Ancestry Magazine

Usually, I tackle mysteries submitted by readers, but once in a while, I take a detour and handle requests from others. This is one of those cases, and one of the most amusing outcomes is the song, “There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama.” Let me explain …

Around St. Patrick’s Day 2007, Ancestry.com issued a press release revealing that Barack Obama was part Irish. His third great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Fulmoth Kearney, is Obama’s most recent connection with the “old country.” When Fulmoth arrived in New York in 1850, all of Obama’s other maternal ancestors were already here.

I was quoted in the press release, and because I have an unusual name, several Irish journalists were able to quickly locate me. Their question? Where in Ireland did Barack Obama’s ancestors come from?

Bragging Rights
Being half Irish myself, I wasn’t especially surprised by this interest in the specifics. I was well aware that Dunganstown, County Wexford, was delirious when “native son” John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960. Because his greatgrandfather had immigrated to America from Dunganstown, Kennedy’s political ascension gave the place bragging rights that it continues to flex today. Likewise, his Fitzgerald heritage gave the village of Bruff in County Limerick something to boast about, too—especially when Kennedy took the oath of office on the Fitzgerald family Bible.

Honestly, I both welcomed and dreaded the phone calls. I like a challenge, but if you have Irish heritage, you know how difficult it can be to find the place of origin in Ireland. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I would succeed. But it was worth a try, right?

Finding Fulmoth
Obama’s maternal roots are what I regard as typically presidential—they extend back along most branches for centuries in America. This made my preliminary research pretty straightforward. I relied heavily on U.S. federal census records to methodically march back on his mother’s side of the family tree.

As I did so, I scanned for evidence of foreign births and made my first find in the 1870 census for one of his greatgreat-grandmothers, Mary Ann Kearney. Her father was from Ireland.

He was listed as Falmoth or Fulmoth (a little hard to make out) and 38 years of age. His name would turn out to be the proverbial mixed blessing. As my research progressed, I would fi nd him as Fulmoth, Fulmouth, Falmouth, Fulmuth, Falmuth, and so forth—a bit of a nuisance. Kearney off ered its own complications with spellings such as Kerney and Carney. But ultimately, his name was distinctive, which made him comparatively easy to pluck out—I was grateful to be dealing with a Fulmoth Kearney, rather than a John Murphy.

The Fulmoth Trail
With his unusual name, it wasn’t difficult to locate Fulmoth’s arrival record in America on Ancestry.com. Experimenting with various versions of Fulmoth and Kearney, I found him as Falmouth Carney (indexed as Falmouth Cainey). He had arrived on the Marmion in New York on 20 March 1850.

While most arrival records from this time furnish just the basics, this one gave Fulmoth’s destination as Ohio, so it made sense when he showed up in the 1850 census in Wayne Township, Ohio. I noticed others in the same household named Carney, Cleary, and Canada. No relationships were provided, but these names would come in handy.

By 1860, he was living in Deerfield, Ohio, with his wife, Charlotte, and several children.

A little digging at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City produced his 1852 marriage to Charlotte Holloway in Fayette County, and I couldn’t help but notice that the name of the justice of the peace was William Kearney—the same name as the head of household in Fulmoth’s first home in America.

Around 1866, Fulmoth moved from Ohio to Jefferson Township, Tipton County, Indiana. This is where I had first spotted him in the 1870 census when searching for his daughter Mary Ann. He died before the 1880 census. So the documents I had briefly outlined Fulmoth’s life in America, but now I needed to cross the pond. Fortunately, the same documents provided me vital clues.

Connecting the Dots
One of the most effective research techniques is something I call “surround and conquer”—also known as collateral research. When you can’t find what you’re looking for (say, an overseas place of origin) by following a person’s paper trail, broaden your search to include the trail of people associated with him or her, especially relatives.

In Fulmoth’s case, I accidentally did this by finding his arrival record, which showed the travelers’ intended destination. While most of their fellow passengers were heading for New York, Fulmoth and two others—William and Margaret Cleary—were headed to Ohio. Why? I didn’t know, but I was glad of it—and even happier when I realized that William and Margaret were also in the same household with Fulmoth in the August 1850 census. Clearly, there was some connection.

I decided to focus on William and Margaret Cleary and easily found them in the 1860 census in Deerfield, Ohio, living with an older couple named Joseph and “Pharb Kearny” (Phebe Kearney). Maybe Margaret was Fulmoth’s married sister, and Joseph and Phebe were his parents. That could explain why Fulmoth had named a daughter Phebe. It would also be a serious bonus, as I hadn’t expected to find Fulmoth’s parents in America.

Fulmoth’s Family
Using this notion as my hypothesis, I looked for records to piece together this nascent family tree. By the 1870 census, the alleged sister Margaret’s husband died and she married the neighbor’s farmhand. Her father had also died, but her mother, Phebe, was still living with her.

