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Harold O'Kelley
As a retired criminal investigator I try to speak plainly and to the
point so while my below analysis is blunt, I do not seek to be rude
and if I appear to be I apologize. I have a great deal of respect
and gratitude for the person and the work of Harold O'Kelley and he
spent his time and money to add to our knowledge about our
ancestors and thanks to him a great deal of our
ancestry has been preserved for all time but more importantly he
gave us a different thought about our earlier ancestors. Given the resources
available to Harold one has to acknowledge the amount of effort,
time, and money invested for what was probably a very minor
financial return but it is certain he did not do it for money.
He did it to express his love of his ancestors and his fath. Harold was
not as fortunate as I because a
great deal of my information came to me in a computer file from my
aunt Kathleen and from her very large starting point much of what I
have discovered about our family I have found from the comfort of my
easy chair with my laptop. I have no doubt that if DNA science has
been known and affordable at the time Harold prepared this book, he
would have followed my path to narrow the search. Thanks to DNA I
know that our family descended from the
Ui Ceallaigh of
Ui Maine
Ireland so I don't have to look at the
Scots Irish and wonder, my
only wonder is what Harold might have further accomplished if he had
known the information that has become available to me. Science has
made my work much easier and more precise but I still
have to analyze the data and do additional research to
understand what the data might be telling me, that didn't come to me with
the result of my DNA, it has taken me a great many hours of reading
and reading again the same material to understand the customs of the
Irish and how those customs influenced our family and I am just as
certain that some new science will be discovered in our future and
some new generation of O'Kelley will take up where I have left off
and probably prove me wrong in many of my conclusions so nothing
that I record should be taken as condemnation of any researcher who came before
me. In the end
all our goals are the same; we are attempting to learn as much as
possible about our ancestors, who they were and from where they
came. It is in this light that I make my assessments of
my opinion about the mentioned author's work. My only purpose with this
page is to make readers aware that some (not all) of the Harold's work may
not be invalid as indicated by the result of my DNA testing and they should consider
this as they do their research.
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Harold O'Kelley - Four Families
through Georgia (1985) |
Thanks to the generosity of
Shannon, a daughter, I have the pleasure
of reading this book about her O'Kelley line of our family in its entirety.
This very large red covered volume is very impression,
a great deal of time and resources were invested and at the time Harold O'Kelley wrote his book, the
data was not on line, his resources were available only by shoe
leather and travel but when I began my journey in the spring of
2009 I had Google Books to guide me as I began my "cold
case" investigation of our ancestors. To read Dr John
O'Donovan's 1843
Tribes and Customs of Hy-Many, I had only to do a Google search
and begin reading. My readers only have to click on the
above link to do the same. Harold quotes
Alethea Jane Macon a great deal, he had her previous work to
aid his investigation so he started at a point greater than
she but given Macon provides no evidence to support most of her claims
about our early family,
her book
may have been more hindrance than help because it seems to have directed
Harold's research in a predefined way. That was not
Alethea Jane Macon's fault
that Harold accepted Macon's claim that Thomas was our
ancestor's name anymore than it is Harold O'Kelley's fault that some descendant
today replicates William of Caroline Co as our ancestor.
In both author's defense I have years of training and experience in tracking people
who are difficult to locate and analyzing the limited records
they create as they lived so it must be expected that I might
see something differently than Harold and we
come to a different conclusions when we read the same data. The
fact that I disagree with some of his conclusions should not be
taken as a criticism of a man who is clearly accomplished in his
own right. My training makes me unhampered by religion or the
influence of my family, I don't really care if our ancestors
were Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, Baptists, or had no
religion my only interest in my ancestor's religion is in how it
might aid in unlocking data about them. In Harold O'Kelley's
book the religious overtones are obvious and understandable and
in some cases I believe they have influenced his research taking him in a
desired direction. He was Baptist so he believed his
ancestors were also Baptist and that appears to have limited the scope
of his research. I don't disagree with his data, but I do
have reservations about some of his conclusions based upon his
data just as surely as some will disagree with my conclusions about my
data. Harold seems to believe that our shared first
grandfather who came to America would act and think the way we
might act or think and that could not be further from the
truth. We know Harold would not have traded a daughter for a cow
but that is the life our shared grandfather lived even at that
late date. In 1750 our ancestors believed it was Christian to
own and work slaves and husbands were selected for daughters by
their father in what was most often a financial transaction.
