ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s not unusual for your “Roots & Branches” columnist to offer a bit of advice here and there to questions that I field and I customarily will ask for feedback if researchers have a breakthrough regarding their query.

And it’s gratifying that a fair number of people replay and indicate success in their missions.

What’s not so usual is when I get a reply a couple of years or more later, as was the case with Kevin Kelleher of Hollidaysburg.

Kelleher had asked for advice in May 2016 looking for the birth of his great-grandfather Daniel Kelleher, supposedly from Ireland.

Since I’m not an Irish genealogy expert, I pointed Kelleher in the direction of several websites and gave usual rejoinder about letting me know if he met with success.

Well, did he ever! “What happened between then and now is almost too amazing to be true,” Kelleher said.

Kelleher interviewed his Aunt Norita, the current oldest living member of the family. “She always had interest in her Irish ancestry since all four of her grandparents emigrated from Ireland,” he said. “She remembered being told that her grandfather Daniel and his brother Cornelius emigrated from Ireland and lived and worked in Toledo, Ohio.

Norita’s reminiscences included that Daniel married a woman Annie Kelley who also emigrated from Ireland and they had one child Hugh born in 1902, two years before Daniel died. Annie remarried and they moved to Pennsylvania. Cornelius never married and remained in Toledo and Norita recalls that her father received an inheritance with Cornelius died in 1936.

With that “word of mouth” information, Kevin built an online family tree and also posted a query on Ireland XO “Reaching Out” message board. “A couple years later I get an e-mail from a John F. Kelleher from Ireland,” Kevin said.

John said he did a Google search for two brothers Daniel and Cornelius and Toledo, Ohio. John remembered hearing about two brothers leaving the farm where he was raised. 

“I am interested in getting more information about Cornelius and Daniel Kelleher as two granduncles of mine and possibly Michael emigrated from Schull, County Cork, to Toledo, Ohio, about that time. One of them did not get married and died in the early 1930s.”

While there were a lot of immigrants named Daniel and Cornelius Kelleher, writing that one brother never married seemed like a match to Kevin.  “I responded telling him what Norita remembered but I never thought to mention that her father Hugh received an inheritance when Cornelius died,” Kevin said. “After a couple of e-mail exchanges, John says the reason he remembers the information about the brothers because when one of the brothers died his father and three other family members received inheritance money in Schull, Ireland.”

And that’s how the trans-Atlantic connection was made, which will be more fully profiled in next week’s “Roots & Branches.”