Regarding the link to ballymurn and Kilmallock….my great aunt Carrie (daughter of Kathleen peare) told me that she thought her branch of the peares had come originally from ballymurn. I had a little google and did find peares there, especially in relation to a kilmallock house, but could find no connection to those peares and my peares to sure up her original thoughts.
I assume that info was passed down to her in some way but I can find nothing to prove it correct.
Well, that may be a problem.
For Kilmallock House see
https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/buildings-search/building/15703250/kilmallock-house-kilmallock-wexfordand
http://www.iftn.ie/locationsireland/irishlocationstype/houses/?act1=record&aid=90&force=1&only=1&rid=251&tpl=archive3locationsThe Peares of Kilmallock were evidently Protestant minor gentry.
Your Peares were evidently Catholic laborers, originating with John Peare born sometime around the 1830s.
The obvious way to reconcile these differences is that John may have been born on the wrong side of the blanket, as the euphemism goes. And that can be very difficult to document, for several reasons:
- The father of illegitimate children is frequently unnamed.
- More fundamentally, the Crossabeg parish registers filmed by the NLI don't start until 1856, and that for baptisms only. There may be earlier records under local control
One ray of hope is that there is a descendant of these Peares active here on RootsChat - N. Peare, who made post #10 in this thread. He was last online in December. He stated that he has family documentation. Obviously you should contact him - though I doubt anyone would create or keep documentation of such an event! But if you both took DNA tests, this would rapidly establish the truth or otherwise of the story. [And I am interested to see if there is a link on your Walsh side, if you take a test]
