Hanna/Cardwell Families

As you have probably already discovered, marriage records from the early 1800s generally don’t record the couple’s parent’s names. If you know where they lived (ie what townland), and if the family were farmers, it may be possible to look for land records (tithe applotment records, leases etc) but if they were agricultural labourers and weavers it’s a lot harder. Killyman’s Church of Ireland records go back to the 1740s, so that's a help. You could go through them and extract all the Hanna births, deaths and marriages and see if you can link them together but it’d be quite a tall order. Most people find it pretty hard to get back earlier than 1800 with Irish reserach, due to the general lack of records.

I am descended from Thomas Hanna b. 1838 who we believe is son of Robert Hanna.  He married Mary Anne Cranston.   They came to New York.  The story was that they later lived in Tyrone but in a Killeyman Parish town of Derrylee that was actually just over the border in Armagh.  Their children were born in Coalisland.  Has anyone in your family done DNA testing at ancestry.com?  I have and am there to be matched.  

We think Robert also had a son William b. 1830 and a daughter Eliza b. 1841.  I think they lived at times in both counties.  

Virginia, did anyone in your family do a DNA test yet?

Hanna/Cardwell

I have done my mitochondrial DNA, and ethnicity DNA. I have no family members that I am aware of beside two of my sister that did DNA as well. Very frustrating indeed, and there are a lot of French names that my ethnicity DNA connected with but I do not know of any of those names. 

My gr grandfather William Robert Hanna was born in Canada, his father Samuel was born in Ireland. There was a newspaper posting in 1939 of a Hanna family picnic and in it stated that the Hanna family was from the Limerick area. 

The Hanna's were weavers so guess it would be hard to trace back in Ireland. 

Vroot