In his book Harold says our ancestor and Ms Dean met and married
in King and Queen County but it is far more likely that MS Dean
was sent for from Ireland and our ancestor and she married as an
arranged marriage the way most marriages were conducted in that
time and place. It was very unlikely this was a marriage
of love and more likely it was a business transaction between
the father of the bride and the groom and it is even possible
that our ancestor bought Ms Dean from a slave auction block as a
great many wifes were bought, it
was a different world. In the "The
Short History of Ireland" by Dr Johnathan Bardon
there are many documentations about how hard these times were
in Ireland and how to avoid starvation sometimes our ancestors would
raise their recently dead and eat them or even eat their living
children and the most recent occurrence was in 1740 and 1741
which was during our ancestor's lifetime and 212 years before I
was born so the fact that our ancestor may have had such views
should not be judgment of him, that is the life he was born
into. I doubt our ancestor's experiences would be something
that Harold would have easily accepted but that was how it was. Our
Ancestor's customs, morals, and religion were far different than
any modern O'Kelley embraces today so when Harold speaks of our
share ancestor almost as if he was a kindred sprit I believe it
gives descendents a false view of who or what our ancestors
really were in that time. Our ancestor was born into a land
that was in occupation by a foreign power who was of a different
religion than his grandfather embraced and it is likely a great
number of his family had been murdered
by the occupiers while working in fields they didn't even own or
our ancestor murdered the wives and children of the foreigners in
Ireland so
I can not stress just how different the world was during our ancestor's
time.
Because our ancestor appears in America as a protestant it is
assumed he was
Scots Irish and not native Irish and having done
the research before my DNA test I can understand how this
conclusion was determined. To make the matter clear to my
reader, the
Scots Irish were protestant settlers who migrated
from either England or Scotland to lands in mostly Northern
Ireland that had been cleared of the native Irish by the force
via King James of the King James Bible fame.
This set up a 400 year war between Catholics and Protestants
that continues today. DNA confirms my uncle John and
I descend from Native Irish and are related to the
Hy-Many line
of O'Kellys that Dr. John O'Donovan documents in his 1843 book "The
Tribes and Customs of Ui Maine commonly called O'Kelly Country".
Hy-Many is an area of about 1000 sq miles in Co Roscommon and
Galway ruled over by the O'Kelly Kings. We are not Scots
Irish and Dr O'Donovan gives an explanation as to how some land
owning native Gentry
Irish Catholic O'Kelleys became protestant, how four of the
ruling native
Gentry Irish O'Kelleys came to drop the O from
their name, spell it in an English spelling and embrace the
protestant faith all characteristics found in our ancestors
living in Mecklenburg Co VA, they are protestant and they are
Kelly.
Harold tells us that according to his friend the spelling of our
name with or without the second "e" is meaningless but that
ignores the the history of the English language where early
Gaelic to English translations had many extra letters and later
translations had less. I believe the
double "e" spelling may
tell us that we are of a line that used an English translation early
thus may have descended from
one of the four Gentry lines Dr. O'Donovan lists that agreed to
raise their children in English ways because in 1585 the English
spelling of our name would have likely have been "Kelley". Let
me be clear our ancestors did not drop the O and become
protestant because they had a choice, they were forced to do it
or loose their land and their lives. What we do know
from the notes of
Col Charles
O'Kelleys 1692 book
Macariae Excidium is on page 163 we find both double "e" and
single "e" spellings so there was a meaning to the double "e"
spelling that has become lost in time. To be clear, the
poor common Irish Catholic had no reason to use an English
spelling of their name, most spoke Gaelic and fi they could
write they used Ó Ceallaigh until about 1850 so if our ancestor
arrived in Virginia at the time he did and with the double "e"
spelling and protestant religion, he was of the landed Gentry
O'Kelleys otherwise he would have been forced here as a white
slave and catholic and would have probably been worked to death.
