idea of a single or correct spelling for a surname or a place name is very much a recent phenomenon designed to meet the needs of modern officialdom. Before that, especially in Ireland, there was no consistency. Names were spelled phonetically and each variation was down to the whim of the particular person recording the information. You will often see the spelling change as the records go back. This rarely indicates a deliberate decision to alter the name, nor even a mistake. Not everyone was literate, but even when they were, exact spelling simply wasn’t something they bothered about. In addition to varying the actual spelling, O’ or Mac prefixes were optional and were often omitted. Expect the spelling to vary. It was the norm.