Background

My great grandfather, Thomas Francis O'Connor's, parents were Anthony O'Connor and Julia Henry. They were both born in Ireland in the late 1840s.

Where they were from in Ireland was unknown. Their parents names were unknown

Here is what was known

1 - Julia Henry reported in the 1900 & 1910 US Census that she had given birth to four children with only one still living - (my great grandfather, Thomas Francis O’Connor).

2 - Julia died in 1925 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There wasn’t an obituary for Julia O’Connor, but there was a notice in the paper - Julia Henry O’Connor’s funeral was on Christmas Eve 1925.




3 - Anthony O’Connor died in 1894 before Pennsylvania required death records to be kept - there was no obituary. There was however, a news article about how he was killed by a train in Pittsburgh, PA.



Not knowing where in Ireland Anthony O’Connor and Julia Henry were born or the names of their parents left me at a dead end … a rock solid brick wall.

Aunt Alice

Thomas Francis O'Connor's youngest daughter - my Great Aunt Alice, was a genealogist. Aunt Alice's research on the Scott/Fadden side was very accurate - probably because she got the information from her mother Ellen Scott who was born in Ireland.

However, Aunt Alice didn't get very far on the O'Connor side. (perhaps because her father, Thomas O'Connor, died when she was about 8 years old.)

The information Aunt Alice had on her grandparents Anthony O'Connor and Julia Henry was as follows:

1- Anthony O'Connor was naturalized as an American citizen in the 1850s
2- Julia Henry was first married to a Dan Regan in Ireland
3- Julia Henry and Anthony O'Connor were married in the USA
4- Anthony O’Connor was killed by a train in 1894

Turns out Aunt Alice was wrong - almost all of that is wrong.

Then I got lucky

I was looking at the Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania marriage database for an O'Connor marriage of one of my father’s cousins and I noticed a 1899 marriage for a Julia O'Connor in Scranton to a Dan Regan. This was the same name Aunt Alice had in her records as the first husband of Julia Henry. Turns out that Aunt Alice was partly correct. Julia Henry did marry a Dan Regan, but he wasn't her 1st husband and they weren't married in Ireland.



Julia Henry shows up in the 1900 US Census as Julia Regan, wife of Dan Regan, living in the same Scranton neighborhood as the O'Connor's and Haggertys. I don’t know what happened to Dan Regan, but I have not been able to find him in the records after the 1900 US Census.

Julia stopped using the surname Regan sometime after 1900. Julia is using the name Julia O’Connor in the 1910 US Census and she uses the O’Connor surname until her death, so I was really lucky to spot that Regan marriage. (It's very unusual for a woman in this time period to revert back to an earlier name)

The exciting part about finding this second marriage was that this marriage record for Julia O’Connor and Dan Regan included the names of Julia Henry’s parents - James and Anne Henry.

So I was closer, but you really need to have some idea of a location in order to start searching Irish records, and I didn’t have a clue where Julia Henry was born.

Then came DNA

I connected a group of interrelated DNA matches who all tracked back to the same common ancestor - a Thomas Henry born in 1842 near Swinford, County Mayo, Ireland. I was thinking that this could be my Henry connection. Thomas Henry and Julia could be siblings (Julia was born circa 1849 per the 1880 US Census)

The ancestor of the shared DNA matches, Thomas Henry, never left Ireland and so his children are recorded in the Irish Civil records into the 20th century. Some of the children and grandchildren of Thomas Henry did come to America and they show up in American records and they have some of the same DNA as my family.