The Flaherty Family of Truxton, NY

This paper follows the children of Patrick Flaherty and Catherin Phelan and their families. The Flaherty, O’Connor, Herlihy and Savage families will be described in detail. When possible an attempt will be made to trace these families back to their points of origin in Ireland.

The patriarch and matriarch of the Flaherty family were Patrick Flaherty and Catherine Phelan. Patrick was born in Ireland in 1824 and he came to the US by 1860. Catherine was also born in Ireland and she came to the US in 1862. As far as can be determined they arrived in America alone and left their families back in Ireland. Patrick’s parents were Michael Flaherty and Catherine Phelan. Catherine’s parents were Martin Phelan and Catherine Phelan. These names were found on Patrick and Catherine’s death certificates.

Patrick and Catherine Flaherty had five children: John (1866), Nora (1867), Michael (1869), Mary Ann (1871) and Grace (1876). By 1870 Patrick Flaherty had a farm on West Hill road out of the village of Truxton which was worth $2,800. Nora died in infancy on August 5, 1869. Mary Ann died on March 17, 1888. Patrick Flaherty died on November 11, 1894, leaving Catherine, two sons and a daughter. Catherine herself died on February 8, 1912. All four are buried in St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Truxton.   LINK

The Nix Families of Truxton

This paper began with the gathering of all the Nix entries in the Baptismal, Marriage and Death records for St. James Catholic Church in Cazenovia, NY which included Pompey, Fabius and Truxton and Cuyler as mission churches in the latter half of the 19^th century. These names were then organized into families and the sponsors and witnesses compared to determine any family relationships. Next the census records for the Truxton area were searched from 1850 through 1920. This yielded some more insight into the family relationships and identified additional children that weren’t found in the church records. It was also possible to use the census records to see which families were living close together. The children could be followed as they moved out of their parent’s homes as they went to work on neighboring farms and then sometimes married and started families of their own.

Most of the Nix families found in Truxton from 1850 - 1870 were related as brothers in two different families. In addition, the Nix families were related by marriage to the Phelan, Quinn, O’Donnell, Melody, O’Hara, Griffin and McGrath families.  

Ultimately it was possible to separate these individuals into two families from two different parishes in Co. Limerick, Ireland.     LINK

Madison County McGraths

On July 10th 2000 I found a post from Pat Bird (state of Washington) on the Tipperary list on the Internet. She was looking for descendants of Phillip and Margaret Ryan of Gleninchnaveigh, Co. Tipperary. This opened a virtual floodgate of new information. Pat led me to Dick Barr who was assembling the family history of Phillip and Margaret Ryan. Dick and Pat informed me that there wasn’t a Catholic Church in Pompey in the 1850’s and so people went to Cazenovia for the sacraments. This led me to the Madison County web page and to an amazing man named Daniel Weiskotten. He was doing an extensive cemetery project on ALL the cemeteries in three of the towns in Madison County (Cazenovia, Fenner and Nelson). From his work I found out that there were 21 McGraths buried in the St. James Cemetery in Cazenovia, NY.

Valuable information came from Dick Barr’s extensive work with the names from the Baptism and Marriage records of St. James Church, Cazenovia, NY. The 1855 State Census, Town of Cazenovia, Madison County, NY (heads of families only) had been transcribed and edited by Daniel H. Weiskotten and posted on his web site.

The initial construction of the McGrath family trees in this paper was based on one or two census records, baptism and marriage records and the list of burials in St. James Cemetery. That was over 24 years ago and the amount of online records has increased tremendously during the intervening years. It was time to update the information on these families. One of the McGrath families, Matthew McGrath and Bridget Donnelly, could be traced back to a specific location in Ireland — Johnstown, Co. Meath.    LINK

Moyaliff to Maple Ridge

“McGraths, Ryans and Gleesons in Lewis Co.”

This is the main paper on the page and it has been updated with more info on Walter McGrath, son of Thomas McGrath and Mary Kennedy. There are also more details on Patrick Gleason’s family.

“The Tarpy Families of Martinsburg, NY.”
While working on another paper a large amount of information was developed on the Tarpy families in Martinsburg. These have been placed in this separate document. In the beginning there was just James Tarpy and his newly wed bride, Ellen Gleason, who together had followed a number of other Pompey residents to Maple Ridge in 1860. As the effort to sort out the various Maple Ridge families and the possible connections among them proceeded, the number of Tarpy families began to multiply. All of the Tarpy families, with the exception of James Tarpy, the person who started this line of research, were from the same area of Co. Mayo, Ireland and they arrived in Martinsburg after James Tarpy arrived at Maple Ridge.

“The Trail of James McGrath” and “James McGrath — The DNA Story”
James McGrath and his family have been described in the main paper on this page but his origins and connections to the other McGrath families at Maple Ridge remains a mystery. These two papers describe the continuing search for his origins.

“Thomas McGrath of Moyaliff”
In this paper there is a significant amount of information on the descendants of Thomas McGrath’s daughter Catherine McGrath Smithling. There was too much material to fit easily in the main document. The story of Thomas McGrath of Moyaliff has been written in three waves. His journey from Pompey, NY to Maple Ridge, Martinsburg in Lewis County took form in 2007-2008. Sometime later his son Michael was traced into the Utica area. Thomas’s daughters Catherine and Ellen proved more difficult as is the usual case with women who marry and change their names. By late 2019 Catherine and Ellen were found — it was Ellen’s obituary that was able to tie all the pieces together. Catherine had married into the very large Smithling family.
This paper contains the entire research done on the extensive Smithling family, which would have overwhelmed the primary story in the main Maple Ridge paper mentioned above. Some of the material in this paper has already appeared in the larger paper The McGraths, Ryan and Gleesons of Maple Ridge, Lewis County, New York. It was decided to repeat the material here so that the entire story would be in one place.