Through a combination of searching online records and googling likely names and locations, I cobbled together a family for Fulmoth: parents Joseph and Phebe, sisters Margaret and Mary/Mary Ann, and a brother named William. Particularly helpful was a family history website by a researcher named Roger Kearney. The site tantalized me with mentions of what appeared to be pockets of this same family, but Fulmoth was nowhere. Still, I badly wanted to believe my blossoming theory because Roger’s site included a tombstone transcription for Fulmoth’s possible father that gave his birthplace in Ireland. Hoping for more clues, I commissioned Ohio-based genealogist Carolyn Burns to go to the cemetery and photograph all the graves. Roger had transcribed most of them, but I needed to see photos of the actual tombstones myself.

In the meantime, I continued to mine his site for clues. That’s when I spotted another interesting transcription—the will of a Francis Kearney, dated 28 January 1848. In it, he left land in Ross County, Ohio, to his brother, Joseph, “if he comes to this country.” Was this why Fulmoth’s family’s left Ireland? I assumed it was the famine, but if Francis was Fulmoth’s uncle, the promise of land may have lured the family to America. According to Roger’s site, the Kearney family had been chain migrating to America since the late 1700s. If my theory was correct, Fulmoth’s branch would have been about the last to leave the old country.

Coming to America
I decided to see if immigration records could support a will-triggered migration and quickly found the evidence I was seeking. Fulmoth’s probable father, Joseph, had arrived in New York on 25 April 1849 on the Caroline Read.

As I had discovered earlier, Fulmoth, his sister, and his brother-in-law had followed in March of 1850. His likely mother, Phebe, arrived in New York on 28 August 1851 on the Clarissa Courier with her children Mary and William and a 40-year-old woman named Catherine.

Francis Kearney died only a week after making his will in 1848. Allowing time for his brother back in Ireland to get word and make appropriate arrangements, the family had left for Ohio in annual waves in 1849, 1850, and 1851.

When the tombstone photos arrived from Ohio, I could piece still more of the puzzle together. Parents Joseph and Phebe had died in 1861 and 1876 respectively. I already had an idea of what had become of Margaret, but the stones revealed that brother William had died in 1855 and sister Mary Ann in 1866. Fulmoth and Margaret were the only ones in the family missing from the cemetery.

Previously researched census records showed that Fulmoth had named his children Phebe, Elizabeth, Martha, William, Joseph, Fulmoth, Mary Ann, Margaret, and Francis, and now I knew why. I can’t explain Elizabeth, but Martha was the name of his wife’s mother, and the other seven names were those of Fulmoth’s parents, siblings, and the uncle whose death brought the family to America.

Crossing the Pond
Thanks to the cemetery photos, I finally had the information I had hoped to find—the place of origin in Ireland. The tombstones for Fulmoth’s father, Joseph, and brother William both indicated that they were born in Moneygall in Kings County (now County Offaly).

Who’d have thought that the key to Obama’s Irish roots would be a pair of tombstones in Wayne Township, Ohio?

Although I was confi dent about Moneygall, the logical last step was to locate the family in records in Ireland. To this end, I enlisted the help of Irish expert Kyle Betit of ProGenealogists.com. There were a number of possible parishes to consider (particularly since we weren’t yet sure of the religion), and Murphy’s Law kicked into high gear as Kyle tried parish aft er parish without success. He gradually zeroed in on the diocese of Limerick & Killaloe and made contact with Canon Stephen Neill, the Anglican priest there. But Murphy wasn’t quite done with us.

Canon Neill was friendly, but none too swift in responding. As he later admitted, “I get a lot of these requests and it was only after the nature of the possible link with Barack Obama was revealed that I fully engaged with the search.” The Obama connection perked up his interest, but there was another complication—the church treasurer who had the records had just passed away, so there was now the delicate matter of obtaining the records themselves.

Based on the information gathered from the earlier research, we provided Canon Neill with a list of names and estimated dates for the baptisms of Fulmoth and his siblings and the marriage of his parents. Fortunately, an index had been prepared for the Templeharry Rectory of the Church of Ireland about 20 years earlier, so Canon Neill was able to cross-reference our wish list with the index and find most of the requested records, which he gamely took digital photos of and e-mailed to us. Now we had substantiation from both sides of the ocean that the family hailed from Moneygall.

And in Moneygall …
Search “Obama” at RootsTelevision.com, and you can watch Ireland’s Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys perform their song “There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama.” Be forewarned, it’s a tune that gets stuck in your brain.

Your Turn
This was a fun detour, but it’s time to return to a more conventional orphan heirloom rescue for the next time out, so if you have a stray family treasure in need of rescuing, go to www.honoringourancestors.com, click on the Submissions menu, select Orphan Heirlooms, and fill out the form. Maybe your heirloom will be next!