The biggest, most exciting event for genealogists researching Irish roots this year has got to be the release of hundreds of digitized images from the National Library of Ireland's collection of church parish registers. Thanks to these records, I've been able to fill in some gaps and address some of my speculation regarding my own research.
1) I had theorized that a baptism record for Julia Bridget O'Reilly in the parish of Bekan, Mayo, which I believed to be my great-great grandmother Adelia's baptism, had been misread and that what someone had read as Julia could be Delia. As it turns out, the transcription was incorrect, just not in the way I had thought it would be. She was actually baptized Julia Bedelia O'Reilly. That name makes me even more sure that the record is my great-great grandmother's, for reasons which I've already explored in a previous post.
2) I had also suspected that an Isaac O'Reilly who lived in Rathfarnham was the same person as one of Adelia's nephews, a son of her brother James. Finding the marriage record of Isaac and his wife Julia (Mannering) in the parish records of St. Joseph's in Terenure confirmed that Isaac was indeed the son of James O'Reilly and Margaret Rothery. Furthermore his witness at the marriage was none other than Laurence O'Reilly of 5 North Richmond Street, his uncle and James and Adelia's brother. The record also provided the important information that Isaac's parents were living in the U.S. in Delaware City, Delaware. Thanks to that clue, I looked into Delaware records and was able to track down both the baptism record of Isaac's sister Sarah and the marriage record of his brother Laurence.
Search the NLI Parish Register collection
Postcard image of St. Joseph's Terenure courtesy South Dublin Libraries
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