William Henry Donovan

Hello Ryan,

Most of the baptismal records are between two websites.  www.rootsireland.ie and www.irishgenealogy.ie

I looked at the first one and found 28 matches for William Donovan in Ireland in that timeframe.  I then looked at the other site and found about 4 records for year 1826.

The big problem is that you don't know his parent's names so it will be difficult to verify which one is yours.

If I may offer some advice?  You seem quite sure of his birth date and I would suggest that if it comes from a census record or a tombstone inscription you should keep a very open mind regarding same.

Most people who emigrated were illiterate and undocumented.  They didn't know how to spell their names and hadn't a clue as to what age they were.  At the port of arrival their names were recorded phonetically, their ages were only guessed, and this is the information that followed them for the rest of their lives.

The proof of this occured in 1909 when the old age pension was introduced into ireland.  People had to prove their ages and were forced to go through baptismal records to establish when they were born.  That is why there is such HUGE discrepancies between ages in the 1901 census and the 1911 census of Ireland.  Dates were found to be out by many many years in some cases.

We tend to forget that people back then had no social security numbers, and were not tracked from the cradle to the grave as we are today.  They didn't celebrate birthdays, as it was all they could do to clothe and feed themselves.  So I would advise that people bear this in mind when researching.

There is not much that we can do for you here on this side of the pond yet without some more information to go on.  I would suggest that you apply over there for his marriage certificate and his death certificate.  These documents should yield up some more information.  I would also suggest that you apply for his service record form the civil war.  These records sometimes contain quite a bit of information.  Have you looked up the newspaper archives to see if his death was listed?

Please get back to us if you have any more information to go on, we would love to help.   At the moment it is a needle in a haystack.

Kind regards,

Anne Dennehy

I want to say thank you so much for your help with this!  Honestly, I think I'm stuck!  Like your said we aren't even sure the spelling is right for when he immigrated to the  US.   I will be working on all sorts of other ways to be finding out where our heritage originates from!  I can hopefully get messages put to all these boards.  Thank you again for your advise and time!  It is greatly appreciated!

My grandfather is William H. Donovan, born 26 July 1824. His second marriage was to Mahala McGuines. They both died from "milk fever" in 1879. 

I'm looking for his parents and siblings.