From Kilkenny to Canada and on - research uncovers a family saga!

Family research detective work has revealed emigration links between rural Kilkenny, Canada and the USA.

Members of the Doran family left Coolagh, near Callan, at the time of the Famine. Generations later the descendants of that family have found their way home from Bangor, Maine.

In some ways a familiar tale, for Mary Alice Wildasin it was a personal one, and a genealogy search she was introduced to as a little girl.
“When I was nine years old I remember going to the Maine State Archives in Augusta (the state capital) with my grandparents. They were researching our family history and I remember pulling books off the shelves, I wasn’t into genealogy then,” Mary Alice recalls.

On a trip to Ireland in 1981, with her grandparents and her mother, Mary Alice remembers sitting in the reading room of the National Library looking for references to their ancestor Patrick Doran. At that stage they still had no idea even what county to search in.

Fast forward to 2023 and Mary Alice has tracked down her four times great grandfather to Summerslane in Coolagh, in the mid 1840s.

It’s been a fascinating detective story and one that the locals in Coolagh, near Callan, were delighted to hear when Mary Alice, who now lives in Co Clare, visited recently.

She stressed to the Kilkenny People that although she has not yet found a DNA family match to the nowadays local Dorans (including Councillor Matt Doran who has taken a DNA test for Mary Alice to compare to her family) the community of Coolagh has welcomed her and her mother like family.

The pieces of the family history jigsaw came together for Mary Alice and her mother through a mix of commitment to the search and some good luck.

In 2008 Mary Alice was living in Florida. Her mother belonged to an Irish research group who had planned a research trip to Salt Lake City, Utah. Mary Alice joined her at the last minute, expecting to be bored by day two of the trip.

But the curiosity to know where the Dorans came from kicked in. She was still in the research library on the Saturday and with just five minutes to go to closing time her mother entered the names of Patrick Doran and his brother in a computer. But she couldn’t press enter. She just had a ‘funny feeling.’
Mary Alice stepped in, hit enter and for the very first time the two ladies saw the location ‘Callan’ appear on a record, on the screen in front of them.

A chance meeting between Mary Alice and an Irish genealogist in an Irish bar on a visit to Providence, Rhode Island, unlocked the next big revelation.
Having taken a note of Mary Alice’s story on a cocktail napkin, the genealogist was back to her in just three days - ‘I’ve found your family - in Quebec!’

The other woman had been researching French immigrant families to Canada, and a search in French records found the Dorans from Summerslane. Not the english language records that Mary Alice’s family had been studying.
Six weeks later Mary Alice and her grandfather visited Summerslane for the first time.

What the genealogist had discovered was that the Dorans had travelled from Callan to Quebec in Canada. Mary Alice’s fourth great grandfather, Timothy Doran, was born in Coolagh circa 1800 and died in Quebec in 1850. He emigrated with his wife and six of their seven children. Records show their youngest child, Johanna, was born in Coolagh on May 17, 1849, and that she died in Quebec on July 17, 1850.

Patrick Doran, Timothy’s son and Mary Alice’s direct ancestor, worked in the lumber industry. Huge in the region at the time lumber was exported from Canada to Ireland and the UK.
Patrick and his brother would have taken the ‘Old Canada Road’ from Quebec to Bangor following work in this industry.

The rest of the family stayed in Quebec. One sister married in Montreal, another two stayed in Quebec city and are buried there in St Patrick’s church - the first ethnic church in Canada, built by the Irish.

Birth dates and death certs for the family match up, so even though she has not been able to find emmigration records, Mary Alice is as sure as she can be that she has found her ancestors. A find she described as ‘thrilling.’

It also matches up with a family story passed down through the generations that the Dorans went to Canada from Callan, a father and two or three sons. Mary Alice, and her grandparents before her, didn’t know where to look in Canada.

When Mary Alice’s grandfather passed away she used her small inheritance to study to become a geneaologist. Something he would have been proud of. Then in 2019 she was accepted to University of Limerick to do a Masters of Family History. Her dissertation was “The Dorans from Summerslane, Kilkenny, to Bangor, Maine, 1820-1900. A case study in step migration.”

Mary Alice now works as a genealogist and social historian, despite having fibromyalgia which can make sitting at a computer for long periods uncomfortable. It’s wonderful to see records, she said, but you really need the story behind them, what was going on locally, in the county and country at that time.

For Mary Alice this search has only started. She still wants to find out what happened to one of the Doran children, Catherine, who she thinks emigrated to Australia when she was just five years old. Who she was with or how that came about is the next big family mystery, but there are clues she can work with in the baptismal records of the Summerslane family as well as Australian marriage and DNA records she has found.
The next chapter of the Doran family history is just waiting to be discovered by Mary Alice.