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Author: canavanb
Surnames: Canavans Longford
Classification: queries
Message Board URL:
http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.canavan/17.22.24.1.1.1/mb.ashx
Message Board Post:
Laura - I'm afraid i am not a true genealogist for I have not had the curiosity to
trace the family back beyond the photographic watershed ( say 1890): i was just interested
in piecing together old photographs , family hearsay and property and attempting to make
sense of it and perhaps to get a convincing explanation of the family tensions that
probably affect all families, but as land was so central to Irish families in the last two
centuries, were so deep in Ireland, and the losers usually emigrated. It is true that i
often wondered how the Canavans - a small huddle of them - came to be isolated in the
Irish midlands with not an other relative in sight in the late nineteenth century. I have
always heard it is a Galway name, with strong emigration links to Ulster and Scotland -
and of course America. My own name, Bernard, has a non-Canavan root that would take too
long to explain, but then i was surprised to find that there was a Bernard Canavan in
Carton, Co Longford!
, in 1836, and another in 1883, and another in Cartongolan, Co Longford in the 1911
census, so it is obviously a name that has a resonance with them . Bernard is not a
common Irish first name, but James is and there are plenty of James Canavans in that
extended Longford cousinhood. I don't know how many went to the US in the 19th
century, but two went from Ballinalee, Co Longford in the early 1920s. The Argentine was
another place they settled as part of a wave of south Longfordians in the 1880s.
Don't know if any of this fits into yor 'Bernard Canavan' ancestoral date.
bernard
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