“Dunton List” and the “Powlin List.”

Also added to the page are two cemetery lists which contain transcriptions from the gravestones in St. Patrick’s Cemetery at Maple Ridge.

The Families of Cortland and Onondaga Counties

"The Gleason Families"
These families were documented while searching for Gleason connections in the Coming to America — The Early Years paper (not published yet). The plan was to look for family connections, descendants and where possible trace family origins. Although it was determined that none of these Gleasons were connected to the Gleasons of Moyaliff, the document still provides an enormous amount of information on these Gleason families. In some cases it was possible to trace individuals to their origins back in Ireland.

Old Mattydale

"Tracing Nellie Gleason’s Relatives"
The fictitious young Irish ghost, Nellie Gleason, was blended into the real Michael Gleason family for the purpose of writing The Young Ghost Searchers. This Michael Gleason actually died in a shooting incident while in the book he was supposed to have been murdered. This document searches for the actual family after Michael’s death and establishes their connections to other Irish families. Although the Gleason branch of the family hit a brick wall, it was possible to reconstruct the family tree of Michael Gleason’s wife, Sarah O’Connell, and to trace her family back to Co. Clare, Ireland.

The Long Families

"The Descendants of John and Sarah Lynch"
In 2023 two new grandchildren of Frank Lynch and Katherine Long were identified. They were the daughters of the Frank Lynch and Katherine Long’s youngest child: Frank A. Lynch (1920-2012) and his wife Barbara Griffin (1926-2010). These daughters, Betsey and Mary Lynch, were squeezed into their grandparents’ family tree, at the end of this paper. That family tree was from a document whose primary subjects were the Long and McGrath Families. In this paper it was decided to pursue the Lynch side of the family, the grandfather, just to see where that trail would lead.

Old Mattydale, New York

Secrets in an Irish Diary

It’s their senior year in high school and the girl’s pipeline of new mysteries has run dry. In addition, they are beginning to worry about what will happen to their organization Les Mademoiselles after they graduate in June 1966. At her family’s annual reunion in the summer of 1965 Nancy picked up an interest in genealogy after talking with her grandfather’s older sister and her daughter. Her interest in researching her family’s history will show up various times as a minor interest while the girls continue to look for their next mystery.

Nancy’s sister, Shirley, and her friend, Emo, are interested in getting in on the fun. They conduct a campaign throughout much of the book for joining or taking over the Les Mademoiselles organization for the investigation of Mattydale mysteries after the older girls graduate.

Nancy’s interest in her family’s genealogy is what initially pulled her in the direction of going to Ireland. She had to convince Colette and Sam to come with her since she didn’t want to go alone. Her grandfather had inherited a farm back in Ireland from a 2nd cousin, from a branch of the family that hadn’t immigrated. He invited her to stay at the farmhouse on his Irish farm that was located just north of the village of Upperchurch which was close to where the family had emigrated from.

It took Nancy a couple months to convince Colette and Sam to go to Ireland with her. At a St. Patrick’s Day celebration at Nibsy Ryan’s Pub on Tipperary Hill in Syracuse she was finally able to win them over. They arrived in Upperchurch in mid-July and settled into the inherited farmhouse formerly belonging to William McGrath III. It didn’t take long before the girls began to sense that there was something amiss with the circumstances surrounding William’s death in March 1965. They hadn’t been able to find a new mystery in Mattydale, but now, here in Ireland, a mystery had found them.

As the girls endeavored to discover more details about the death of William McGrath, their quiet Irish nights were shattered by the screams of a banshee. For those who believe in such creatures the banshee screams foretell the death of someone.

The McGraths of Turraheen - UPDATE

Family connections which were observed in the Griffith’s Valuation records for Turraheen Lower gave rise to this paper. Using the parish and civil records in addition to census records it was possible to generate several connected family trees. These family trees were constructed with the best information that was available at the time and assuming that the families had followed the Irish naming tradition. This process is not perfect and the results need further corroboration. Several members of the Patrick McGrath family of Turraheen immigrated to Australia and Michele Cullen has provided valuable information on her family members from the Australian records. This has allowed the paper to be updated. — LINK

The Phelans of Central New York - UPDATE

The intent of this paper is to cover the descendants of William Francis Phelan who settled in Central New York. The paper takes the form of four sections on five of William’s children: 1. Pierce Phelan (1798-1880), Honora Phelan Lee (1812-1882): 2. James Ambrose Phelan II (1852-1919); 3. John Phelan (1854-1940), and 4. Patrick Phelan (1830-?). Section 1 will be an update of the original The Phelans of Central New York paper, written in 2006. Sections 2-4 contain new material. — LINK

Reconstructing Families From the Records - UPDATE

In compiling the paper Reconstructing Families From the Records, there were many lines to follow as the number of family members grew with each generation. Some lines are easier to follow than others but eventually the search will end due to lack of records, leads, or just a lack of time. In early 2019, the Reconstructing paper was uploaded to the website mcgrathsearch.com in the hopes that someone might recognize their own connection to one of the families described in the paper. In August 2022, Seamus McGrath (seamus160452@gmail.com) of Thurles recognized his family and sent the author an email. Seamus had recognized Patrick McGrath as his grandfather and had some additional questions about the family. The update of this paper shows the records which connect Seamus McGrath to the Matthew McGrath and Margaret Costello family from the original paper. — LINK

The Fate of the Old Wooden School House in Mattydale - NEW

At one time there was a small wooden school house, referred to as District School No. 3, located on what is now East Molloy Road. During the 1920s the area around the old school house had rapidly transitioned from farm land to residential neighborhoods. That surge in growth brought with it a dramatic increase in population which included growing families that needed schools for their children. A new school house was needed and it took the form of a four classroom brick building located just east of the little school house. But what eventually became of the little old school house? According to an old document it had become a residence on one of the nearby streets, according to Gertrude Duplessis’ History of Mattydale. “This early school was moved to Matty Ave. in 1922 and is occupied as a private dwelling.” But on which lot had the old structure been placed? And from there the trail went cold — until now. — LINK

The Descendants of Francis Gray and Anna McGraw - NEW

Anna McGraw Gray was the sister of John J. McGraw of the New York Giants. This was the only sibling of John J. McGraw who had any children and John himself never had any children.

