Seeking help for County Donegal (Moville?) ancestors

Miriam, thank you SO much for your hard work on this;  I have been looking for quite some time, and you have filled in a few critical holes.  The…interesting?…thing about family research is that it seems to create as many questions as furnish answers when you finally have a breakthrough.

The record of marriage you located between Charles McGinnis—Maginnes—and Brigid Lafferty is definitely a breakthrough.  I am less sure about some or the other parts—may I share with you a little bit about the remaining mysteries for this couple, Charles McGinnis (about 1825-?) and Bridgid Lafferty (perhaps 1830-?)?

My dad’s father was one of the seven children of John and Catherine McGinnis Keogh: the children were Rose (1885), John (1886), Agnes (1887), twins Mary and Charles (1889), Catherine (1891) and my grandfather William (1894).  Through DNA test results on the Ancestry website, I have actually been matched to the descendants of five of the six siblings of my grandfather and exchanged communication with all of these cousins: I am certain that this information is correct.

Interesting that that my dad’s paternal grandmother Catherine McGinnis (born Feb 1856) was the oldest among siblings Catherine (1856), Mary (1858), John (1859) Charles P (1860), Rose (1863), Agnes (1867) and a baby boy (1870).  In other words, Catherine McGinnis named each of her own children after her siblings except for my grandfather, William.  

My dilemma was that Familysearch had a tree put together by one of the cousins that specified that Charles McGinnis’ wife was actually Margaret Dougherty, and I was unable to come up with any supporting document that would indicate when they married (presumably before 1856, since Catherine was the oldest).  

Another puzzle was that while Agnes and Rose McGinnis’ death certificates indicated that they were the daughters of Charles McGinnis and Margaret Dougherty, the death certificate for Catherine McGinnis Keogh indicated that her parents were Charles McGinnis and Bridgid Caverty.  

Quite confusing since this family unit—Charles and Margaret McGinnis and their children Catherine, Mary, John, Charles, Rose and Agnes—appears in SEVERAL US census listings that are each a decade apart.  I don’t believe that I am conflating two separate families, in other words.

Again, through reaching out to DNA matches, it eventually dawned on me that "Caverty"=Lafferty, and that Charles and Margaret Dougherty McGinnis were not my Catherine McGinnis's parents: I am matched quite closely to several Lafferty cousins from Donegal, and it has to be that Charles married Margaret Dougherty after Catherine was born.  So these siblings of Catherine McGinnis were in reality her half-siblings.

I have a baptismal record for Catherine McGinnis, daughter of Charles McGinnis, (sponsors Patrick McAteer and Agnes…McAvoy?  Had to read) dated Jul8 8, 1857 from Seapatrick, County Down.  Note that there is no mother listed—I wonder whether Brigid Lafferty McGinnis died at some point between Feb 1856, when Catherine was born, and July 1857?  Is Seapatrick too far to be plausible?

Other questions:

Is there an Irish marriage record between the widowed Charles McGinnis and his second wife (and mother of some of his children), Margaret Dougherty?  Presumably this would be between 1856 and, say, 1865 (nearer to the former).

It is uncertain whether the other siblings were actually born in the US—they may have been.  Did Charles return to Ireland after Brigid died, to marry Margaret Dougherty, or were they married in the US?  I have been unable to locate ANY records as to when the McGinnis/Lafferty/Dougherty family members migrated, on either the Irish or US side!

Again, many thanks—if you have any ideas about how to untangle these remaining puzzles, I would very extremely grateful for your help!

Best, Ray Keogh

p.s.  I can upload the US census/death records/etc. if you'd like to see them :)

Miriam, again, thank you for your help--you have gone well over and above what I was hoping for!  You have certainly given me a lot to think about--it is surely possible that there were older children who perished (perhaps spurring a new start in NY?).  I had no idea that these events were not recorded.

Thank you for looking over the Ancestry.com (that is, US) records: I do have a public tree, Keogh Family Tree that contains the various documents I've unearthed.  Some of the information that I have excavated has been shared with cousins I've encountered, so please don't take the appearance of some assertion in multiple trees as anything definitive--we may all have the identical mistakes :)

Agree that the US census forms are to be taken with a grain of salt, for eactly the reasons you mention.  I find them to be helpful as a guide, but I'm well aware that there is a great deal to be desired in terms of precision.  I have had good luck in some cases comparing DNA matches to records from other folks' family trees (and then communicating in writing).  Not foolproof, but gratifying when it hangs together.