I have considerable doubts that our ancestor met and married
Miss Dean in America. Women were in short supply so I suspect
it is far more likely that our ancestor was of the Mac
GilliKelly and she was of the Dean(e) family of English descent
who were one of the 14
tribes of Galway opening up a very real and likely possibility
that she was born in Ireland and our ancestor and Miss Dean were
of an arranged marriage in Galway before coming to America. I
believe there can be no doubt that the name Benjamin that
appears in our family came from the most popular Benjamin
Franklin, we do not find a Benjamin Dean O'Kelley like we find
with Thomas Dean, Francis Dean and Charles Dean O'Kelley, names
that I am certain originates from Miss Dean's Galway family,
certainly one of these names was her father. I am certain our
ancestors left us the clues and it just amazes me that so many
can not see them in plain sight.
The religious strife that caused so many deaths all over Europe
during the reformation period is not well stated as Harold makes
it sound like the protestant movement was being readily accepted
with open arms but the cold hard truth was people were being
forced at the point of the sword to embrace the protestant faith
and a great many families who refused were wiped out during this time
and in some of the most cruel ways.
Even King Henry VIII's friend, Sir Thomas More, was beheaded and
his family had their estate and possessions seized for his
failing to take the required oath that the King was the head of
the church the cornerstone of the protestant movement. Even
today protestants cling to the King James Bible not knowing the
real reason why but in those days it was for survival.
Reformation was always about whose pocket the tithes went into.
For the most part the Irish like many others just wanted to be
left in peace except when they were the ones doing the raiding
and plundering but the protestants saw fortune and plunder in
Ireland so for more than three centuries great sins were
committed by both sides as almost 1/2 of the native Irish were
wiped from the face of our earth in some of the most tortured
methods and of course in the name of Jesus Christ. There are
many accounts of Irish men, women, and children being burned
alive or hung by the neck until near death then having their
bowels ripped open and burned before their eyes then having
their still beating heart ripped out and also burned. Now dead
the protestant English would behead their bodies and cut their
bodies into quarters and send them as trophies to other
protestants to be put on display and they would state that all
of this was ordained by God. I am not Catholic but I also do
not understand how any protestant today could pretend these sins
did not happen and it is true the Irish also engaged in
murdering entire protestant families so as a researcher I do not
take sides and seek only to report this was much more
complicated than reported in Harold's book. There was
considerable effort to convert the Irish and when that failed
they were killed. Queen Elizabeth's agreement with four ruling O'Kelleys required conversion and when all else failed, the
English parliament passed the penal laws in the first quarter of
1700 and during a time our ancestor was born and it was
designed to force the Irish to become protestant or loose their
land. The so called protestant reformation was always about
politics and money, it was about making the King of England the
head of the church and the Irish state something the native
Irish would not accept and when the bill came due for the
centuries of war, the English protestant paid for their war by
killing the Irish and taking their land and wealth. The
protestant reformation was always about diverting the flow of
money from the churches in England and Ireland that was going to
Rome and into the pockets of the Pope and put it in the pockets
of the English King and new protestant clergy. It was and
always is about money. It really was that simple. When King
James in the early 1600s set out to kill, displace or enslave
the native Irish some being our ancestors and plant Scots and
English in Ireland in their place and force his King James Bible
upon the world he created a fire storm so great that it is
likely that almost 500 years later it influenced Harold not to
go into Northern Ireland during his visit to Ireland. I am
not saying that how Harold reports this was intentional
incorrect only t doesn't tell the full story so I seek to make
the reader aware of the true difficulty our ancestor was born
into.
Harold on page 189 states, "It is
believed that my earliest known ancestor, Thomas O'Kelley, lived in
Virginia". Like J Fred O'Kelly and
Alethea Jane Macon Harold
provides no source to backup the belief that our ancestor was named
Thomas. I also do not find a source for his belief that
Thomas, George, William, Charles, Benjamin and Francis were the
sons born to this family and we are told that Benjamin of NC is
one of their sons and information from the pension
application of that Benjamin born in 1761 is used to conclude our
family came from King and Queen Co and this takes Harold to
Caroline Co VA where he concludes William Kelley of that county
is the father ofr our ancestor. Everything depends on that
pension application something only DNA testing will resolve so I
encourage a descendant of Benjamin to test.
