What's in a name? Adelia, Delia, Bedilia and Bridget.

My great-great grandmother, Adelia O'Reilly Fagan, was born in Ireland and until recently, she was a genealogical brick wall.  You know what I mean.  We all have them.  They're the ancestors that you can't seem to find origins for, no matter how hard you look.  For a long time, I didn't even bother.  Irish ancestors are notoriously difficult to track down, partly due to destruction of records and even more due to the fact that the records were scattered all across the country in various repositories.  If you didn't know a townland, you weren't going to get very far.

The first break in the case came a few years ago, when I ordered a copy of Adelia's death certificate from the Pennsylvania Vital Records Division.  This was before they passed the law that allowed open records access to older vital records, so you had to know exactly what you were looking for back then, no outside access to the index was allowed.  Once I had that, it gave me more of the information I was going to need to find Adelia's family back in Ireland.  Her father's name was Laurence O'Reilly, and her mother's was Adelia Treston - which I promptly misread the handwriting on as "Tresson".  No worries, I eventually got it figured out and it only took a year or two!  Let's warp ahead a few years.  I found Adelia listed among the obituaries published in Luzerne County papers in 1933.  I ordered a copy of her obituary, and got some surprises.  Her obituary gave her place of birth as Dublin, and stated she had a sister still living in Jersey City named Nora Cahill.  I haven't had much luck tracking any additional information on Nora down, unfortunately.  But at least I had a place in Ireland to start looking.


As it turned out, as genealogical research so often does, much of what we're told are half-truths.  Adelia's family does have Dublin connections, but they also have roots clear across the country, in county Mayo.  Among a message board thread full of questions and speculations on the origins of the Tresson/Treston name, a clue emerged in a message regarding a Mayo-born man named Laurence O'Reilly who was a Dublin policeman in the late 19th century.  This Laurence had descendants who moved to Pennsylvania and knew and visited their Fagan cousins in Hazleton.  This meant that Laurence had to be Adelia's brother.  I finally had a relative in Ireland to help pinpoint my areas of research.  To differentiate between him and their father Laurence, from this point on I'll refer to him as Laurence John.

Following the principle of researching collateral lines, I traced Laurence John back in Ireland to Mayo in the 1911 census and to Dublin in 1901.  In 1901 he even has a daughter named Delia in his household!  The names of his children are actually very important clues, because when I later discovered the records pertaining to the O'Reillys back in Mayo, it turned out that Laurence John recycled many of the names of his siblings in his children's names.  The calendars of wills and administrations in the Irish national archives also proved useful, as they told me that Laurence John had died in 1917.  Google searching for pages where the surnames Treston and O'Reilly appeared together led me a now-defunct webpage that had listings of parish registers from Mayo.  I found two: Charles and Francis, baptized in Knock in 1865 and 1868, respectively.  Further searching on FamilySearch.org turned up an additional sibling born and baptized in 1875 in Dublin, John Joseph.  The free church records section of IrishGenealogy.ie, a fairly new site from Ireland's Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, turned up baptisms for most of Laurence John's children in Dublin.  At this point I decided that I'd exhausted most of the free resources available to me online and purchased some research credits on RootsIreland.ie, the database set up by the Irish Family History Foundation to provide a centralized index to Irish records.  It proved to be money well spent, as I found an additional number of children baptized in the 1850s and 1860s in Bekan parish, Mayo: James Thomas, Margaret Agnes, Catherine Mary, and Julia Bridget (possibly a misread of the name Delia as Julia.  Delia repeats in the O'Reilly family, Julia does not.).  I also signed up for a trial run on FindMyPast.com and really struck gold among their collection of the British Library's newspaper archives - well worth a subscription if you have 19th century British Isles ancestry!  Those newspapers provided me with the BMD notices posted in Freeman's Journal, a Dublin-based newspaper that was the major paper of 19th century Ireland.  It was among those notices that I found obituaries for their sister Kate Maria (presumably the "Catherine Mary" of the Bekan register) in 1877, their father Laurence in 1880, their sister Anne in 1885, the youngest brother John Joseph in 1886, and their mother Bridget in 1890.  Those obituaries also provided another springboard for further research: all of the death notices pointed to Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin as their final place of rest.  Fortunately for the internet researcher living an ocean away, the Glasnevin records are accessible online.  However, you need to know the first and last name and year of death to search.  When you do find the listing, for a small fee (currently €3) you can access the full details including the plot location and last known address.  For €8 you can get that information plus all the details on anyone else buried in the same plot, which can be helpful if you're researching family groups.  Accessing the full plot info for Laurence and Bridget turned up an additional relative: a one-year-old granddaughter named Norah, daughter of their son Laurence John, who died in 1886.  I finally knew who and where the O'Reillys were.

After all this, one of the loose threads I still had was why Adelia's death certificate listed her mother's name as Adelia, when all of the records back in Ireland bar one had her name as Bridget.  The single exception was the baptism of Adelia's brother Francis back in Mayo in 1868.  Francis is listed as the son of "Lawrence O'Reilly and Bedilia Treston".  Bedilia... it's not quite Adelia, but at least it rhymes.  The key may lie in an entry in Rev. Patrick Woulfe's definitive volume on Irish names and surnames,  "Sloinnte Gaedheal is Gall".  Rev. Woulfe included a small section for male and female personal names and their Anglicizations, in which is found the following entry for Bríġdín, a diminutive of Bríġid (Bridget):

Bríġdín - Bridie, Breeda, Bidina, Bidelia, Dina, Delia, Dillie, Beesy.

Bearing in mind that 19th century Mayo was a heavily Irish-speaking region, the difference between Adelia and Bridget may not be such an irreconcilable one after all.