(Or, How a Find My Past Free Trial Weekend Rocked My Research, pt. 1)

Welcome to my 4-part series on how a promotional free access weekend at FindMyPast.com was all it took to inject fresh clues into my toughest genealogy mysteries–and even to solve a few of them!

The story of my great-grandparents, Orilla Wells and Edward Laughlin, is the one I’ve tried the hardest to tell. I’m constantly trying to dig deeper into both of their family histories. A couple days immersed in new-to-me records blew open tightly locked doors and brought me some answers I’d been seeking for a long, long time.

The Irish Collections connected the dots.

Edward’s father, Christopher Laughlin of Bradford PA, was a brick wall for about 6 years. Facts trickled in slowly:

• His parents were Bernard Laughlin and Anna Dawd/Dowd.
• He came to America as a minor and was here, and naturalized, by 1876.
• He was somehow connected to a group of Laughlins in Cattaraugus county NY who were originally from County Down, Ireland. This was based on circles of names that continually cropped up in records associated with him, most notably in his 1920 obituary in the Bradford Era.
• Also noted in his obituary, he had a surviving sister in Belfast in 1920. Part of Belfast is in Down, so this flimsy clue led me to hope Christopher Laughlin was originally from somewhere nearby.

The essential piece of the puzzle came in the form of user-uploaded content on Ancestry, an 1869 letter from home addressed to one of those Cattaraugus Laughlins. Written by Patrick Laughlin to his daughter Catherine, the letter revealed Tullyorier as the townland in Ireland where to look for my Laughlins (assuming I was right about the nebulous familial connection). This 1851 census extract places a Bernard and Anne Loughlin in Tullyorier as well, and adds onomastic evidence to the case that they are Christopher’s parents. I’m not sure who Isabella and James were in 1851, but their names crop up again in the 1890s as Christopher’s children/Edward’s siblings.

Finally, the letter drops a helpful handful of neighbors’ names, as well as the following line:

“Your aunt Mrs. Loughlin and family are all well and sends your and all their cousins their respect and good wishes for your welfare.”

(Here’s a great-big THANK YOU to Ancestry.com user Jsheliga and Bob Bentley, who shared the letter on Ancestry!)

I had plenty of dots that needed connecting. During my free-for-all Find My Past weekend, access to the Irish Collections gave me what I needed to connect them. In Griffith’s Valuation, I found Christopher’s mother, Anne Loughlin as a neighbor to Patrick Loughlin, living in townland Tullyorier in the parish of Garvaghy.

My theory? Bernard and Patrick Laughlin/Loughlin of Tullyorier were brothers. Patrick’s children emigrated in the 1850s and became established in Cattaraugus county, NY. When Anne Loughlin died, her son Christopher joined his older cousins in America. As already mentioned, he was naturalized in 1876, and he later married Mary Tobin and moved to Bradford PA to settle permanently.

Thus, Find My Past help me to establish my case for the identity and home of my Irish ancestors. In the future I hope to make sense of the Calendar of Wills, too!

(Related news: Irish Catholic Parish Registers to Go Online July 8, 2015.)

Next time, I’ll be taking a look at Orilla’s side, where coincidentally or not, there were more Irish mysteries to unfold…

(Photo: © Okea | Dreamstime.com)

Disclosure: I’m not an affiliate of Find My Past—and actually, I’m technically not even their customer, since I haven’t bought a paid subscription. However, I’m very likely to do so at some point in the future.