The Philip McGrath Family - NEW

Philip McGrath was descended from the Coolkill McGraths of Moyaliff parish, Co. Tipperary. In the early 1880s the family settled in the town of Geddes, on the west side of Syracuse, NY, where Philip worked as a salt boiler. By 1887 the growing family had moved to Indianapolis, IN.

Denis McGrath and Catherine Quigley - UPGRADE

Denis McGrath came to the US from Ireland in 1858 at the age of 22. The first record of his presence was his marriage to Catherine Quigley in May 1861. According to the 1900 census Catherine came to the US from Ireland in 1860 and there was an 1860 census record of a 25- year-old Catherine Quigley living with a Dobin family in Homer, Cortland County, NY.

Denis enlisted as a private in the 122nd Regiment of N.Y. as August 15, 1862. He received an honorable discharge from the same on June 16, 1865. In May of 1864 Denis was taken as a prisoner of war at the Rapidan River in Virginia during the Battle of the Wilderness and ended up at Andersonville and then Florence, So. Carolina. They moved some of the sickest prisoners to Florence because they feared General Sherman who was well on his way through Atlanta. Denis came home a broken and very sick man and he could never sleep in a bed again and always slept on the floor.

Upperchurch Cemetery Connections

Revised: February 26, 2022

The task of finding Upperchurch area ancestors is complicated by the fact that the church records for that parish only go back to 1829. Researching earlier than that year requires some good luck in the form of gravestone inscriptions or finding an old genealogy at an estate sale. In the case of Upperchurch, it was the gravestone inscriptions that allowed ancestor searches to proceed back into the 18^th century in some cases.

This section has been reformatted from the original single large paper into separate smaller papers, each based on one or more present day individuals with connections to ancestors buried in the Upperchurch cemetery. A while ago, a set of gravestone photos and inscriptions were combined into family tree structures. Since 2015, the readily available Parish Registers online has allowed some of those family trees to be further expanded.

            This has also provided opportunities for the creation of four additional papers. These papers made extensive use of the cemetery pictures, transcribed inscriptions and the expanded family trees.

Re-organization of the mcgrathsearch.com web site - Link

            The initial organization of this web site was based on assumptions about the directions in which the genealogy research was expected to proceed. Over the many years since the launch of mcgrathsearch.com in 2006 significant additional research has been conducted and it has led into areas that had not been anticipated. A consequence of this success is an array of research that doesn’t fit neatly into the original structure of the web site. Therefore the homepage and several of the next level web pages have been re-organized for improved navigation.

           Although the reorganized home page will aid in the navigation of the web site it is not the final answer. An efficient procedure for finding material on this site is to use a browser and limit the search to the domain mcgrathsearch.com. Many of the documents found on this site have a title and an appended date which indicates the date of creation or revision. When searching for a document titled as such don’t include the date in the search string because there might be a more current version of the document on the site, which has replaced the earlier version.

William Ryan and Margaret Kane -

on the Alanson McGraw web page.

            The William Ryan family was discovered to have lived in the same sub-townland as the Alanson (Lanty) McGraw back in Ireland: Prisoon, Foilduff, Abington parish. The families were later neighbors in the Clifton Springs area. William’s son Patrick later took over the Alanson McGraw property on the west side of Clifton Springs. Recently, new information has described the possibility of additional Ryan family members who settled in the area.

Update and re-organization of the paper:

“The McGraths, Ryan and Gleesons of Maple Ridge, Lewis County, New York.” 

             After being revised and updated over some 15 years this initially short paper had become very long and was in need of a table of contents. This has allowed a clearer distinction to be made among the many families described in this paper.

“Family Connections in Co. Tipp” - page

Paper Title: The McGrath and Harty Families of Cooleen and Knockakelly 02-08-20

This report was initiated during research for McGraths in the civil records when a cluster of McGrath families in Coleen and Knockakelly (Glenkeen parish, Co. Tipperary) was discovered. A descendant of a McGrath family of Cooleen, who is still occupying the family Cooleen land, provided the links which traced his Cooleen McGrath family down to the present day.

“Family Connections in Co. Tipp” - page

Paper Title: McGrath-Dwyer-Ryan Families 02-08-20

            A previous version of this paper (04-28-17) has been updated in relation to the McGrath family of Knockakelly which is described in the McGrath and Harty report above. Descendants of this Knockakelly McGrath family settled in Syracuse, NY, in the 1870s.

“The Ryan Family of Fenner, Madison Co., NY” - page

Paper Title: James Ryan and Bridget Hayes of Upperchurch 02-06-20

Major Update - Records from the Irish parish registers which showed where James and Bridget’s children had been baptized were integrated into this paper. The Ryan family took the sacraments at Borrisoleigh while residing in the townland of Rusheen, Glenkeen parish even though they associated themselves with the nearby village of Upperchurch. Long standing questions about a list of baptism records compiled by family member Mary Ryan Kennedy in Onondaga and Madison County, NY were finally answered. Why had she collected records belonging to these particular families? They turned out to have been neighbors or friends back in Ireland. In this document more records were compiled for the persons on Mary Ryan Kennedy’s list and in some cases the persons were linked to specific townlands back in Ireland. Several families on her list had already been the subjects of separate reports since the earlier version of this paper had been completed (01-27-08).