The reason I think that Charles McGinnis' second wife was Margaret Dougherty is that, unlike Catherine McGinnis (whose death certificate lists her parents as Charles McGinnis and Bridgid Lafferty--again, which matches my pattern of DNA results), Mary and Agnes Ginnis' death certificates each call out Margaret Dougherty specifically.  I couldn't find a McGinnis/Dougherty US marriage record either, so this might remain something of a mystery. 

Not that this is necessarily relevant, but I also noticed that the 1870 NY census for the Ginnis family lists two Dougherty families in the same building: I wonder whether they were Margaret Dougherty's brothers.  I will attach these items as an FYI.  There seems to be a maximum spread between Catherine and Mary's ages in the various census-es of three years, so the second marriage likely dates to 1857 or 58.  It does appear that he was a rag dealer (at least once he reached NY)

I did find that 1850 New York Brooklyn Ward 7 record, incidentally, that lists an unmarried Charles Ginnis (b. 1830) along with Roger Ginnis (b. 1833)--a brother?--but I thought that this is kind of thin proof: not necessarily "My" Charles Ginnis, in other words.  I am not convinced that he came over as early as 1850, in other words.

Again, you've been a huge help to me, and I do appreciate your time and expertise

Best, Ray

Hi Miriam

Wow, this is more complicated than I had imagined!  Seriously, thank you for your perspective: I honestly don't think I would have EVER figured this out.

You are probably right about Mary being Brigid's daughter, rather than Margaret's; based on the baptismal document you found it looks like she was born in 1857, not 1858.  Again, what was throwing me off was the fact that her death certificate calls out Margaret rather than Brigid as Mary's mother.  Mary WAS a single lady: perhaps the survivors (nieces/nephews?) were misinformed.

I guess what led me to discount Grace as a possibility is the June 15, 1860 NY census (attached) that shows the Charles/Margaret McGinnis family living in NY, with a 10 month old baby (John, b. August 1859?) who must've perished, as he does not appear in any of the later census documents.  Presumably John and Grace would've been quite close in age as well (if she was baprised in November 1860, presumably she was only born shortly beforehand)

Do you think that any of these kids could have been Margaret's--that is, that perhaps Charles as a widower (and bereaved father of the late Grace) married Margaret--a widow--and raised their assorted children (and any later-born babies) as siblings?

I do notice that there are FOUR Dohertys that appear on the two pages from the Parish register (attached) for Mary's March 1857 baptism, so perhaps it's not too much of a stretch to think that Charles and Margaret could have know one another when he was married to Brigid, which might help with a rapid remarriage. 

On a related note, I was also interested to see that the wedding record you unearthed for Biddy Lafferty and Charles McGinnis had Neil Lafferty as a witness not only for THIS couple, but for several others on the page.  You wonder if this was a relative, or just some old parishioner who liked weddings :)

One more random observation: in some of these documents Catherine could have been as early as 1854....maybe it was conveniently switched to 1856 to obscure the fact that she was older than her husband (John Keogh was born in 1856) :) ??

Again, you've been tremendous--thank you, and I hope that you have a wonderful weekend

Best, Ray

Dear Miriam

Once again, I know that you are quite right—you can’t tell with a high degree of certainty whether the relationships that you ASSUME exists between 3rd or 4th cousins are necessarily tied to the common ancestors you think they are, but I have tried to “stack the deck” using as much available evidence as much as possible (please don’t laugh—I am an amateur!):

I have been building my family tree for many years now, and have found relatively closely related cousins the old-fashioned way: that is, I know the names of my grandparents and g-grandparents from family sources (that is, from my own parents and grandparents), and have managed to find cousins who have these same folks in their ancestry trees.  I then have written to these folks and have been fortunate in that I’ve gotten many responses—not a PERFECT response rate, but enough—confirming the information from their own family knowledge, so that I know that these relationships are correct.

