McGuinness

The townland of Brackaville is in Donaghenry parish. Their RC parish records go back to 1822 (with some gaps). Have you searched them for possible baptisms? The records are on-line free on the nli site. https://registers.nli.ie

I found the marriage of Thomas and Mary on 16th November 1852 in the Clonoe parish, but I'm having trouble reading the text. I'm unsure of the birth year of each of them or the parish they were baptised in. Do you have access to any sort of Griffiths report from that general area from that time?

Sorry 1853.

ADaly,

The marriage record is in Latin. Translated it says: Joined in matrimony, Thomas McGinnis & Mary Coreran. Witnesses: Charles (the surname is illegible to me) & Brigid Devlin.

The priest’s fee was 15 shillings which is an indicator of their circumstances. Others were paying 10 shillings and others £1. So they were middle of the range financially.

Griffiths Valuation is on-line. See link below. I see Thomas McGuinness listed there in a labourers/weaver’s cottage - plot 3(b)(c).

http://www.askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/index.xml?action=nameSearch

If you want you can trace that forward to see how long he lived there, using the Valuation Revision records on the PRONI website:

https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/information-and-services/search-archives-online/valuation-revision-books

I see this Joseph McGinnis living in Brackaville in 1901:

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Tyrone/Tullyniskane/Brackaville/1737161/

He married Susanna Cullen in 1897 and his father was James McGinnis, a labourer, so can’t say whether there is any connection with your family.

https://civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/images/marriage_returns/marriages_1897/10469/5812543.pdf

There is a tree on Ancestry (Janesftw Backup 001) which appears to have Thomas, Mary and their children. It says Thomas was born in Coalisland in 1826.  However some of the other information seems a bit unreliable to me. It has him marrying in Ohio in 1843, then living in Glasgow in the 1851 census, Yorkshire in 1871, Baltimore in 1881, Rutherglen (Scotland) in 1891 and Westchester USA in 1900. That might be correct but it would a fairly unusual pattern of moves. Mary is shown as born in Ireland in 1829. If she married in Ohio in 1843 she was 14. Some of the information on that tree may not be 100% accurate. But you could search the baptism records to see if you can find Thomas or Mary’s births around the years given. They probably came from the area around where they married, but there’s no easy way of determining exactly where they were born from Irish sources.  If they died in the US (as the tree suggests) then their place of birth etc may be on their death certificate, but it’s not something routinely recorded on Irish marriage or death documentation. And a US death certificate might also give you their parents names.

You ask about a “report from that general area from that time.” For a good description of life in the area in the 1830s, you could read the Ordnance Survey memoirs. These were compiled on the instructions of the Duke of Wellington (then Prime Minister) primarily for taxation purposes. So a bit like the Doomsday Book. They were compiled parish by parish, and describe the inhabitants, their occupations, pastimes, habits, they analyse the various different denominations by number, and report on health, schooling, seasonal migration patterns as well as permanent migration patterns. And so on. A typical parish contains about 20 to 30 pages of information and some drawings. They are well worth reading if you want to get a feel for life there at that time. (It’s probably the most detailed contemporaneous summary that exists from that period).

There are copies on the bookshelves in PRONI’s main research room in Belfast and Omagh library should have a copy too. If you can’t get there, you can order a copy from the Ulster Historical Foundation. If you e-mail them with details of the parish(es) you are interested in, they’ll send you the relevant volume(s). Generally there are 3 or 4 adjacent parishes in each volume. I think they are between £5 and £10 per volume depending whether it’s old stock or newer reprints.

https://www.booksireland.org.uk