Long before I let the DNA start helping me, I looked for records. This is the story of that hunt: what I actually did, in order, and why it eventually ran into a wall I couldn’t climb with documents at all.
Here is all I knew : Bridget Sheridan was born in County Cavan around 1828ish — it’s only reverse-engineered from US census returns and her obituary, which don’t even agree. She married Patrick Caughlin on 7 November 1846 at Chicopee, in Springfield, Massachusetts. She died on 6 February 1897 at Clyman, in Dodge County, Wisconsin. And on her marriage record she gave her home as County Cavan — with no parish, no townland, and no parents named anywhere. That single word, Cavan, was the whole of what we had to go on. And as a woman, she kind of fell into obscurity behind her husband’s legacy.
Two churches, and not a scrap left between them
The obvious next move is church records — a marriage register with parents’ names, a baptism back in Ireland. So that’s where I went, and this is where Bridget’s luck (and mine) turned out to be spectacularly bad.
The church where she married in Chicopee closed in 2023. I wrote to ask whether their older attendance registers survived anywhere — she was, by all accounts, a devoted churchgoer, so if anything was kept, she’d be in it. I heard nothing. I had a certificate and an intention register entry – neither with parent names.
The church she attended in Wisconsin met a stranger fate : it was lost in a blaze. According to correspondence with the diocesan office in Milwaukee, there are zero surviving records from the Irish church as a result. So the two most obvious documentary sources for Bridget’s life in America had, between them, closed and been burned.
I was going to have to come at her sideways.
Reading the children’s names
When the direct records fail, you read the indirect ones — and in Irish genealogy, one of the best indirect records is a family’s naming pattern. Irish Catholic families of the period named children in a fairly predictable order after the grandparents, so a set of children’s names is very nearly a coded list of the generation above. (But not always – it can be a way to begin pointing in to the records, though!)
Bridget and Patrick’s sons gave me my cipher:
- James (1848) — my great-grandfather — named, I’m confident, for Patrick’s father James (This turned out correct).
- Bernard Francis (1849–1854)
- Francis (1854–1854)
- John (1855–1931)
- William Francis (1860–1898)
If the pattern held, one of those early names — Bernard especially — had a good chance of being Bridget’s father. So “find a Bernard Sheridan with a daughter Bridget” became my working brief, and it sent me into the abyss of Irish records.
Three hundred and fifty-four Sheridans
Here’s the scale of the problem : John Grenham’s indexes list 354 Sheridan families in Cavan at the time of Griffith’s Valuation. Sheridans are like Starbucks : one on every corner. The naming-pattern idea was my attempt to narrow it down a bit.
So I worked the surviving 1821 census two ways. First I searched it for an adult Bernard Sheridan who might have a very young Bridget in the house. Bernard as a name threw 71 hits, most of them children; the grown men I could find were these five —
- Bernard, age 40, Bellananagh, Kilmore — no Bridget
- Bernard, age 42, Cormeen, Kilmore — no Bridget
- Bernard, age 21, Edenburt, Lurgan — a householder’s son, nobody else
- Bernard, age 35, Clifferna, Drung — no children
- Bernard, age 30, Drumgrin, Drung — no Bridget
Not one of them had a daughter Bridget. It was going to be close anyway – but as the estimates for her age spanned 1814 to 1828 I thought I’d check. So much for the tidy theory.
Then I turned the search around and looked in the 1821 census for Bridget Sheridan as a young child, which gave nine results across Kilbride, Drumlumman, Crosserlough and Kilmore. I kept a particular eye out for any household that also held an Anne — for a reason I’ll come to — and marked those. And for those houses with Bernard in 1821, I could then go look to see if they did end up having a Bridget.
Then I ran the 1841 census for Bridget Sheridan, which gave only four: two infants at Cordownan in Killeshandra, a 45-year-old widow at Coronea, and one very interesting young lady.
The servant in the Mulligan house
That fourth 1841 record was a Bridget Sheridan, age 20, working as a servant in the household of Patrick Mulligan, at Coronagh in Killeshandra. She’s listed as unmarried, from Cavan, and unable to read. The household was Patrick Mulligan (38) and Mary (36) — a note says they married in 1829 — with children Catherine, Thomas, Jude and John.
For a long time this was my best candidate, and you can see why: the age fits a birth around 1821, she’s exactly the kind of young woman who emigrates, and she’s a Sheridan in the right county at the right moment. So I followed the Mulligans — because if I could trace them, I might find her beside them again. I checked Griffith’s and found a Patrick Mulligan renting at Derrylane (from Richard Morton, under Lord Farnham), a few kilometres from Coronagh. I filed the Mulligan surname away as a name to watch for on the American side. I never found a connection.
Bernard of Cordownan, and a number I nearly believed
The Bernard thread hadn’t died in the census, so I looked in the Tithe Books and Griffith’s Valuation — the property records. And there he was: a Bernard Sheridan at Cordownan, Killeshandra, holding land in the 1832 tithe list under the landlord Lord Gosford.
Beside his name sat the number 260, and I read it as acres. Two hundred and sixty acres is not a cottier — that would be a family of some means, the sort whose comings and goings might actually get written down somewhere.
