Hi Melanie, What a great find! I can't believe that you didn't give up after 40 years of searching. Thanks for the details of how and where you searched. I have been searching for 12 years regarding my gr.grandfather Patrick Neville. Family information passed down says that he was from County Cork. I would like to find out exactly where in County Cork he was from. I have searched many records here in the USA but like you said there just isn't any clues to find from this end. The records I did find only say that he was from Ireland, nothing more. Thanks to you, I will now concentrate on searching in Ireland. The only information I have is his date of birth(1843)and as mentioned County Cork. I will start from there and use approximate dates on records. I would love to find his parents, siblings. You have given me a little hope. Thanks so much. Toodles, Ginny --- megan@cfl.rr.com wrote: From: "Melanie Egan" <megan@cfl.rr.com> To: <ny-irish@rootsweb.com> Subject: [NY-IRISH] Finally Found the County! Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2010 21:14:45 -0400 Yesterday, I received a copy of a marriage record from Ireland, 1867, that identified the county of a set of gr-grandparents. I wanted to share this, since so many of us get discouraged over how to find that elusive location in Ireland, and in my case, I never did find a hint of it in US records. The good news is that with more and more Irish records being indexed, it is possible to find an Irish record using facts other than location obtained from US records. Of course, it helps to have more unusual names. (I'm not hopeful I'll ever find my Smiths...) In this case, I had Owen Curtis tracked from the birth of his son in 1869 Boston to his burial in Calvary Cemetery Queens in 1909. His wife, Mary Kelleher Curtis died in 1878 NYC. Recently, there was a notice that the LDS pilot site had a new set of records: Ireland Marriages 1619-1898. I tried searching on Owen in this site and up came an intriguing record (which contained much more information than the Civil Indexes). The birth and marriage years matched my estimates, and both fathers' first names matched what I had gleaned from death records. The only difficulty was that the bride's maiden name was Callaghan. Her father's last name was indexed as Callagher, and that gave me a little more hope. Research revealed that Kelleher, Callaghan and Callagher could all be variations of the same name. I requested the record from Ireland and was thrilled when it arrived to see, in addition to the Callaghan spelling, the bride's name in another section spelled "Kelleher", and the occupation of Owen as "Baker", an occupation he never deviated from in the 40 years I tracked him in the US! With the facts all matching up, the location was revealed as Dundalk, County Louth. Louth would have been my top guess before this, based on the preponderance of Curtis's and Drumgooles (gr-gr-grandmother) living there in the past. I truly never thought I would find the Curtis family in Ireland, since everything turned up a dead end. But thanks to technology and many volunteers indexing, I found my answer! Melanie Curtis Egan Orlando Florida ====NY-Irish Mailing List==== Don't forget to check out the NY-Irish mailing list website. Also, check/add your NY-Irish surnames on the Surname Registry: http://www.connorsgenealogy.com/NYIrishList/ ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to NY-IRISH-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message