NOW AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE TRYING TO TRACE THEIR IRISH ROOTS

[Daanyeer]

Now African Americans are trying to trace THEIR Irish roots after being inspired by Barack ObamaBy Turtie Bunbury

23rd May 2011


Since Barack U.S. President Barack Obama’s connection with Ireland emerged, genealogical firms have been fielding large numbers of queries from African Americans.
A leading academic recently revealed that Irish immigrants and African Americans married more than other ethnic groups in the U.S. in the 19th century.
Slave owners and poor immigrant workers are the two main groups of Irish ancestors being uncovered by African Americans looking into their past.

Irish heritage company Eneclann, who discovered Mr Obama’s Irish family, said African Americans now make up one in five of their cases from the U.S.
Eneclann’s director, Brian Donovan, said he was amazed by the numbers approaching his company at a recent genealogical conference in South Carolina.
‘People are being inspired by President Obama’s story to look into their own Irish roots,’ he said.

‘About half of the people we spoke to were descended from slave owners and half from poor Irish immigrants.’
In 1850 Falmouth Kearney, the 19-year-old son of a shoemaker, left the Irish town of Moneygall for America, where he married Charlotte Holloway from Ohio. He was Mr Obama’s great-great-great-grandfather.

Today, it would be difficult to find a more unlikely Barack Obama cheerleader than Jane de Montmorency Wright. The 75-year-old former Montessori supervisor, who worked in the school founded by Diane Guggenheim, has a long aristocratic lineage.

Her uncle, Sir Geoffrey de Montmorency, was governor of the Punjab from 1928 to 1933. At one point, the family owned a 4,800 acre estate including a mansion.
And, yet, Mrs Wright is Barack Obama’s cousin, well, sixth cousin, three times removed. That makes her his closest living Irish relative.
Jane, with the help of a genealogical association and the U.S State Department, proved the link.
This week at home in Bennettsbridge, Co. Kilkenny, she says her father, Captain de Montmorency, would have been delighted with the association. She added: ‘My children are delighted by the connection,’ referring to her son and two daughters by her late husband, Beverly.

'A Russian radio journalist came to my grandchildren’s school and interviewed them about it all’, she added.
Mr Obama owes his Irish ancestry to Jane’s family, or rather the family of her great-great grandmother, Rose.

She says: ‘I am the same generation as Obama’s great-grandparents on the family tree. And my seven grandchildren, the oldest of whom is 17, appear to be a generation older than the President.’

Jane and Obama’s descendants, the Kearneys, were the hereditary keepers of St. Patrick’s Crozier.

It was the early 1700s before their recorded history begins in earnest, when Michael Kearney moved to Dublin and set himself up as a hairdresser and wig-maker. He invested wisely, in Georgian Dublin, and Moneygall and Shinrone in King’s County, now Offaly.
Michael bought a house in Gortcreen, south west of Moneygall, which he gave to his brother, Joseph. The profits of the wig-making business also enabled Michael to send his son, John, to Trinity College, which he entered aged 15 in 1757.


John Kearney was appointed Provost in July 1799, and he and his wife Anne had two sons and three daughters, the eldest of which was Rose. As for her father’s cousins – Joseph’s sons – Thomas Kearney took over the wig-making business while Joseph Jnr became a wool comber.

The next generation of the family had to look abroad for work. Tom Kearney – the son of Joseph Jnr – emigrated to Ohio where he worked as a carpenter. His brother, William, remained at home and became a shoemaker, providing for the residents of Moneygall and Roscrea. He and his wife had two sons.

William named the eldest Joseph after his own father, and the younger Francis. Joseph followed his father into the family business and, in 1825, he married 21-year-old Phebe Donovan, a farmer’s daughter from Ballygurteen. They had a son, Falmouth, and a daughter, Margaret.

Francis, meanwhile, had joined his uncle Tom in Ohio, where he found himself a farm in the Appalachian Mountains in Pickaway County. But Francis’s life in Ohio was tragically short. He died, aged 44, in January 1848. In his will, he left his elder brother the farm.

Joseph Kearney sold off his family’s interests in Moneygall to raise the fare for his passage. Sailing from Liverpool on the Caroline Read, he arrived in America on April 25, 1849.

The following year, he was joined by his 25-year-old son Falmouth Carney and his daughter Margaret and her husband William Cleary. Falmuouth had also been working as a shoemaker in Moneygall. This trio also made their way directly to Ohio.

And so the Kearneys re-established themselves as farmers in Ross County, Ohio.

In 1852, Falmouth was married to Charlotte Holloway. Their great-grandson, Stanley Armour Dunham, was Barack Obama’s grandfather. Stanley, who passed in just 1992, apparently went by the name ‘Dunham Kearney’ in his younger years.

It’s a complicated history, but today the ancestors of a wigmaker called Michael Kearney can still be found on both sides of the Atlantic. In Moneygall there’s Henry Healy. In Bennettsbridge there’s Jane de Montmorency Wright.

And, of course, in the White House there’s Barack Obama.






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[ciyaal_warta]

yh rite and am trying to trace ma chinese roots