Clare Parish Register information in American Parish records

[ndhockey]

I hope someone here can suggest something that will help us get past a stone wall in a New York parish. We researching a fairly large group of people who wound up in Ellicottville, New York in roughly the 1855 time period. We have discovered handwritten notes taken by a descendant of some of these people when she was allowed access to the parish registers in the early 1980s. At the time the notes were taken, the person had limited knowledge of her ancestry, so only noted names that she thought were part of her family. In the course of our research, we have learned that a good portion of this New York town actually came from the Doonbeg area of Co. Clare. Names that we have traced back to the Doonbeg area include Blackall, Duhan, Nehill, Roche, Kelly, McInerney, Marrinan, Russell, Falsey and Scanlon. There was a vast amount of intermarrying amongst these families in Ellicottville. In the notes, we discovered that the parish in Ellicottville contained information about baptisms and confirmations in the Clare parishes that would predate extant parish registers in Clare. As an example, the Ellicottville register contained information that Catherine Blackall had been baptised in Co. Clare on 11 Nov 1829 and gave the name of the Bishop who confirmed her. We've found a number of similar references to other individuals in these handwritten notes.

Given the lack of extant registers for this time period in Clare, it is our belief that such information should be extracted from the parish records in Ellicottville and repatriated to the appropriate areas in Co. Clare, and the rest of Ireland. To date, we have been denied all access to registers in Ellicottville, told to write the parish and the secretary would assist us when she had time. The one response we have received from the secretary, more than 2 months after the original request, happened to include some individuals found in the handwritten notes and did not reflect the information contained in the notes, which was the maiden name of the mother found in the record of a marriage for one of her children, so we suspect the parish secretary is not even looking at the actual records, rather is merely accessing a set of transcriptions made by a former parish secretary a number of years ago.

Would anyone have any suggestions as to how to best to approach this problem? To me, is is simply incomprehensible that such historical information pertaining to Co. Clare, or indeed anywhere in Ireland, is being withheld from us, rather than being shared with said Irish parishes that may have NO records dating back that far.

Cindy Wood

[Kevin J. O'Brien]

Cindy,
Your message was very interesting. I live near Ellicotville, NY but have not done any research in Ellicottville. I have been to the Catholic Cemetery in town and noticed all the Clare names on the stones. I am a member of the Buffalo Irish Genealogical Society (BIGS) and will bring it to their attention. I will be meeting a few members tonight and see what we can do about harvesting the Clare data
Kevin J. O'Brien, Buffalo, NY