Move to Ballinamore, County Leitrim In Search of Meehan and McGloin Hart Cousins
Editor’s Note: I asked Joe when the Canavans moved more into his focus. Joe explains that, because his starting documents left him fewer questions about the Canavans, it was some years before he got serious about that branch. After three years in Killybegs he moved to Ballinamore, County Leitrim, with the county genealogy center and an excellent library just up the street. There he pursued the Meehan and McGloin branch, learning that unusual surnames are far easier to trace than common ones. A neighbor put him in touch with McGloins, and a baby-book reference to “Tralee” in Leitrim turned out to mean the townland of Tolly.
Transcript
Speakers: WJB — William J. Bowe; JH — Joseph Hart. Transcribed from the recording; punctuation added and obvious mis-hearings corrected.
WJB: Yeah. Now when did the Canavans slip more into your focus?
JH: Probably… Well, because of the information that I’d started out with, I probably had fewer questions about the Canavans than about all the other branches in my paternal branch side. And so it took a while before I got serious about what I could do on the Canavan branch. So it was probably a number of years later. I was living in Killybegs for about three years when I moved to Ballinamore, which is a town… Killybegs, of course, being a premier fishing port, was on the coast. I loved living on the coast and comparing Killybegs with Kodiak, Alaska. But I eventually moved to Ballinamore, which is in County Leitrim. So I thought, “Well, I’m getting closer to where my ancestors came from.” And the genealogy center for County Leitrim was in Ballinamore, just up the street from where I was living there. And there was also the library, which was an excellent source of genealogy information. So, after that first three years, that’s probably when I really started getting more serious about research. But I still would rely on information help that I was getting from friends and neighbors. And so when I was living in Leitrim, one of the families, or the family branch from Leitrim, is the Meehan McGloin branch. So McGloin being kind of an unusual name, and Meehan being more of a common name, you quickly find that the research is a whole lot easier tracing the family branches with unusual names than with common names. Because if the names are common, there are just so many that if you don’t have really good leads, you don’t know where to start. So I kind of picked the McGloin branch, and my neighbor knew of several McGloins and suggested that I get in contact with them. And so that’s the way my research went for a while, was just trying to find people with the same names and seeing if we could make any kind of connection. So—
WJB: Yeah.
JH: —ultimately, I did make connections with a McGloin family. The Meehans are still a little bit elusive, but as far as pinning down their origins in County Leitrim, I haven’t confirmed that connection. But one of the interesting clues that I had from the notes in the baby book was that there were a couple of kind of unusual clues. One was that… Let me see if I can remember this. Was that the Meehans came from Tralee in County Leitrim. Well, Tralee — the big festival of the Rose of Tralee, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, but it’s a big annual kind of a beauty contest, talent contest in Tralee, which is down in Kerry. And I thought, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense. He’s talking about Tralee in County Leitrim.” Well, in Leitrim, there’s a townland called Tolly. And I figured in getting the oral history, it might have been passed down a generation before the notes got entered in the baby notes in the baby book. So everybody I asked in Leitrim about this reference to Tralee, they say, “Oh, that’s got to be Tolly.” So anyway, I’m pretty sure that that is the townland. It’s situated in the right location to link up with Sophie McGloin and James, or Francis Meehan, ends up marrying Sophie McGloin. So anyway, some of my early research was trying to make some headway in that branch, which I did, finding McGloin cousins. And so I—
