Great Grandfather Thomas Kelly

[heywood]

This is becoming a bit complicated.

Marlin,
I gave you a link to Irish Genealogy and suggested you look through the names of the siblings of Thomas which are shown on the 1901 census. When you found a couple with matching parents it would give you a mother’s name which you could then cross reference for Thomas in London area.


You have, thanks to Maureen, a marriage and birth which give you a Richard Kelly married to Mary Dwyer in Wandsworth with a child Thomas born in 1879.
Trish has also listed the children’s names and given you Balrothery as district.

Then you have the children in 1901 census http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Dublin/Donabate/Ballalease_North/1266696/ and births of two of these children which also show Kelly/Dwyer parents.

You would have to purchase Thomas’ birth as it is a UK birth but Irish births etc for are online or in the prices of being published online.

You now also have a marriage which you can purchase so you can begin to go back further.

This is all good progress but you say that Thomas’ mother is Mary Murphy?
Where does that information come from?

You can also check the Christopher /Christine Kelly marriage by buying the certificate to see if her father is also Richard.

[heywood]

Here is Mary Kelly’s death

https://civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/images/deaths_returns/deaths_1904/05611/4578026.pdf

[marlin1]

This is great.

I believe that you are right that Thomas' parents were Richard Kelly & Mary Dwyer.  In addition to the Dwyer links that you gave me, I was also able to find documentation confirming that Mary Dwyer was the mother of Mary Anne & Christina Kelly.

I was initially thinking that the mother was Mary Murphy, as I had found a birth record Mary Anne Kelly from North Dublin, with Richard Kelly & Mary Murphy as parents.  However, I have since ruled this out because of a DOB mismatch.

I have ordered Thomas' birth certificate and his parents marriage certificate.

Not sure how to chase Thomas' death record.  As mentioned, I have limited the date range of his death to 1918-1939, and believe it was in Lancashire (Salford).  Also, there is a family rumour that he died while working as a railway Ostler.  It is said that he was administering a pill to a horse with a straw, but ended up choking on the tablet.

Any suggestions in this regard would be much appreciated

Thanks again for all of your help
Jon

[heywood]

You could look on Free BMD to start with https://www.freebmd.org.uk

There is only one death showing for Salford with a birth year of 1879

 1933 but he is Thomas S Kelly and there are possible matches for that name elsewhere.

Do you know when Alice died? Is there a family grave?

[marlin1]

Alice moved to New York in 1940 at the age of 60.

I don't have any further records for her.  However, she initially stayed in the Bronx with her sister, Mary Behler, who died one week after Alice's arrival.  Alice is believed to have lived on Long Island & Married a xx Lubeck.  She is also believed to have run a dairy.

I have posted a query about Alice on the US forum

[heywood]

That’s interesting.

I suppose you will just have to check deaths that might be him with the age within a couple of years.

[czechhero]

Hi ! I am the son-in-law of the late Bedelia Kelly (daughter of Thomas Kelly) and I can tell you from our own research that the above information which you have found is all correct.

Thomas Kelly was born in Battersea, London in 1879 (we have a copy of his birth certificate here), the only children of his Irish parents to be born here. By 1882 and the birth of Christina, his sister, the family was back in Donabaite, Ireland. He married the widow Alice Dowling (born Alice Ferguson) in December 1911, Alice's own first husband William dying in the early part of that year, followed by the death of Alice and William's son William at the age of just 8 months. When Thomas Kelly married Alice Dowling, she had a daughter Alice (aged 3) and Thomas and Alice went on to have 4 children together - Molly (Margaret M Kelly), Bedelia (my mother in law), Thomas and finally Kathleen. Molly died in about 1972, Bedelia died on 12th January 2006 aged 91 at Nazareth House Nursing Home in Prestwich, Manchester. Kathleen died in the spring of 2004 at the age of 85, her husband Bill Imms having died in July 1982.

Thomas's own death is a mystery. Bedelia always told my wife Shelagh that her father had died during Lent when she was about 18 (which would be 1932 or 1933), but an extensive trawl through the death records in this country has not turned anything up and we are baffled. A Thomas S Kelly aged 54 living in Salford died in March 1933 from drowning in the Manchester Ship Canal (he was born in 1879), and another Thomas Kelly (born in 1879) died in 1932 in Birkenhead, but neither profile seems to fit, although the age is right. It did make Shelagh and I wonder if he could have died in Ireland or perhaps there is some family secret that they did not want revealed !!! It is interesting that others have hit the same brick wall with Thomas's death.

His birth puzzled us for a while until we saw the 1901 Irish census records (we had found the rest of his family by that stage), but it was only on looking more closely that we could see that he was born in London (we had always believed him to have been born in Ireland), and once we found that, obtaining his birth certificate was easy.

We will carry on looking and are always happy to share any information which we have, either here or privately.


Thomas's death is a real puzzle