 Note: These documents can also be found by searching for the paper title on Google and restricting the search to the mcgrathsearch.com domain. Don’t include the date in the paper’s title to avoid problems locating the paper after possible updates.

The North Side McGraw Families

     There were two McGraw families living in Syracuse, on 1st North Street, in the 1880s who both had connections back to Loughorna, Knigh parish, Co. Tipperary. Descendants of these original families are still living in the Syracuse area.

Link: North Side McGraws

The Young Ghost Searchers

           A new Mattydale historical novel has been published by myself and Colette Smolinski. In the fall of 1959, three young girls join together to help rid Mattydale of its dullness by investigating mysteries in their small hamlet on the north side of Syracuse, NY. After solving several mysteries their attention was drawn to the Salina Free Library. What began as a school project led to their discovery that the building was haunted by a small ghost and that led to a murder mystery back in 1872. And of course the girls took a crack at solving that mystery, too, even if it brought them to the attention of a Dark Stranger who was eerily interested in their progress.

Link: The Young Ghost Searchers

The McGrath Families of Clogher and Clonoulty

The following papers have been researched, written, and revised over the past few years with two having been previously published on the mcgrathsearch.com site. All six papers have been revised and updated using parish and civil records combined with land and census records. The common thread among these papers is that all the families have a connection to Clogher and/or Clonoulty civil parishes.

One of the goals in writing these papers was to find any connections among the families described in the six papers, either familial or geographic. An effort was also made to extend the various family histories as far back into the past as possible. The descriptions listed below are roughly in the chronological order in which the papers were first conceived.

Link: The McGrath Families of Clogher and Clonoulty

The Coonans of Roscrea

The research papers and notes of Robert J. Conan, Jr., Ph.D., which have been published on the mcgrathsearch.com web site, have provided the motivation for this set of papers. The latest volume in what has evolved into a trilogy is now available The Coonans of Roscrea. A goal of the trilogy has been to summarize and update Conan’s research and to connect with the present day descendants. At the same time every effort was made to search for connections among the families described by Conan and to stretch the family lines as far back into the past as possible.

Link: The Coonan Trilogy

The Civil Records

The civil registration of Catholic births, marriages and deaths were required beginning in 1864. These records through about 1920 are available on line at https://irishgenealogy.ie  The birth and marriage records of the McGrath and Long families in the Thurles and Cashel registration districts were extracted from the civil records. The results are presented in a series of four papers: McGrath in Thurles and Cashel; Long in Thurles and Cashel. Each paper has its own table of contents so that it’s possible to easily navigate these data intense papers. The primary areas of interest are the civil parishes of Upperchurch, Moyaliff and Holycross but it was decided to use a larger net and to transcribe all the McGrath and Long birth and marriage records in both of the above registration districts.

Link: The Civil Records

The Scrapbook and Diaries of Paul B. Conan, Sr.

In the 1940s Paul Bernard Conan Sr. was a teenager living in Syracuse, NY.  He lived with his brother Robert J. Conan, Jr. (Bob) and his Irish Catholic parents, Helen and Robert Conan Sr.  Paul attended Most Holy Rosary school and graduated in 1947.  Paul kept a diary and wrote in it every day, beginning as a 15-year-old sophomore on January 1^st, 1945, and continuing through May 6^th, 1946, in which he mentioned several World War II related events.

He also kept a scrapbook from about 1938 through 1957, which included his 1939 Lone Ranger membership card, his 1942 Boy Scouts ID card, his 1945 Learner’s Permit to drive, report cards, and family photos among other mementos. 

Paul’s scrapbook and diary entries provide an interesting look at the daily routine and activities in the life of a teenage boy living in 1940s Syracuse, mentioning the names of more than 120 people living in Syracuse.

Link: 1945-49

The Upperchurch Coonan Families

This paper connects the research of the late Robert J. Conan, Jr., (1924-2002), concerning Coonan families from the Upperchurch area, with their descendants. In the late 60s and early 70s Robert Conan made multiple trips to Ireland where he sought out and interviewed as many Coonan descendants as he could find. During the last year, through the efforts of Robert Conan’s nephew, Paul B. Conan, Jr., his research papers and the notes, upon which those papers are based, have been published on the mcgrathsearch.com web site as part of the Conan Archive Project. Among Robert’s original material are the hand written notes which he produced contemporaneously with those Ireland interviews. After several months of exchanging information with Philip Coonan of Co. Laois, and his cousins Tom Carroll and Pat Donnelly, the possible connection of several Coonan lines to a common Coonan ancestor in the Upperchurch area has begun to take shape. The diagram below illustrates the descents of several Coonan/Conan individuals who have contributed to the research for this paper. The dotted lines at the top of the diagram signify the possible existence of a common Coonan ancestor.

Link: Upperchurch Coonans

The Diaries of Robert Conan, Jr.

Dr. Robert Conan wrote in his diary every day in 1949.  In it he comments on his many interactions with faculty, students, and friends, and his transition from being a Ph.D. candidate in New York City to becoming an assistant professor at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York.  The highlight of his day was playing a small organ in his apartment and listening to classical music, which gave him great joy and inspiration.  Bob also mentions the daily struggles he faced while compiling research for his Ph.D., including fatigue, melancholy, loneliness, and inadequate sleep. 

