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Our Family Research
McGrann Family
My Dad, Patrick McGrann was the man behind our family research. He spent many, many hours over 10 years or more researching the family tree. He jokingly called himself the 'Great Genealogist' but there is no doubt that without his work and instinct for genealogy then we would still be in the dark about our family history.
Patrick or ' Paddy' as he was better known had a great interest in history, current affairs and his Irish roots. After retiring as a shipkeeper at the Royal Naval HMS Eaglet base in Liverpool he pursued his interests at local libraries in Bootle and Liverpool.
How did he get started? Well of course he knew his immediate family in Bootle. He was the youngest of a large Catholic family raised in the Derby Road area of Bootle. He knew his older relatives and had listened to his father John recount family tales too. His older sisters knew a little more and he was off and running.
He knew the McGrann family had come over as a result of the Irish Famine in the 1840s or early 1850s. In the wider family there were branches that had arrived in Liverpool much later. The belief was that the McGranns had originated in the West of Ireland. In fact, McGrann is an Ulster variant of the common Leinster (Dublin) name McGrane. It was time to use the information he had and start working backwards.
There were several local sources he used to build the picture from the 1980s back to the 1850s in Liverpool and Ireland. They included the Parish Records of St. James and St. Winefride in Bootle; the Registrar of Births, Deaths ad Marriages in Bootle and Liverpool; and the national record which later became available at the Central Library in Liverpool.
Gradually, he traced back using deaths, births and marriage certificates to the 1870s. Here he hit a stumbling block. The records available tended to record Irish births as ‘Ireland’ rather than any specific town. Additionally, the family name was often spelt incorrectly. His breakthrough came as he studied the 10 yearly population census for the Bootle area. One of his direct ancestors John McGrann had been recorded as from ‘Armagh, Ireland’. I remember my Dad being over the moon with this discovery.
He used Hibernian Research to try and trace his Armagh roots. There were McGranns in north County Armagh but heir first names were inconsistent with ours or there appeared no link. He needed another breakthrough and he got it. Whilst browsing the 1850s census in Bootle street by street he came across a family with kids who had the same names as our ancestors. But they were listed as McGran or McGrane. It could be an error or a big coincidence.
He used the Griffiths Valuation records and Tithe Records in the national library in Dublin. There he found many McGrane family names for the County Armagh. The only hope now was to search the Parish Records for the McGranes. After much work he found the family in Derrynoose, near Keady in South Armagh. The family were James McGrane and Mary McCartan with sons John, Bernard and Arthur.
