Mary Agnes Sullivan

I never knew my paternal grandmother, Mary Agnes Sullivan.  She died many years before I was born;  before my father was married.

He didn’t talk much about her, but every once in a while when I was a teenager, he would answer my questions, briefly.

Me: “What was your mother’s name, Dad?”

Dad: “Mary Agnes Sullivan,” he said with a wistful smile.

Me: “Was she from Ireland?”

Dad: “Yes.  She came over when she was 16, with only her sister!” he said with big eyes.

I was too young to think of pressing him for information.  But when I started researching her, a few years back, one bit of information from those days helped a lot:

Me: “Where was she from in Ireland, Dad?”

Dad: “She always told me to ‘just remember Ballyfeard’ when I asked her that."

Sullivan is a common name in Ireland - very common. On a trip to Ireland in 1981 I stayed at a bed & breakfast run by a Sullivan, a middle-aged woman, running around trying to serve dinner to a very long table of people. She introduced herself, and when she got to me with her serving plate, I cheerfully piped up, "My grandmother was a Sullivan too!" She growled out of the side of her mouth, "Sullivan is like Smith in the U.S. - very, very common." I imagine that she often met Sullivan descendants from the U.S. and was tired of them! Can't say I blame her.

I have certainly seen the truth in her statement while researching this family line. And "Mary Sullivan" seems to be just as common. But knowing that she came from Ballyfeard, which is in County Cork, has helped to confirm some information about her.

I knew that she had married my grandfather, Andrew John Tobin. I ordered that marriage certificate from the New York City Municipal Archives, along with Mary Agnes' death certificate. Both certificates list her parents' names.

On the marriage certificate her parents are listed as John Sullivan and Nora McDonald; on the death certificate, as John Sullivan and Nora McDonnell. It's not uncommon for surnames as well as first names to be spelled differently, or spelled incorrectly from document to document. But I did want to know how the name was spelled the majority of times.

A search session on irishgenealogy.ie showed the civil birth record of Mary Sullivan to parents John and Hanora Sullivan "formerly McDonnell" on June 27th, 1871, and no other family trio with these names, or similar spellings, in the "Registrar's District Ballyfeard."

I am confident that these three people are my paternal grandmother, and paternal great-grandparents. The long line back is growing!