But – it is his plot number. The acreage is the next column along, and Bernard’s reads 8 acres 3 roods 19 perches.
Three Sheridan households sit side by side on the same townland, all under Gosford — James at 12 acres, John at 14, Bernard at just under nine, something like a fifth of Cordownan between the three of them. A cluster of ordinary neighbours who may well be kin.
Which pointed me at the Gosford estate papers. Big estates kept rent rolls, emigration-assistance records, correspondence about tenants — and the Gosford collection sits partly in PRONI and is documented through the landed-estates databases. I flagged it as a real, if long, route: the kind of archive you read by hand, once you’ve earned the right to narrow your reading to one or two families. I haven’t yet done that reading. It’s still on the list for when I get to Belfast.
Ruling out the wrong Bridgets
With 354 Sheridan families, a lot of the work isn’t strictly about finding Bridget — it’s eliminating the other Bridgets. My rule for it was simple: trace each Bridget forward and if a Bridget Sheridan can be shown to have married or died in Cavan, she stayed in Ireland and is therefore not my Bridget. If she instead vanishes from Cavan records shortly before 1846 she stays a live candidate for further research.
A few candidates I have worked forward so far:
- Bridget of Enagh, Castlerahan — baptised 26 September 1829, daughter of William Sheridan and Eleanor Cain (a properly documented baptism for her). Castlerahan has only two Bridget Sheridan marriages on record ever: one in 1835 (she’d have been six) and one in 1858 to a Peter Burns that names no parents. So I couldn’t place her marrying — which leaves her open, still possibly an emigrant.
- Bridget of Drumcoghill Upper — “born 1828, daughter of William Sheridan,” the lead that comes from a member tree online but it’s something to check into. Killeshandra’s Bridget Sheridan marriages are 1866, 1876 and 1878 — all far too late for her — so nothing there contradicts emigration.
- Bridget of Rossodden, Castlerahan — baptised 19 February 1830, daughter of Patrick Sheridan and Eleanor Brady, with sisters Rose (1833) and Eleanor (1836). The whole family disappears from Castlerahan after 1836. I followed both sisters Rose and Eleanor forward and neither leaves an Irish marriage or a findable Irish death — three Sheridan daughters and a family all vanishing together is very consistent with an emigration. (And the mother being a Brady is a surname that, much later, the DNA would make me care about a great deal.)
| Bridget | Baptised | Parents | Source | Where the forward trace left her |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enagh, Castlerahan | 26 Sep 1829 | William Sheridan × Eleanor Cain | Parish register | Open. No Castlerahan marriage can be tied to her |
| Rossodden, Castlerahan | 19 Feb 1830 | Patrick Sheridan × Eleanor Brady | Parish register | Open. Family and both sisters vanish after 1836 |
| Drumcoghill Upper, Killeshandra | claimed c.1828 | William Sheridan; mother not named | Member tree — no baptism found | Open. Killeshandra marriages all far too late |
Three worked forward is a drop in the bucket, unfortunately. Castlerahan alone baptised thirteen Bridget Sheridans — and Castlerahan is one parish out of many.
| Where they stand | Which Bridgets |
|---|---|
| Worked forward, still open | Enagh 1829 · Rossodden 1830 · Drumcoghill Upper c.1828 |
| Ruled out — stayed in Ireland | Ballyduff 1837: married Peter Burns, died at Ballinagh 1887 |
| Excluded on age | Castlerahan 1833 and 1841 (aged 13 and 5 in 1846); every Bridget baptised 1844 or later |
| Parked — outside the DNA cluster | Killeshandra-area Bridgets other than Drumcoghill |
| Baptised in Castlerahan, not yet worked | Thirteen there in total — most of them still untouched |
| Born before her parish kept a book | Unknown — and quite possibly the answer |
The wall the paper couldn’t climb
The Catholic registers for the parishes Bridget was most likely from simply start too late. Crosserlough’s begin in 1843. Ballymachugh’s in 1837. Denn’s not until 1856. Castlerahan’s around 1829. A woman born in the early-to-mid 1820s, in most of these parishes, was born before her parish kept a book — which means her baptism, the one document that would name her mother and father may never have existed. It’s hard for us to imagine – with all of our documentation, IDs, National Insurance Numbers, Social Security Numbers and knowing the minute of our own birth. Most of these people had no need to know exactly when they were born, not even what year.
So, I could rule out wrong Bridgets forever and never find the right one, because the right one might be documentarily invisible — no baptism, no surviving marriage register, two burned-or-shuttered American churches. There was no amount of paper that was going to hand me her parents’ names with certainty that it was the same Bridget.
So, how to narrow any Sheridan down at all?
I put the paper down — and I went looking for her another way entirely.
That’s where the DNA story begins. But none of this paper was wasted: it built the candidate field, it found me a probable sister in Anne, it taught me which corner of the county to doubt and which surnames to watch — Brady and Mulligan — and it drew the exact map that the chromosomes would later either confirm or overturn.
(If you carry Sheridan, Brady or Gilligan out of Cavan and into Massachusetts or the American midwest, I’d love to hear from you.)