Discovering Clancys of Barr of Farrow

I'm learning alot about Irish geography in the last month or so as I've been trying to group Crown families by location. You can find some very useful maps of districts, parishes, and townlands in counties Leitrim and Roscommon here.

My research has centered in Drumahaire barony where the Crown's and Travers lived in the 1800s, with most concentration in the the Drumlease civil parish. But records for Crown can also be found in the surrounding Leitrim parishes of Killanummery, Killarga, Cloonlogher, Killasnet, and even though not immediately bordering Drumlease, also Cloonclare. In fact, this last parish is where we believe we located the 1860 marriage record of our ancestors who later emigrated to NY, Patrick Crown and Ann Clancy.

However, two things have subsequently brought my attention back to Cloonclare.

• While looking at Clancy families that were enumerated nearby to our Crown family in Brooklyn, I wondered if they were somehow related. One Clancy family tree I found which seems to connect to those early Brooklyn Clancy families documents them as coming from Farrabar, Cloonclare, Leitrim, Ireland. Hmmmm.
• In a separate exercise, I was looking up the Ireland civil birth registrations for the children that Patrick Crown and Ann Clancy had before they emigrated to NY. The civil registrations give the address where the couple was living when the child was born, and interestingly for two of Patrick and Ann's children, the address of the parents was listed as Farrabar. Hmmmm.

So what about this place, Farrabar? Further investigation has lead me to a place in Cloonclare parish that was called Barr of Farrow (in Irish, Barr Fharaidh) and/or Farrow Barr (Farrabar), located in the D.E.D. (district electoral division) called Glenboy and the PLU (poor law union) of Manorhamilton.

And what about this other family tree? It documented its Irish ancestors as Charles Clancy and Jane McElroy. In searching for a couple with those names in County Leitrim, I did not find a marriage record, but I found several children born in Cloonclare parish to Charles Clancy and Joanna (sometimes Anne) Gilroy. Seems to me that Gilroy is very close to McElroy, and Jane could be the familiar version of the Latin name Joanna.

In checking the 1834 Ireland Tithes records in the Barr of Farrow, there were SIX Clancy men listed, and of immediate interest were Charles Sr. and Charles Jr. In moving on to the 1857 Griffiths Valuations in Barr of Farrow, there was no listing of any Charles Clancy, but lo and behold, there was listed Jane Clancy! Either Jane was a widow by then or maybe Charles preceded the family to NY? Either way, these early Irish documents establish there were indeed a Charles and Jane Clancy from Barr of Farrow!

All of which is very interesting, but even though I have a passing reference to Farrabar in Irish records of Crown, there is really nothing that ties my Ann Clancy Crown to Charles Clancy and Jane Gilroy. Until today. Today I revisited the baptism record of the first child of Patrick and Ann, Richard. Here is my transcription of the Irish baptism record which was written in Latin:

8 July 1860, Richard, child of Patrick Crown and Ann Clancy, 

sponsors Richard Crown and Joanna Gilroy.    

OMG. I always thought that the male sponsor was either Patrick's father or his brother, but I had no earthly idea about the female sponsor.  Now, thanks to the sharing of another researcher's family tree, I do! I now think the sponsors of Richard Crown were his grandparents, Patrick's father and Ann's mother.  Wow.

So there we have it. Happily, we now have a whole new story to explore, and likely more relations to meet! I'm still researching, but it appears to me that Patrick and Ann might have come over to NY with Ann's mother, Jane, who very likely was the older woman enumerated as Mrs. Clancy in the Patrick Crown household in 1870. After that, Jane may have gone to live with other Clancy relations, as it appears that she probably had other children also in NY. Jane Gilroy Clancy died in Flatbush in 1894, after her daughter, Ann Clancy Crown, who died in 1888. Jane was around the age of 80 when she died, and like all our early Crown relations, she was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery.

I'm a little stunned. I think about my father, Richard Charles Schaefer. The second son of my grandmother, Peg Crown, my father was definitely named for the Irish. Not only did Nana have a brother named Richard who died young, she also had two uncles, Richard and Charles, who were by all accounts bigger than life and who both died after Nana was married. And now we know something about how the Crown uncles Richard and Charles were named: one for our Irish ancestor Richard Crown, and the other for our Irish ancestor Charles Clancy. Amazing.