Link: Diary 1949

Jerry Conan's General Store, Pompey, NY

“For 50 years or more Jerry was on the front porch, or the ‘stoop,’ or platform, as you will, to welcome all to Pompey. Jerry and his general store were symbols of the village life that is passing. The store changed and Jerry Conan grew a bit gray, but the atmosphere was just the same from the bicycle days, yes, even from old horse and buggy days, to these times of streamlined cars that now whiz just beyond the corner along Route 20, or snarl their gears when the light changes to green."

    Sunday, June 28, 1941, Syracuse Herald-American, Syracuse, NY

Link: Jerry Conan's General Store

The Pompey House and Other Stories

While pulling together a web page for Jerry Conan’s General store, to incorporate some new pictures and architectural drawings of the store, I began to notice some more connections. Jerry Conan was the postmaster of Pompey and his 1st cousin, Thomas Mahar, was the mail carrier and also the Pompey stage coach driver. This led to a connection with the Jamesville plank road, the Pompey House hotel in Syracuse, and to one of its more well-known proprietors named Frank Jewell. One of Jewell’s early employers, after he arrived in Syracuse, was Jacob Crouse, a wealthy businessman, and a boulder with his name on it that became a moving tourist attraction and billboard in 1904. There was also a possible Pompey House connection with a strange character named Lew Smith and then that led to a really strange roadhouse on the Jamesville plank road, also run by Smith, called the Strawberry Mansion.

Link: The Pompey House and Other Stories

Robert Conan's  Research  

             Robert Conan laid the groundwork for connecting the many Coonan/Conan family descendants in Ireland. During the process Conan became aware that many of the families in the Upperchurch area of Co. Tipperary had settled in the Pompey and Fabius areas of Onondaga County, NY during the famine and in the years immediately thereafter. In the 1880s, as the children of the original Irish settlers were moving off the farms and into the nearby cities, many moved to Tipperary Hill in the town of Geddes on the west side of Syracuse, NY. During the 1880s the folks back in Upperchurch were aware of Tipperary Hill and many more came over to the US and settled on Tipperary Hill in the latter decades of the 19^th century.

The challenge of The Conan Archival Project is the sheer scope and the time required to go through the boxes and organize everything, scan each page, and then combine the pages into specific subjects.  The contents include letters from Irish priests in Upperchurch, County Tipperary and baptismal records.  During his many trips to Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, Bob became friends with several Upperchurch-area priests and was allowed rare access to transcribe church records from the old, fragile, hand written parish registers.  

This is a long-term project that is being carried out by his nephew Paul Conan. Hopefully the results will be useful to those seeking information about their relatives in the Upperchurch-area as well as in Pompey, N.Y.  

Link to Conan Archive Project

The Thomas Maher Connections

The Alanson McGraw Family

The townland of Foilduff is in Abington civil parish Co. Tipperary. In the townland of Foilduff there is a small region in the northern part of the townland called Prison (a sub-townland). Lanty McGraw and William Ryan were both connected to that small sub-townland back in the 1840s and later they both wound up in Clifton Springs, Ontario Co., NY.

Lanty started in Truxton, Cortland Co. in 1850. He went to Fabius, Onondaga Co., NY by 1855 and went to Hopewell, Ontario Co. by 1860. The family wound up in Manchester (Clifton Springs) by 1865. Tom’s Ryans didn’t appear in the 1865 census so they must have arrived shortly thereafter since Patrick married Bridget Hayes in 1868 in Clifton Springs. I still don’t know why Lanty went to Clifton Springs but it appears that Tom Ryan’s Ryans went there following an old neighbor from back in Ireland.

William Ryan and his family came to the US in 1862 and by 1870 they were living in the town of Manchester, Ontario Co. For most of their time in Clifton Springs Patrick Ryan, William’s son, lived north of the village of Clifton Springs in an area called Bunker Hill. Lanty and his family lived on West Hill Road just west of the village. After Lanty died in 1893 Patrick Ryan had moved into Lanty’s old house by 1895.

Link: Alanson McGraw

The Long Family

This family has been promoted to it own web page with the addition of a new paper. The Lawrence Long Farms in Onondaga Co., NY

Link: The Long Family

The Conan Family of Foilagoule

A search begun in 2010 to uncover the source of information found on Wikipedia about the large number of former Upperchurch, Co. Tipperary residents who had settled in the Tipperary Hill section of Syracuse, Onondaga Co., NY led to the Conan family. Then it led to their old homestead in Foilgoule, Uppperchurch and finally to several connections between the Conan and McGraw families in Onondaga County, NY.

Link: http://mcgrathsearch.com/Cortland_02.html. 

The Patrick and Julia McDonald Family

“In 1843, Patrick McDonald I, with his wife and family, left Castle Olivar [Castleoliver - MFM] in the County of Limerick and sailed on the Ruth of Scarberry, a sailing vessel, to come to the U.S.A. The captain’s name was William Newham and the voyage took sixty-six days. The ship was destined for New York but the storms drove the ship north and so they came in the St. Lawrence River. They journeyed past Quebec into Lake Ontario and finally to the Port of Oswego. The canal had been completed so they went from Oswego to New York City to get their instructions. They were to go to Solon, New York to a family by the name of Leo. Their journey continued upstate on the canal to Syracuse where they engaged a Negro teamster with a lumber wagon and a team of black horses. They went down through Onondaga Valley to Cortland and finally arrived at Solon. The cost of the trip was $15.00. During this trip, sometimes it was necessary to give the teamster a quart, this was kept at a minimum. They reached Solon after haying in August, 1843.”
By the late Father Lawrence Sheehan (d. 1993) whose great grandparents were Patrick and Julia McDonald.

