I've hit a snag in my genealogy work, in that I seem to have stumbled across a relative that was either in two places at once, or I've been completely wrong about a branch of my family tree.
My second great-grandfather, Charles McCahill, was from a townland called Drimalost (formerly Drumnalost) in Co. Donegal. I was very fortunate in that I have his family's information from 1851, because
his brother, Peter, submitted a search request for the 1851 census return, in which he named his parents as William and Catherine, and scribbled the names and rough ages for all of his siblings in the margin. According to the National Archives, these census searches were usually carried out by people who wanted to collect a pension in Ireland, as the census records were considered to be a reliable proof of age.
Now I'd taken some of those siblings' names and traced them - I thought reliably - to a town in Lancaster Co., Pennsylvania, in the United States. The problem began when I realized that,
among those McCahills, now McCalls, in Pennsylvania, there was a Peter too.This Peter has a death certificate that seems to match what I know about my family in some respects, but not in others:
- Pennsylvanian Peter also had a father named William, but his mother is given as Mary Thomas. (Some of the other McCalls in the same town listed their parents as William McCall and Catherine Thomas).
- The birthplace of his parents is given as "Drimloost," but his own birthplace is given as "County Mead."
- His birth year is given as 1852. US censuses seems to suggest that he may have even thought he was younger, as his birth year was typically listed as anywhere from 1854-8.
Now, either I have been wrong about the Pennsylvania connection, or the Peter in Pennsylvania and the Peter who did the census search in Ireland are the same person. But why would Peter McCall have gone back to Ireland and submitted a census search request, when he didn't need to collect an Irish pension, especially if he thought he hadn't been born in 1851? This would have entailed traveling to Ireland in February at age 63, since the Peter McCahill who requested the census search was staying on Castle Street in Donegal Town with a Mr. James Williamson. By all accounts, he never got the return either, as it seems the clerk wrote that no return had been found.
tl;dr What reason would someone have had to do a search of the 1851 Irish census if they weren't collecting an Irish pension, or even living in Ireland?