After almost two years of investigation I am of the opinion that
Alethea Jane Macon without
malice constructed the couple Thomas O'Kelley
and Elizabeth Dean and Dr Francis C
O'Kelley may be responsible for their six sons and
Harold O'Kelley is the person who added
William O'Kelley of Caroline Co Virginia to this fictional
family which is now pretty much set in stone for most
descendants. What we can proven from records is Charles
and Francis lived and married sisters in Mecklenburg Co VA as
Kelleys before moving to Georgia where they and their
descendants appear as O'Kelley. There are a great many
record to support this and during this time the only Kelley,
Kelly, O'Kelley, or O'Kelly that appears in any Mecklenburg
Census is William Kelley who has ten others living with him in
1782 which is exactly how the native Irish lived, all in the
same home with their eldest male head of the household, so I am
certain that Charles and his wife and two children and Francis
are five of the ten living with their father William.
Mecklenburg as their home is proven by a
single early bible record. Thomas is living in Granville NC
and Benjamin born in 1761 is living in Warren Co NC during this
time, proof is found in land records, tax records, marriage
records and census
records. What can not be proven is that Thomas of
Granville NC and Benjamin of Warren Co NC are of the same
family, that they are brothers let alone brothers of the
Mecklenburg Kelleys. In his pension application Benjamin
makes the claim that his brother served with him and he was
deceased but none of the Mecklenburg Kelleys or Thomas of
Granville Co NC are on record as serving in the units that
Benjamin served so there is more against Benjamin being of our
family than is. This is where the evidence trail stops, no
one , not J Fred O'Kelly, not
Alethea Jane Macon, nor
Harold O'Kelley provides a single bit of proof beyond this that
the family of Thomas O'Kelley and Elizabeth Dean and their sons
Thomas, George, William, Charles Benjamin, and Francis is
correct. I have spoken with the son of Kate O'Kelley, and
he read from her bible, I have communicated with two of Kate's
grand nieces and no one knows the source for Macon's claim that
the names of the six sons came from the family of Francis.
Harold's body of work may be more important for what he is
unable to prove than what he could prove. I don't think
J Fred O'Kelly or
Alethea Jane Macon did much
research, I think they mostly took what others told them and
published it. Harold clearly conducted an
investigation, he hired professional researchers to aid him and
he used his training and education to try to make sense of it
all and in the end, very little was found and that too is
important because it tells us what doesn't exist. No records
were found to to prove Thomas Kelley of Granville NC
appears any where but in North Caroline and Georgia opening up a
very real possibility that he was the Thomas O'Kelley born in
Ireland anc came to America. He presents his reader
with the possibility that Elizabeth Wyers was previously married
but I present my reader with the possibility that both Thomas
and Elizabeth were previously married as we have three US Census
for Francis the first born son of Thomas that puts his birth
year six years before the marriage of Thomas and Elizabeth and
in NC not Virginia. I propose there are two Elizabeth
Deans, they could be cousins or aunt and niece and one married
William Kelley of Mecklenburg and was the mother of Charles and
Francis and the other married Thomas Kelley of Granville NC and
she was the mother of Francis born in 1779 in NC and she died
and Thomas secondly married Elizabeth Wyers. There is some
DNA evidence to suggest this could be true.
There is a golden nuggets for me found in Harold's book
and it concerns the the source of
Alethea Jane Macon's best evidence claim that Thomas was the name of our
ancestor and that leads me to the 1938 book by John Gwathney
titled "Historical
Register of Virginians in the Revolution" which records the
service of Lt William D O'Kelly and Lt Thomas D O'Kelly.
The DAR gives this source as their confirmation source for my
grandfather Charles serving in the 8th Virginia. Harold
tracked Lt Thomas D to its source and learned and reported that
Lt Thomas D was a mistake, that he was Lt William D O'Kelly.
I think Harold unknowingly discovered Macon's" best evidence".
Webmaster:
Rick O'Kelley
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