The Ballycastle Blog: Irish Genealogy and More

I have just found your blog. I am from the Pittsburgh PA region and there are a lot of people of Irish descent living here. I am surely going to read all your information and I am anxious to start reading. I thought I had my Great Grandparents figured out from the information on their marriage application. Then upon requesting their death certificates the dates and information was all different. Back to the research for me....

Mike, my family came to Carbondale, PA abt 1834-36.Name was changed to McDonald. Family left behind was Ann Nolan McDonnell and her young son Alex. Her husband Patrick and another son Francis died before her children (Patrick, Peter and Ellen) left Ireland. They must have lived near the Ocean because my Great Great Grandmother (Ellen McDonnell Quinn) told my great grandmother that she missed the sounds of the Ocean>

Carol, We have common Irish county origins. My Irish ancestors started in Sligo and moved to Glencalry, very near to Ballycastle, Mayo, around 1850, one of them, my grandfather, Martin, came to America in 1892, returned to Ireland and married a Mayo woman in 1911, and both came to Baltimore, Maryland in 1912 and stayed. I am particularly interested in your Ballycastle side, as a number of my Irish relatives and friends live there today. When did your Irish ancestors travel to America?

My Irish ancestors (McDonnell/McDonald) came to Carbondale, PA USA from Ballycastle, Mayo County and (Quinn) came from Sligo. I believe they sailed from Killala Bay

Great post. It must be amazing to have so many family members in the one place for a weekend.

Congratulations!

Ralph

People do not even look at the genealogy to determine why they are the way they are! Thanks for the blog! great information

Thank you for your great article.

Do an internet search on Diarmuid Gavin and his TV documentary series, Blood of The Irish and you should find some additional information on the documentary.

This is interesting, especially considering that the local Church of Ireland was contacted by Salt Lake City, (basically the capital of the Mormon church), and that the Mormon leaders later presented the president with his own copy of his family's geneaology. So the president probably knows he has Irish roots.

This blog post was interesting to read, but I'm not sure how I feel about the implications about the Irish heritage... Is there a link to the docutmentary you mentioned?

Litteral translations often lose their meanings, particularly in things like this and it is a true art to get it right!

Everyone knows the phrase "Yes ,we can"

Nice post. Its quite learning.

Cool I like all the candle lighting

to bad about the no whiskey, but an enjoyable Christmas. Some traditions i see we Americans have modified but all in all a good time

I have never encountered such situations, but it seems to me that these people have very hard life.

Mary, I'm glad that you enjoyed these Christmas memories. Thank you for sharing your own memories of Christmas traditions in Ireland from years gone by. Mike of BallyC

From my Irish relative in County Sligo:

St. Bridget the Virgin? Take Two.

A visitor has made a welcome comment as to what evidence I have regarding St. Bridget’s status. There is no direct evidence, but there are two bits of deductive evidence which I consider compelling.

What direct evidence we have comes from the Lives of the Saints and these were written a hundred or more years after the death of the Saint by a successor with a view to strengthen the particular institutions claim to primacy. Copies exist many hundreds of years old with some fragments going back to the eighth century. They are, however, regarded as not very reliable and as being full of exaggeration and dubious miracles. In St. Bridget’s life we are told that she was a head-strong independent young princess in conflict with her father when she met St. Patrick and was converted from paganism.
Another powerful Celtic woman was Queen Maebh (Maeve) of Connaught. She personally assessed the prowess of one hundred princes before deciding to marry Ailill and then went to war with Ulster because Ailill had a better bull than she had. The story of that war is told in the Táin. In pagan Celtic Ireland it was impossible for a princess to reach adulthood and still be a virgin.

One of the series of legends we have are the Imramha. They are a series of curragh voyages of adventure and they are a bit like a James Bond film in that they follow a formula. Among others they usually visit the Island of Apples (apples were a symbol of abundance in Celtic times), the Island of Fire, the Island of Ice and the Island of Women. The Island of Women was considered to be full of magic and mystery. In the Voyage of Bran the women did not want the men to return so when they tried to row away after a year the women threw magic ropes that stuck to the curragh and hauled them back. One time a crew member grabbed the rope before it touched the curragh and with his sword Bran chopped off the crew member’s hand and so they escaped. However, when they got home a hundred years had passed and as soon as they stepped ashore they became very old men.

In another story there were three women for every man and the men found the women’s demands so exhausting that they went on strike. The strike was settled when it was agreed that the men would be allowed to hunt for one day a week. In another there were seven women to every man and with his crew half dead the skipper went back on his own to get a second crew to relive the pressure on his first crew. St Brendan the Navigator’s voyages are in this tradition and he visits the Island of Fire and the Island of Ice but unfortunately missed the Island of Women.

I have tried to imagine the monks in their freezing scriptoriums solemnly writing down the sexual antics contained in the oral legends.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a community which had the last echoes of a Gaelic past and the cult of St. Bridget. Her cult had absorbed much of the Celtic goddess Bríd the fertility goddess, mother earth the mother goddess. I was genuinely taken aback when I walked into the church in Portugal and saw St. Bridget the Virgin because I had an image of St. Bridget as a mother figure and giving a mother’s protection to Ireland.

So, other than lack of celtic emphasis on chastity, why do you think that she wasn't a virgin? You didn't exactly say.

I loved the xmas story we had a wonderfull christmas similar to this story what wonderfull memories even though we did not have too much we had roaqst duck for dinner and my mother roasting on a hearth fire with the iron oven and the lid put on top of the oven with the coals burning red to cook the top of the duck. I ate two dinners that day one with the local midwife and one at home. We also had the masipan fruit cake that i could not wait to get my hands on. I always missed from going to communion xmas morning because of the cake. Those was the days the best years of my life

My Sweeney line is from Crossmolina Co Mayo. Also have Connor Dooher Dougher Cawley Barrett McHale O'Boyle Donnolly Byron Birrane and a good many more surnames from Crossmolina area.