Hi Dennis
It’s good that you found those great great grandparents, Thomas O’Brien and Mary Mungovan, who lived in Tromra West about two hundred years ago, and that you found baptism records for three of their children.
I’m sure you have done all of the following searching already yourself and found that it yielded nothing – just like I did. But I will go through it anyway.
I looked for Thomas in Tromra, east, and Tromra, west, in Griffith’s Valuation (1856) but found no O’Brien. There are several Muggevins, which is the same name as Mungovan. It may be that Thomas was a labourer and worked for farmers, rather than leasing any land for himself.
Civil registration of deaths did not become law until 1864, so if Thomas died before that date, there will be no record of his death. Likewise Mary. If Thomas died after that date, his death would have been registered in Cragaknock registration office, which belongs to Kilrush Union, so I went to
www.irishgenealogy.ie, and had a go at finding the registration of Thomas’ death in Kilrush, but almost all the results I got did not show the image of the record, which is what I needed. Some day these images will become available – soon, hopefully.
The 1901 census (
www.census.nationalarchives.ie) shows a family of O’Briens in Tromra West (Kilmurry DED). They are John O’Brien, aged 20, and his younger brothers and sisters. But they are not descendants of Thomas. By looking at records on irishgenealogy.ie, I found that their mother, Eliza, had died in 1898, a widow aged 40, and their father, John, had died in 1897 aged 62. So he was born about 1835. He was a widower when he married Eliza (Crehan from Mutton Island) in Mullogh chapel in 1880. The record of the marriage shows that his father was John O’Brien, a labourer. That John O’Brien would have been a contemporary and a near neighbour of your great great grandfather, Thomas O’Brien.
Then I looked to see if there were any records for Elizabeth and Margaret. If they remained in Ireland and married, those marriages would most likely have been entered in the Kilmurry Ibrickane register of marriages 1863 – 1876:
https://registers.nli.ie/registers/vtls ... 1/mode/1up. Starting at page 36 of the microfilm, which is the first page for 1863, I looked through the 13 pages of records which brought me up to 1876. On the right-hand side of the very first page I saw the marriage of a Lot Keane and a Margaret O’Brien in 1864. Unfortunately the priest who entered the record did not give any address for either of them, so there is nothing to indicate that it is your Margaret. I looked at the civil registration of the marriage and saw that it was registered in Kilrush in 1864, but the image is not available to view online, which again is very frustrating – that image would have given you the name of the father of the bride. I think Lot Keane must have come from another parish – at least I don’t see any baptisms of children of Lot Keane and Margaret O’Brien in the Kilmurry baptisms recorded between 1864 and 1870. But it’s better not to bother about Lot until we find out (sometime) if that Margaret is your Margaret. There is an entry for another Margaret O’Brien on page 49. This Margaret married James Donohoe in 1876. This time the image of the civil record is available and shows she is from Clohaninchy and that her father is John O’Brien. So she is definitely not your Margaret. I found nothing at all for an Elizabeth O’Brien – I did a word search of the transcriptions of the baptism records for each year 1864 - 1880 –
http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclar ... rowley.htm, but found no Elizabeth. If she married, it must be to someone living in another parish.
Sheila