Edward O’Reilly aka Edmund Reily was the great-great-grandfather of Robert de Niro the movie star. Edward aka Edmund Reily and his wife Margaret were from County Tipperary. They emigrated to America during the Great Irish Famine (1845-51) and settled in Syracuse, NY, USA.
Their son Dennis Francis O'Reilly (1866-1952) married Mary F Burns (1868-1924) and also raised their family in Syracuse. (Mary was the New-York born daughter of Irish immigrants John & Mary Burns).
Robert's grandmother Helen M. O’Reilly (1899-1999) was the US-born descendant of Irish immigrants on both sides. Her grandparents left Ireland for America during the Famine era of the mid-19th century. In 1920, Helen O'Reilly married Henry M De Niro (1897-1976) a second-generation Italian World War I veteran. Pictured above is their son Robert De Niro Sr. aka Robert Henry de Niro (1922-1993) who went on to become one of the most famous American abstract expressionist painters of the 20th century. Helen and her family are interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in Syracuse.
In 1962, when Robert 'Bobby' De Niro was a teenager, he hitchhiked around the Emerald Isle for two weeks on a quest to track down his long-lost relatives. He had no success at that time. Recently US-based genealogists were able to trace the O'Reilly's back to County Tipperary. De Niro stars as crime boss Frank Sheeran in Martin Scorsese’s latest picture The Irishman (2019).
Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran [1920-2003] was an Irish-American mobster alleged to have been involved in the infamous 1975 disappearance and death of labour union leader Jimmy Hoffa.
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| Date of Birth | 1st Jan 1830 (circa) | |
| Date of Death | 1st Jan 1870 (circa) | |
