The Heagney Clan

This is the part of my Irish side that I have the most people in the tree. The tree can be seen here https://myfamgen.com/hagneyheagney-family/. Several years ago a man named Jim McDonald contacted my brother. He said he was a distant cousin of my mother’s. It turns out that they are 2^nd cousins. Ancestry DNA testing turned up another 3^rd cousin twice removed from the Heagney line through the Maguires. The Heagneys were from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. According to the 1900 US Census Mary Murtha (nee Mary Bridget Hagney) came to the US in 1880. We didn’t really know anything about any of her side of the family other than her children and their descendants until we found out about Jim’s research. It turns out that she had a brother John and a sister Bridget. I have no proof that Mary’s middle name was Bridget, but that’s the family story I have always heard. It does seem a little strange that that would be her middle name when it was also her sister’s first name, but since Saint Brigid is the female patron saint of Ireland maybe the family just liked including it in all the girls’ names. I just read recently about a family that named all of their female children Mary and male children Joseph and called them all by their middle names. We have a somewhat similar situation in our family where many girls were named Mary and called by their middle names, but not any siblings with the same name.

Through DNA testing I have also found some Heagney relatives who still live in Ireland. One of them is my third cousin once removed through her father and my fourth cousin through her mother. Her parents were each other’s second cousins once removed. That makes her her father’s second cousin twice removed and her mother’s third cousin. In small villages without a lot of people to marry this was not uncommon.

There is another DNA match that is a pretty close match that we haven’t been able to figure out exactly how we are related, but it’s definitely through this line somehow.

Mary Hagney(that’s how it’s spelled on her marriage certificate) and James Murtagh had eight children, only three of whom, all girls, survived to adulthood.  The other five all died young and at least four of those were within two years of each other. James on January 6, 1895 at the age of 18 months, Anna 6 days later on January 12, 1895. She was 5 years old. Agnes one year later on January 20, 1986. She was 11 months old. She was born one month before her other siblings died. Then later in 1896, Josephine was born on December 19, 1896 and died 8 days later on December 27, 1896. I am not sure when Michael died or how old he was, but he died sometime before 1900. It’s possible that he died in January 1895 because the family story has always been that three children died in the same week. Even most of the adult children died relatively young, Sarah(Sadie) was only 37 and Edna was 40. But Mary Ellen lived to be 80.

Edna’s first husband, Augustine Mulvaney, died when their daughter was under one year old. I hadn’t known his first name until I was contacted via Ancestry by one of his brother’s descendants. I was able then to put the person who contacted me in contact with Edna’s granddaughter. They are second cousins. Edna did remarry to Charles Lange. They had a son Robert. Edna died shortly after Robert was born. One of my biggest hopes is that I can find out what happened to Robert and if there are any descendants of his out there that I can locate. The last info I have is the 1940 US Census where Charles, Robert (age 2), and Charles’ mother Emily where living in Bogota, New Jersey. Since that’s the latest census that is available, I don’t know anything else about them.