Link

The Lee Families of Central New York

This paper describes four Lee families who settled in Central New York during the mid-19^th century. They had come to America from the counties of Limerick, Cork and Tipperary in Ireland in search of new lives. The format consists of a detailed family tree for each family that shows the family birth order and contains vital statistics for each member. These are followed by church records, census records, interesting obituaries and any other family information that could be found.

Updated Link

Upperchurch Ryan Cousins Connected

Well documented paper trails with an assist from DNA testing results succeed in sorting out and connecting five Ryan related cousins. They are descended from ancestors in the Upperchurch area in the heart of Ryan country in Co. Tipperary. Four persons are 3^rd or 4^th cousins relative to one Ryan ancestor and all five are 5^th or 6^th cousins relative to an even more distant common ancestor.

The link below leads to several documents, which describe the family connections of these newly connected cousins via well documented family trees. The last document describes all the descendants of the common ancestors: John Ryan and Ellen Kennedy.  

Hyperlink to “Family Connections” page - http://mcgrathsearch.com/FamiliesInIreland/Family_Connections.htm

The family of Thomas McGrath and Mary Kennedy has been expanded. Living descendants were found living in the Syracuse and Utica, NY areas. The baptism records in Ireland were found for the family of John McGrath and Honora Cunningham and the family analysis has been updated. Link 

This is the latest installment in an effort to highlight the connections of active genealogy researchers with their ancestors in Upperchurch and the adjoining parishes. In most of these documents a larger body of research has been summarized to clearly describe the descents of these researchers. It is hoped that other persons searching for their roots might find a connection among these papers. Where they are available, the DNA Kit numbers have been provided to aid in verifying any suspected connections.  

McGrath - Ryan of Upperchurch 

Upperchurch Cemetery Ryan Connections

Co. Tipperary Family Connections

Family records have begun to be connected through the assistance of other researchers. The current state of those efforts are found at the link below. They will be updated as new information becomes available. Link

In the majority of the cases a much larger and more detailed amount of information has been summarize. The purpose here is to reduce the amount of information and to emphasize the family connections, their residences and whether they emigrated (and to where) or remained in Ireland. The results of this approach usually consists of one or more family tree structures containing a large amount of condensed information and some descriptive explanations in between.

If you find any connections to your families in any of these documents or if you only suspect a connection don’t hesitate to contact myself or one of the researchers mentioned in the report.

A research project presently underway is tracing the McGrath, Long, Fanning, and Tuohy families of the Moyaliff and Holycross area back further in time and possibly through the Penal Times of the 1700s. The documents at the link below describe two previous research projects concerning these same families.

The information on the associated Family Records pages is an important resource for this project, enabling the achievement of its research goals. These family records were originally destined for the Appendix of a new document but they proved too numerous. Placing them on the web site not only reduced the size of the document it also improved their access and usability.

Link

The ancestral cottage has often been considered the Holy Grail of genealogists researching ancestors in Ireland. There are many old cottages, from the famine era and beyond, that still dot the Irish countryside. The years of neglect have exacted a toll on many, others have been reduced to use for storage and some have been demolished. Occasionally there is a pleasant surprise awaiting the intrepid researcher when the cottage has been maintained and is presently occupied, perhaps even by a relative.

Link

8/28/15

Old Mattydale, New York

Moving Molloy's Money

The main part of this historical novel covers the period between the fall of 1925 and late summer of 1927, which was an interesting time in the history of Mattydale. Many farms in the area were turning into residential developments and this caused the population to explode. Two fictitious individuals, Charlie Amidon and Clyde Fuller, were grafted onto real families. This story follows their activities as they relieve one of the local citizens of some money and then make subsequent efforts to hide that money until they can reclaim it and then leave town.

The novel itself is available at createspace.com

https://www.createspace.com/5500274

A special section of the Old Mattydale site provides background information on the events and locations mentioned in the book.

Link

The 1912 Tornado

On Sunday, September 15^th, at about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, the tornado touched down near Long Branch on the western end of Onondaga Lake. This was just west of the Village of Liverpool, which is located on the north shore. The tornado moved towards the northeast from Long Branch to Bear Road and then turned southeast to Pitcher Hill, where the largest number of houses and barns were destroyed, and then on to Collamer. Link

There are some fairly good pictures and many interviews with the people who had lived through the tornado, including lengthy interviews with brothers Peter and William Michaels. The latter Michaels brother had been outside, on the way to his barn, when the tornado struck his farm on the old Cicero Plank Road, across from Trolley Stop #4. He had been knocked down several times until he finally gave up and just hung on to the ground, waiting for the tornado to pass.

Thanks to Robert Steingraber, there are also 13 new photographs of the damage at Long Branch and the area to its south. These have not been published before.

Mattydale Landmarks

Landmarks are everywhere, you just need to know where to look and to understand what it is that you are looking at. This list contains the descriptions of landmarks that are still is existence and some that are long gone. Link.

Mattydale Mysteries

As I have tried to uncover and re-discover the history of Mattydale it has been possible in some cases to figure out why events happened as they did or why things look like they do or why buildings and streets are located where they are - but not always. Unanswered questions and mysteries still remain. Here's a chance for some audience participation if anyone wants to get in on this game and help find some of the missing pieces. Link.

