Daniel and Ann and Margaret and Henry

Maggie's father's name was Daniel. That we know from the marriage registration.

We can also infer he was alive in 1876, simply because her husband's father, Arthur Magill, was labeled 'deceased'.

We could usually find out more information from the baptismal register, but the registers for Tickmacrevan (Glenarm) are missing entries from March 1854 to July 1857. So I did it the hard way. If Daniel McNeill was alive in 1876, he likely had an actual death certificate. Problem is, there are 19 death certificates from men named Daniel mcNeill in the Larne district who could possible be our man. So I started going through them, one by one, and cross-referencing them against census and other data. And I found this.

So what? Annie Legge, Daniel McNeill's sister, was godmother to Maggie McNeill's first child Margaret Ann, born 1877. Can't be a coincidence; unlike Daniel McNeill, Anne Legge is an unusual name. Also note that Daniel was a manager for Henry McNeill Ltd. Armed with this, it wasn't hard to find this honking great gravestone, in McGarel Cemetery in Larne.

Look at the link: it claims Henry McNeill is regarded as the founder of the modern tourist industry in Ireland. Folks, we are in the presence of greatness!

With the stone, of course, we have Daniel, his parents, and two siblings. We know he was born in 1826, his sister Ann in 1834, and his brother Henry in 1836. We can now also find his will, which alas is brief, but says he was a 'farm steward', and his wife's name was Mary. He was worth £96, not much even back then. In contrast, Henry, who died in 1904, was worth £5,224 18s. 6d. Henry's executors were Anne Legge and Margaret O Boyle 'widow'. In fact, Henry neverr married, and Margaret O Boyle née McNeill was his sister. I'll write more about his three siblings anon. But it seems reasonable to speculate that her uncle Henry's death in 1904 probably explains how Maggie bought a nice house in Belfast in 1907.

Finally, I think this is the record of Daniel McNeill's marriage to Mary Anne McKay on October 26, 1854, in Glenarm.

This pushes the mitochondrial ancestor back one generation. The only perfect mitochondrial matches I have that are associated with any sort of genealogy are to a Margaret Morrisson, b. 1810 in Alnwick, Scotland; and to a Nancy McClurg (name varies), who was in the Carolinas in 1750, but was apparently from Northern Ireland. She was most definitely Protestant, so we have yet another religious conversion mystery.