From there, I eventually submitted to a DNA test and have found that many of these same people were also tested: seeing that the matches I imagined were solid confirmed by DNA “hits” has given me a sense of confidence that I am on the right track.

I have created groups for each of the g-grandparents, which include members of these confirmed DNA matches.  Ancestry.com is constantly identifying new matches: once a relatively close new match that is unfamiliar to me is tagged, I look to see the “shared matched” that exist.  For example, if new match John Smith matches matches from my Dad’s side of the family—specifically also sharing common matches with his father’s mother (McGinnis)—I will then go into John Smith’s family tree to see if I can find the surnames that I believe could be our common point of connection.  Understand, of course, that this occurs in a very small percentage of the identified connections—ther matches to date include something like 30,000 distant relatives and more like 500 relatively close relatives: my confirmed group is probably on the order of 100 individuals.

What I discovered with this system is that there are many people who SHOULD have matched through McGinnis ancestry, but don’t.  Looking over the family trees for many, many of these, I eventually noticed that Lafferty was a common thread.  I remembered the death record for Catherine McGinnis Keogh (which had “Brigid Caverty” listed as her mother), and came up with a new theory that this must have been Brigid Lafferty.

The ancestry DNA also suggests a relatively strong Donegal connection—I happen to know my Dad’s OTHER side as well as my mom’s entire ancestry (they are all from the center and West of Ireland), so my theory was that these McGinnis/Lafferty folks must’ve been from the North.

Again, not a perfect chain of logic, but this gave me a place to start.  As I noted before, I was aware of this McGinnis family in NY that had precisely the same names as my grandfather’s siblings: it HAD to be the right one.  What confused me terribly is that I couldn’t find any kind of paper trail for this family earlier than that 1860 record. 

Of course you were able to discern that a marriage record did exist between Charles McGinnis and Biddy Lafferty dating from 8 Feb 1853, in Culdaff, Co. Donegal

Taken with all of this other evidence, I believe that Brigid Lafferty and Charles McGinnis are the parents of Catherine McGinnis, again, due to Catherine's death certificate.

However, I am not sure which of the the later children of Charles McGinnis--Mary (1858), John (1859), Charles (1860), Rose (1863), Agnes (1867) and a baby boy who perished--were the children of Charles McGinnis' second wife, Margaret Dougherty.  The death records of Agnes and Mary indicate that they were the daughters of Charles McGinnis and Margaret Dougherty.

With your help, Irish records for the baptisms for the following children of Brigid Lafferty and Charles McGinnis have been identified:

Grace (baptised Nov 1860, residence Poenagh)

Margery (baptised Jan 1859, residence Bredagh Glen)

Mary (baptised Mar 1857, residence Poenagh)

Roseann (baptised Dec 1855, residence Bredagh Glen)

Catherine (baptised Jan 1854, residence Poenagh)

It’s odd that the baptism addresses go back and forth: I wonder whether this could have been two different families.

There is also this troublesome June 15 1860 NY census record for Charles McGinnis and whom I thought was his second wife, Margaret Dougherty--the family then consisted of Catherine (listed as 6), Mary (3) and John (10 months old)

This DOES appear to be the same family that appears in multiple census forms as Catherine, Mary (1857), Charles (1860), Rose (1863), Agnes (1867): the question is whether Grace, Margery and Roseann perished, whether John could have been the son of Margaret Dougherty (that is, that they were a blended family), and whether baby John perished as well.  

[This June 1860 census is schedule 1 of the 2nd Division of the 13th ward of NY City, page 35].

An odd coincidence I discovered on my wife’s side of the family is that her grandfather Oskar was actually the second baby (from a large family) given that name: in other words, a baby named Oskar died, and the next male baby—“Our” Oskar—was given the same name as his deceased sibling.  I suppose that it is possible that Brigid Lafferty and Charles McGinnis’ children Grace, Margery and Roseann could have died and Margaret Dougherty and Charles gave Roseann’s name to a subsequent newborn, but it doesn’t seem….likely?

Again, I do appreciate your perspective—may I ask how, based upon your experience investigating Irish families, you would put the pieces together?

Best, Ray