WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING AND WHAT HAVE I FOUND.

 

I have been doing nothing much, or at least I did not think so.   Running out of ideas of things to write has been what I was doing.

In December I had written about Joanne,  Ellen Mortel’s mother, her last name is Condon.  Which I had suspected and now I know for sure.   A subscription to ROOTS IRELAND was another thing I purchased, and I tried it for one month.  Needless to say I have been working over time with this site; printing, documenting and researching.

One of my biggest brick walls in my Irish research has been the O’Rourke Family,  I have been searching high and low for Denis O’Rourke and his wife Mary Griffith.  A fellow Blogger, Dara, of BLACK RAVEN GENEALOGY has been my mentor for searching Irish records.

She suggested using variants of the names, searching with the fathers name and children's name.   She came up with Dionysius, instead of Denis.   Well low and behold, that is where Denis was hiding, with his Latin Name, in the parish of Effin and Gamenderk in County Limerick.  Hiding with him was his wife Maria (Mary) Griffin, plus Daniel, Patrick, James, Miriam (Mary), and Bridget.  There was also a brother John (the eldest child), but the records started in 1843 and a number of the first pages were unreadable. 

It seems the biggest problem with the records is the transcriptions,  I found the microfilm of the National Library of Ireland to be the clearest’; they also have a mechanism to enlarge the pages, lighten or darken and  reserve an image.   With the writing larger it is easier to read.

Today I was going through the entire roll of microfilm and what did I find but my great great grandparents, Patrick Mortel and Joanne Condon, at the baptism of their daughter, Ellen Mortel, my great grandmother and Patricks’ future wife.

This leads me to believe that they had known each other, and perhaps Patrick came first to the USA and sent for Ellen.   They married in Boston MA in 1874.