Margaret Kirwan
Nicola reveals how WDYTYA? researched one of TV presenter Emma Willis’ ancestors in 2017
We had to use English records to establish where Emma’s great great grandmother Margaret Kirwan originated – Kirwan is a common surname in Ireland, and Margaret was born before civil registration.
Margaret married John Thomas in 1880 and her marriage certificate identified her father as Michael Kirwan, engineer. She was living in Hampshire when she married, but departed for India with John in 1880 and was not in the 1881 or 1891 census. However, a Michael Kirwan, serving with the Royal Engineers, was at the address on Margaret’s marriage certificate in 1881. He was born in Ireland, and was residing with his wife Harriet.
We found a service record for a Michael Kirwan with the Royal Engineers, which gave his birthplace as the parish of St George, Dublin, and he was a stonecutter.
A Michael Kirwan, stonecutter, married Harriet Fowler in
Dublin in 1861, and after an extensive search of Dublin baptismal records, we found the baptism of their daughter Margaret in Kingstown.
Try to locate your Irish-born ancestor in returns from the English or Scottish census
Returns from later censuses, such as those in 1891 and 1911, often included a more specific place of birth in Ireland, such as a county or town. If you are having difficulty finding your family in the census online, try searching using only their first name. I recently slogged through an entire parish’s census returns looking for a specific first name and an approximate year of birth, but no surname, until I finally found someone with the surname that could be an approximation of the family
I was looking for, but with a spelling variant I had not thought of. This return provided specific birthplaces for the family in Ireland. Alternatively, if you have an idea of where they lived, try a manual search by browsing the images, rather than relying on the database search. You can access the images for each parish or subdistrict using the Card Catalogue feature on ancestry. co.uk. A manual search of a parish or collection of streets might find your family with a surname that was incorrectly transcribed. By reviewing the other households in the parish, you may find other Irishborn families, who might have come from the same place.