John Mcanally : Short Biography

Comments

If John was born in or around Drumsough, there are no baptism records for that period so it will be difficult to trace him. Assuming he was RC, the Drummaul baptism & marriage records start in 1825. They are on-line on the nil site. I assume you have checked them. So if he married there it was before 1825. No easy way of tracing his family with any records for that period.

Elwyn, IrelandXO Volunteer ☘

Thursday 4th June 2020 04:13PM

Thanks for your response.  He was definitely Roman Catholic.  In reading other posts, he was probably married in another county or parish, as I understand that marriages usually took place in the bride's parish.  Is there some way of tracking a Sloan-McAnally marriage on line or is the obvious option to fan out into local adjoining parishes and check their available registers.  I agree with you that he was not married in Drummaul R.C. parish.  Any possible advice as to where to look next?

Gerard Boyer

Thursday 4th June 2020 04:28PM

You are correct that it was tradition to marry in the bride’s church. In the 1820s most courtship was done on foot so you usually married someone who lived fairly nearby (unless you were in a profession/trade that involved some mobility eg a soldier, mason or policeman but they would have been in a minority).

You can use this site to see what the adjacent RC parishes to Drummaul are:

https://www.johngrenham.com/browse/counties/rcmaps/antrimrc.php#maps/

You can ignore the parish of Antrim. It was only created in 1873. It was hived off from Drummaul as a result of population growth, so pre 1873 records for Antrim are in Drummaul.

Your problem is that many of the adjacent parishes don’t have records for the period you need.

Most RC records are on-line on Ancestry and also on the nli site. If you have checked them without success, then the conclusion I’d come to was they married somewhere like Duneane (records start in 1834). No easy way round that.

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 is running an Ulster DNA project in conjunction with FTDNA and can offer testing kits at a reduced price. http://www.nifhs.org (Go to DNA project on the website).

Elwyn, IrelandXO Volunteer ☘

Thursday 4th June 2020 05:13PM

Thanks again.  I have had my DNA test and have checked out ThruLines.  There may be some help on the Sloane side.  I'm in the process of correcting the incorrect information that others have posted on the McNeely side. Now, what about the following:

The name connection in Drummaul parish

 

This is a hypothetical reconstruction of John McAnally’s (McNally’s) family based on strong naming co-relations with his own family in Canada and that of his possible parents and siblings in Ireland.

John McNeely (eventual Canadian spelling) and Mary Sloane left Ireland sometime just before 1828 or 1829.  All of their children were born in Canada.  Here is how they named their children in Canada: Daniel, Mary, John, Catherine, James, Anne, Thomas and Francis.

Following this assumption, John McNeely’s father would have been Daniel, Mary Sloane’s mother would have been Mary, Mary Sloane’s father would have been John, John McNeely’s mother would have been Catherine, the third son should have been John, but that name was already taken, so we believe that James was John McNeely’s eldest brother, the third daughter should have been Mary, but as that was taken, Anne would have been Mary Sloane’s eldest daughter, and then the names Thomas and Francis were used but for whom?

Let us now examine the Drummaul R.C. parish records from 1826 on, particularly for the locality known as Drumsough (spelled Drimsoo in those days)

April 5, 1826: a child Daniel is baptized of Francis McNally and Betty McAlister

Sept 8, 1828: Donald McNally is married to Betty Mcashin

Feb 18, 1829: Catherine is baptized of Thomas McNally and Sally Gavin

Aug 16, 1829: Daniel is baptized of Daniel McNally Jr and Mary Mcalister

Sep 27, 1829: Donald is baptized of Donald McAnally and Elizabeth Mcashin

Aug 17, 1831: Mary Ann is born to Michael Boyle and Catherine McNally

Oct 30, 1831: Thomas is born to Thomas McNally and Sally Gavin (Antrim)

 

There seemed to be so many familiar names in such a small place.  Both father and son Daniel McNeely are tenant farmers in Drumsough at the time.  There may still be descendants in the area who know the story.  How might I pursue this lead?  There still exists a R.C. parish church in Randallstown.

Gerard Boyer

Sunday 7th June 2020 04:34AM

You say there seem to be so many familiar names in a small place. That’s correct. Families tended to use the same simple pool of names for generation after generation. I’d be careful about relying too heavily on the naming tradition though. Apart from the fact that not all families used it, there are many things that can skew it. Obvious examples being children who died young. Not only does that mean things like the child that was apparently the first born, wasn’t, but they often re-used a dead child’s name for the next child of the same sex, so the name re-appears, but out of order. And if the father was Daniel, and one or even both grandfathers were also named Daniel, you aren’t going to name 3 sons Daniel. And so on.

Yes there is certainly still a Catholic church in Randalstown. Very much in business. The parish priest is a very affable man. You can e-mail him on the attached link plus they have a facebook page where perhaps you can post a message:

http://www.stmacnissirandalstown.com

The church doesn’t have any additional records to those on the nli site. In the parish office, they have put the nli records on a spreadsheet which makes them easy to search but there are no other records from that era. They are quite strict about data protection and won’t give details of events within the past 100 years (though that’s usually easy enough to find from other public sources).

If your ancestors were farmers then that’s good because they often stayed in the same place. The population explosion in the 1800s plus mechanisation on farms meant that an increasing number of people were chasing a diminishing number of labouring jobs, so labourers often moved away to places where there were plenty of jobs eg Scotland and England. Or further afield.

A word of caution about what people here know. Because we broadly know where our ancestors came from there isn’t the same interest in genealogy as there is in the US, Canada etc. Consequently the average family here can only go back about 3 generations to say around 1900. After they they get a bit hazy. Unless you find a family where someone has done the family tree, it’s most unlikely that they’ll know of relations who left nearly 200 years ago. But there’s no harm in asking.

Drumsough remains a largely agricultural area, though nowadays there are a lot of people who commute to work in Antrim, Ballymena and other nearby towns. The population in the 1901 census was 252 people in 59 houses. See:

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Antrim/Sharvogues/Drum…

There were about 7 McAnally/McNally households there then. Mostly farming as you would expect plus one also worked for the railway company. (The branch line from the junction at Drumsough to Randalstown and Cookstown ran through the townland and so presumably one of the farmers operated crossing gates or something like that. The Randalstown branch closed in 1960 but the main line north to Ballymena remains open and well used).

Regarding spelling, Drumsough is pronounced Drimsoo, or Drumsoo perhaps. (The “gh” is silent as in “though”). It was often written phonetically, so the gh disappeared. Background here which contains around 20 different spellings:

http://www.placenamesni.org/resultdetails.php?entry=5418

Gaelic (ie Irish) is a language where words change their spelling quite significantly depending on the case, sex and in the case of people, marital status, being used. (For example, the forename Seamus in the nominative becomes Hamish in the vocative). Those sorts of changes, combined with the fact that most of our ancestors were barely literate, meant that the idea of a single consistent spelling for a surname or place name was a concept quite unknown to them. Expect the spelling to vary is the only guidance we can give.

Elwyn, IrelandXO Volunteer ☘

Sunday 7th June 2020 09:08AM

The McAnally family lived next door to my Doyle family on Barnish Rd Drummaul. Happy to see if there is a connection

Monday 6th June 2022 10:50AM

Thank you for taking an interest.  I am prepared to reimburse any MacAnally who would be willing to take a DNA test.  That would determine a definite connection.  If you require any more information from this end, please let me know.  John McNeely is my great-great-grandfather.

Gerard Boyer

Monday 6th June 2022 01:56PM