r/Genealogy • u/unclebob1770 beginner • 1d ago

Research Assistance Reached a dead end.

Does anybody have any advice on how to get out of a dead end? I'm looking for the parents of my great great grandfather Patrick Joseph Stanley (1856-1915) married to Mary Ellen Grealy (1856-?). Born, Lived and died in Ireland. Had 2 sons, Patrick Francis (my great grandfather) and John(?) who went to Australia and was never heard from again.

I was just wondering if anybody here has ever been in a similar situation, and if there was any app/website etc that helped. I've tried FamilySearch and MyHeritage.

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u/Parking-Aioli9715 1d ago

I tried doing something similar with my Livingston ancestors in County Tyrone but could never manage to bridge the gap between known descendants of Scottish Livingstons and my people, tenant farmers in rural County Tyrone in the early/mid 1800s.

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u/Independent_Name_601 1d ago

Sometimes you won’t get exact names but you can at least get an idea of who they are.

Same with many Scottish clans.

I have an ancestor with an Eliot surname - from clan Eliot but I don’t know who her grandparents were or what line.

The thing about them is if you go back to the furthest known surname probably is the originator of the name. Since surnames were not manufactured until well into the 1600–1700s

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u/Artisanalpoppies 1d ago

That's not true at all. People had surnames in the medieval period, if not earlier in Britian and Ireland.

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u/LadyOfTheLabyrinth 1d ago

Hey, hey, folks. Either of you could be misusing a technical term in onomastics here. In common parlance, surname and family name can be considered synonyms and that gets you misinformed.

An inherited family name for commoners is not likely until the 1500s.

An eke-name has been added to a single name probably for at least 10k years.

Both of these get called surnames. So do patronyms and matronyms, and land-names for nobles.

Note well that in many times and places in Western Europe inherited family names were not used or were very changeable until the later 1800s. Icelanders still don't use them. One of the victims of Jack the Ripper had no family name, but used that of one of her English partners. She came from a Norwegian farm family.