Genealogy quest: Mapping the Donovan family homes

The newly discovered family grave, located in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin is quite remarkable. The plot itself does not look to be anything out of the ordinary and there is nothing to distinguish it from all the other unmarked graves in Curran Square, the oldest section of the cemetery. Yet, it is the final resting place for fifteen members of my Dad's Donovan family. 

The cemetery's burial register shows the last address of everyone interred in the grave and for over forty years, this extended family lived in the same small area of Dublin city, near the north shores of the River Liffey. It is interesting, don't you think, to chart their addresses on a nineteenth-century map of Dublin:

Dublin streets of Donovan residences are marked in yellow

Glasnevin Cemetery Register, Donovan family plot
Name	Date	Last Residence	Age
Pat Donovan	1832	Gt Strand St	-
Mary Anne Donovan	1832	Gt Strand St	-
Eliza Donovan	1833	King St	-
Cathe Donovan	1834	Essex Bridge	-
Margaret Donovan	1837	Green St	45
John Donovan	1839	Charles St	46
Eliza Donovan	1848	Charles St	48
Eliza Donovan	1853	Bull Lane	1
John Flood	1854	Upper Liffey Street	68
Thomas Donovan	1856	Gt Britain St	2
Thomas Donovan	1859	49 Mary St	1
Francis Donovan	1861	30 Upr Dominick St	2
Catherine Donovan	1861	30 Upr Dominick St	1
Catherine Donovan	1873	51 Great Britain St	86
Marianne Donovan	1873	6 Blessington St	40

At the time of her death in 1873, my great-great-grandmother Marianne (Coyle) Donovan (also known as Maryanne) lived in Blessington Street. Blessington Street runs parallel and to the north of Dominick Street, though it is not shown on the map. I suspect Catherine Donovan of Great Britain Street (now called Parnell Street), who also died in 1873, was Maryanne’s mother-in-law. The four infants who died between 1856 and 1861 were her babies.

Apart from that, I have not yet figured out who the rest of these people were or how they fit in my family tree.

Baby Eliza of Bull Lane, who died in 1853, might have been another daughter of Maryanne and her husband John Donovan, making her a potential sister to my great-grandmother, Mary Agnes. The surviving head of household extract from the 1851 census includes a John Donovan living in Bull Lane – possibly my great-great-grandfather – but Eliza’s baptism record has not been found. 

There again, no baptism record for Mary Agnes has been found either. She was probably born around the same time as Eliza, maybe a year or two later, so perhaps they were both christened in the same church, and the relevant pages of this register have somehow missed digitisation.

Bull Lane was in the parish of St Michan, while all the younger Donovan children were baptised in St Mary's.  I have already, fruitlessly, searched St Michan's church records on www.irishgenealogy.ie, but maybe I'll have more success with the copy registers newly released on the National Library’s web-site.

Wish me luck.

See previous post in this quest: 
Genealogy Quest: Striking gold - the search for Maryanne

Sources: Glasnevin Cemetery burial register (O 54 Curran Square), Glasnevin Trust; ‘The 1851 Dublin City Census’, FindMyPast, citing Dr D. A. Chart’s index of heads of households in Dublin City, 1851, National Archives of Ireland.

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