The Cicero Stage Coach

On Monday, August 31, 1908, in the center of what would become Mattydale, there existed a collection of various modes of transportation that would not coexist for much longer. The electric Trolley had just inaugurated its service from Syracuse to Oneida Lake on the previous day. On the plank road were the farm vehicles, for which it was intended, and on a daily basis the farmers were battling the growing presence of the automobile, or "machines," as they were called then. Still holding its own was a relic from the past - The Cicero Stage Coach. The oldest operating stage coach in the country was running every weekday on what would be the last plank road in the county and perhaps in the whole country. Link

Old Mattydale, New York

The Roadhouses on the Old Plank Roads

In the beginning, when a roadhouse first opened, there was sometimes an air of excitement. In the early days there was more of a sporting flavor to the activities. There would be hunting and sometimes fishing depending on the location. Fighters from out of town would stay at a roadhouse while training for an upcoming fight in the area. In the 1890s a bicycle craze spread across the country and there were bike races along the plank road that added to the sporting nature of the roadhouse activities.

After they had been opened a year or two, the local opinion changed. The roadhouses were now places of evil and dens of iniquity that were frequented by a certain low class of person. The owners, or the persons renting those facilities, were arrested occasionally for violations of the excise laws; there would be occasional fights and more than a few arrests for running a disorderly house.

It was only in retrospect, after a roadhouse had been closed for a while, or had been destroyed by fire, that those initial romantic thoughts began to re-emerge. Reflecting back, it was easier to overlook their faults, and to remember the “good old days.” Over the years all the old roadhouses slowly disappeared. Fire destroyed some of them and a few were then rebuilt on the same locations only to be destroyed by fire a second time. Most yielded to progress, their location was needed for other purposes. Link

Mattydale Riot

It had been a quiet morning when Sgt. Martin Dillion, at the North Syracuse NY State Trooper office, received a call from Oran M. Woodward, one of the contractors, who was working on the newly opened Kirsch Tract. There was a riot under way in Mattydale and Dillon and his men needed to respond. This Mattydale riot was unique. It had been caused by a person who wasn’t even there, Vernon W. Harl. Link

Old Mattydale, New York

Mattydale's "John Dillinger"

The calm April afternoon in Mattydale was interrupted in 1934 by a raid on an illegal still at 116 Brookfield Road. It turned out that the culprits were also bank robbers hiding out from Georgia authorities. One of them, Lonnie Parish, fancied himself as "Dillinger the second." Link

The Old Settlers of the Town of Salina

This new section on the Old Mattydale web site is devoted to Salina Lots 3, 8, 18 & 19, which covers all of Mattydale and a little more. The ownership of land on those four lots is described, beginning with the original Revolutionary soldiers who were awarded lots in the Military Tract for their service during the Revolutionary War. Land records, maps and overlays are used to show how the land was subdivided until some characteristic patterns began to emerge and then stabilized. This occurred in about 1840-1850.

 From that point going forward, 18 individual families were followed and each has their own dedicated web page in the Old Settlers section. The individual web pages cover their: Connection to Mattydale, Where they came from; Where did they settle; Family Connections; History of their Mattydale property and some Notable Facts or Events in which they were involved.

Each family page also has a link to that family’s genealogy with family trees and census records. A second link is to the land records involving that family including a list of all the transactions. A subset of the transactions are summarized with the legal description of the property given and where possible a lot map with a boundary overlay is included.  

The Old Settlers Link  

Old Truxton Pictures

Thanks to the generosity of Bill and Joanne Casey a large number of pictures from the early years of the 20th century in Truxton, Cortland County, have been made available. I have added some descriptions and history to many of the pictures. Click here

Thanks to the help of Roger Baker the video descriptions have been enlarged. More of the dates have been nailed down and Roger was able identify some individuals recognizable in the videos.

http://mcgrathsearch.com/mattydale_files/mattydale_videos_two.htm

Syracuse Businesses and Industries

This is a series of 14 full page articles from the Syracuse Journal in the summer of 1934. It may not belong in Mattydale per se but everyone in Mattydale has shopped at these stores or purchased items from these industries. It was just a case of looking for one thing and finding another.

The second half of the videos have been processed. There are 67 of them in total ranging from 11 seconds to 4-1/2 minutes.

http://mcgrathsearch.com/mattydale_files/mattydale_videos_two.htm

The first half of the videos have been processed. There are 34 of them ranging from 11 seconds to 4-1/2 minutes.

http://mcgrathsearch.com/mattydale_files/mattydale_videos.htm

Old Mattydale, New York 

I have added some new material to the Old Mattydale site

http://mcgrathsearch.com/mattydale.htm

Plank Road Visit to Toronto

The Story of the Double Underpass

The Plank Road and the Mattydale Triangle

Jamaicans & POWs

And a couple miscellaneous items.

Irish Road Bowling - American Style

It always seemed to be more prevalent in the springtime that most of the boys would come to school toting their bags of marbles. The marbles that made the trip to school were always very carefully selected. Everyone wanted to show off their best marbles but at the same time there was the ever present risk that Sister Mary WhateverHerNameWas would spot you with them in class. Then she would confiscate them and add them to her vast and growing collection.....Link

The Stack Family

The Stack Family

This page was added on my Mother's 90th birthday.

       Jean Marie Stack McGraw (1923-2005) 

There are two new document linked to this page.

A revised version of the Stack Camp on Oneida Lake

A second is The Stack Houses in Syracuse, NY

The Arrival of Frank Matty

Frank Matty’s original interest in Salina property (1900) was for providing a place to house and train his stable of race horses. He added to his land holdings and started raising hogs when his friend Sim Dunfee arranged for four wagon loads of free city garbage per day to be delivered to those farms.

