Collins Tracing Your Irish Family History. Ryan Tubridy

Wolfe of Limerick, a Royalist who fled to England, but the genealogist and herald Sir Anthony Wagner argued that this was not so, and that Edward’s father was actually an earlier Edward Wolfe, an army officer of Dublin. When James II came there, Wolfe was thrown out for being a Protestant, but later rejoined under William III. Records at the Deeds Registry, Dublin, show

       ‘that in 1686 Edward Wolfe of the City of Dublin, later a Major, had a lease of a moiety of the lands of Kilmurry and Kilmekanoge in the half barony of Rathdowne, County Wicklow, for the lives of himself, his wife Margaret and his son Edward and that on his death at some date before 1715 his son Walter Wolfe was substituted for him in the Lease, while in 1715, his daughter Margaret Goldsmith and her son George were also added to it.’

      Wagner thought it most likely that this senior Edward was the son of an earlier Edward. A petition in the Cromwellian State Papers by Jane, widow of Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Wolfe, states that the latter accompanied Cromwell to Ireland in 1649, but died six months later at Youghal, Co. Cork, leaving her with six small children. So much for the earlier link to Limerick, though as Edward MacLysaght (see p. 155) points out the Irish Wolfes were all ultimately of Cambro-Norman origin anyway.

      before 1905. Some material is online (see www.cyndislist.com).

      Biographical dictionaries

      The main one is the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (University of Toronto Press/OUP, 1966–91)

      Wills

      These are divided between provincial probate registries and local county or judicial district offices: details are on www.cyndislist.com and in Baxter’s guide (see ‘Further Reading’ on p. 55).

      Naturalisations

      As Ireland was part of the British Empire, no naturalisation was needed.

      Land grants

      There are many petitions and grants of land in the Canadian National and particularly the Provincial Archives, as described by Baxter. Those for Quebec and Ontario date from the 17th and 18th centuries respectively. B.D. Merriman, Genealogy in Ontario, Searching the Records (Ontario Genealogy Society, 3rd edn, 1996) is particularly useful for Irish settlement there.

      Shipping lists

      The main collections of ships’ passenger lists are at the National Archives of Canada. They date, patchily, from 1745, and are complete from 1865 for Quebec and Halifax. Usually, you need to know the port and rough date of arrival. The lists may not tell you much more, though it’s helpful to see with whom your ancestors arrived, as they seldom left home alone. Some provincial archives have records of organised parties of immigrants, such as Peter Robinson’s (see p. 53). www.irishorigins.com has a growing database of British and Irish arrivals in Canada for 1890.

      Hudson’s Bay Company

      The Provincial Archives of Manitoba contain the records of the Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670, and copies are available on film elsewhere, including TNA. Wills of employees date from 1717 and ships’ logs from 1751, but few personnel records exist before 1770. Thereafter they can be extremely useful.

      Empire Loyalists

      There were undoubtedly people with Irish roots amongst the 70,000 Empire Loyalists who settled in Canada from America after Britain lost the American Revolutionary War in 1784. They made claims (now at the National Archives of Canada’s audit office) for loss of land. The United Empire Loyalists’ Library is an excellent starting point for research. For the most part, however, the Irish in America were very happy not to support the British Crown!

      FURTHER READING

       A. Baxter, In Search of your Canadian Roots; Tracing your Family Tree in Canada (GPC, 1999).

       C. Houston and W. Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement (University of Toronto Press, 1990).

       D. MacKay, Flight from Famine: the Coming of the Irish to Canada (McClalland & Stewart, 1992).

       R. O’Driscoll and L. Reynolds, (eds) The Untold Story: the Irish in Canada (2 vols, Celtic Arts of Canada, 1988).

       CHAPTER 7 Argentina

       In all, about 45,000 Irish people migrated to Argentina in the 19th century, resulting in some 800,000 people there now having at least some Irish blood.

      Archives

      Argentina’s main archives are in Buenos Aires, particularly the Archivo General de la Nacion and Bibliotheca Nacional, with other central and provincial archives as identified below.

      Societies

      The Instituto Argentino de Ciencias Genealógicas, Buenos Aires, is the country’s main genealogical society.

      Civil Registration

      Birth, marriage and death records are called partidas. Civil registration started in 1886 for Buenos Aires City, in 1890 for Buenos Aires Province, and other parts of Argentina around the same time. Each municipality has a Registro Civil, with duplicate records at the relevant Judicial or Provincial Archives. Most Irish migrant families appear in the records of Buenos Aires Province. Births include ages and nationalities (so, before 1922, the Irish were ‘British’). Early birth records sometimes list grandparents’ names. There are also recognitions of children by their fathers. Marriages list all four parents’ names and nationalities.

      Migration to Argentina

      Irish missionaries and Wild Geese (see p. 207) were instrumental in the Spanish conquest of South America and its subsequent settlement. Dublin-born Hugh O’Connor (1734–97) became Hugh Oconór in the Regiment de Aragon and Viceroy of New Mexico, fighting the Apaches and Comanches and founding Tucson, Arizona. Ambrose O’Higgins (1721–1801), from Ballina, Co. Sligo, followed a similar route to become Viceroy of Peru, ennobled as Baron de Ballenary and Marquis de Osorno. His son Bernardo O’Higgins (1780–1846) was the Liberator of Chile, where a province now bears his name. Under these luminaries, many Irishmen fought in South America’s wars. The army Simon Bolivar used to liberate Bolivia included many Irishmen. The Irishmen of the St Patrick’s Battalion who died in the Mexican-American war of 1847 are commemorated by a memorial in Mexico City.

      The first Irish to reach Argentina were probably the Galway-born sailors who participated in Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe in 1520. Later Irish participants in the Spanish colonisation of Argentina included Dr Michael O’Gorman (d. 1819), who founded the Buenos Aires’ school of medicine. The British Army that temporarily invaded Argentina in 1806–7 included several hundred Irish soldiers who remained there, farming the rich pampas lands just as their forebears had done in the Irish Midlands.

      William Brown, born in Co. Mayo in 1777, arrived in Buenos Aires in 1812 and went on to found the Argentinean navy. Later, General John Thomond O’Brien (1796–1861), from Baltinglass, Co. Wicklow, became aide-de-camp to José de San Martín, the general who liberated Argentina and Chile from European rule. In 1827, O’Brien visited Ireland to encourage people to settle in Argentina, hoping both to bolster the Argentinean economy with skilled sheep farmers, and also to recreate a sort of Gaelic Eden, far from the rapacity of the British Empire. Irish merchants, too, such as Patrick Cullen and the Sheridan brothers, encouraged migration on board their