When Frank Matty eventually moved to his Salina farm, in about 1914, he didn’t go there with a vision of founding a community or starting a  residential development.  Link

Lanty purchased the land for $4272 with a mortgage that was due on April 1, 1857 by a payment of $3660. The mortgage was held by the previous owners of the land, Albert Skeel and his wife Mary Ann, of Fabius. On March 13, 1858 Lanty sold the property for $500 and the mortgage was conveyed to Seneca Smith, the new owner. Smith was already a land owner in the area. Smith’s original homestead, located about a ¼ mile north of Lanty’s property, is today the Community House of Highland Forest Park. Link

Starting in 1930 and in every subsequent year through 1938, one of the Syracuse newspapers, usually the Herald, would run an annual article on Frank Matty, on or near his birthday. They are reproduced here for historical purposes with the addition of comments and corrections to avoid the further propagation of the distorted history found in these articles. Matty, like any very active public figure, had his fans and his enemies. While his detractors might be overly harsh in their comments, Matty’s fans, which included some of the newspapers of the day, had a tendency to over inflate his motivations and accomplishments. As he aged, his memory began to fade and as a result, dates and sometimes events suffered in accuracy. The comments added after the articles, in this document, are meant to straighten out these inaccuracies in dates, locations and events.Link

This web site has been constructed in an attempt to gather together whatever Mattydale history can still be found - before it disappears forever. Although the name Mattydale didn’t appear until 1922, this label will be used through out to refer to that piece of land on the Cicero Plank road just a mile or two past the city line. Link

The Neighbors in Ireland, by Michael F. McGraw and Clare Tuohy

The Neighbors in Ireland opens a window that covers the Famine period in selected townlands of Moyaliff and Holycross parishes of Co. Tipperary. Most of the townlands studied are adjacent and their relatively small size allows the area to be truly described as a neighborhood. The Irish homesteads of the main families of Long, Fanning, Tuohy and McGrath were identified and described in detail.  

The Field, House, Tenure and Cancelled Books, researched by one of the authors (Tuohy), contained a wealth of new source material. The analysis of that material provided a unique view into the lives of these ancestors during the Great Famine and as they were emerging from the famine. The information contained in the House Books was unique and priceless. They contained an inventory of every structure, on each farm, in every townland along with the dimensions of each structure, the materials of construction and their state of maintenance. It is possible to use the Griffith Valuation maps, with the information in the House Books, to develop a mental picture of these buildings. That is about as close as one is going to get to having a photograph of the ancestral homestead from that time period. 

This document was the result of a trans-Atlantic collaboration between Clare Tuohy, a Dublin, Ireland based researcher, who is descended from William Tuohy of Grange, Holycross parish, and myself, based in Austin, TX, who is descended from Michael McGrath of Moyaliff in Moyaliff parish.

10/30/11

Web Hosting

This site was down for a little over 24 hours during Oct 27-28. That was the final agonizing day of an eleven-day ordeal, transferring the site from one web hosting company to another. The detailed saga can be read here. The names have not been changed because there were no innocents to protect. If you have never transferred a web site, then you will have been warned. If you have transferred a web site, then you should be able to relate. If you are about to transfer a web site, then BEWARE.

The paper The Long and McGrath Families - Neighbors on Both Sides of the Ocean was updated. A related paper about Thomas Long's lease back in Ireland was added: Thomas Long Land Lease.

A number of letters from Ireland have come into my possession. Doug Currie was kind enough to send me letters his mother, Agnes McGraw Currie, had received over the years from Mary Alice Hennity and her mother Martha Rooney Cunningham. I scanned them into a PDF document and added some background material. The link to the letters is on the The McGraw Family of Truxton page.

Two new papers have been added. The Rooney's of County Down and The Long and McGrath Families - Neighbors on Both Sides of the Ocean.

The Rooney paper is an updated version of an earlier paper. This paper resolves several family mysteries and traces the Rooneys back to the family homestead in Tullyframe, Co. Kilkeel, Co. Down.  A mystery child was also discovered whose existence had not been found in any of the family stories.

The Long & McGrath paper builds more connections between the families from the Holycross-Moyaliff area of Co. Tipperary and Central New York.

The paper, The Ryan Family in Ireland and America has been added to the Lewis County page. The author, Father Thomas E. Buckley, S. J., has graciously agreed to share his work with visitors to this site. In this paper Father Buckley presents the results of research into his Gleason and Ryan ancestors from the Moyaliff area of Co. Tipperary. He covers their years at Maple Ridge, in Lewis Co., and their eventual relocation to the West coast.

The number of individuals from the Upperchurch area that settled in the Central New York region has grown to 62 individuals representing 27 families.

The First Arrivals - Table showing the order of the arrivals

The Upperchurch Families - More detailed information on the individuals and their families.

The Ghosts of Glown - An extra Philip and Margaret Ryan family from the Upperchurch area were shown not to have existed at all.

The McGrath, Ryans and Gleasons of Maple Ridge have finally been straightened out. A migration of over a dozen persons went from Pompey, Onondaga Co. NY to Maple Ridge, Lewis Co between the end of 1858 and Aug. 1860.

McGraths, Ryans and Gleasons in Lewis Co. (PDF)  UPDATED

After 10 months of searching and writing, the story of the of the search for my ggg-grandfather, Michael McGrath is "complete." Along the way I was able to link together the families of Maple Ridge, Lewis Co, NY and those in Onondaga Co., NY.

The story comes in two parts. The Short Story describes the search, the Maple Ridge Migration and the new Upperchurch families that were found.

The McGrath Family from Moyaliff Parish, County Tipperary. is the longer version and goes into more detail on Michael McGrath's family and the search for Michael himself.

Tipperary Surname Distribution maps added

10/31/06

Organization and structure of the site finalized and implemented. Site launched. See Welcome page

The Phelans of Central New York added.

The Roger Ryan Family of Cuyler, New York added