1. One Big Family?
a. Assumption: It is more likely than not that most of the Buckley families shown by the Tithe Applotment (1826) and Griffith’s Valuation (1851) records in the Toem region are related to one another.
Basis: (1) According to my research in “Irish Ancestors” at Ireland.com, there were 104 Buckley households in Co. Tipperary in 1851 (drawing on data from GV). Of these, rural Toem parish, with 12 Buckley “households,” was second only to the large town of Caher (23) in terms of the concentration of Buckley families. When I traced these parcels and plotted them on a map of the parish, they show a remarkable geographical clustering in one tight area of the parish involving just a few adjoining Townlands. Given the fairly wide scatter to the other Buckleys in the County at this time, it is either by coincidence or by family ties that the Buckleys in the Toem area came to be clustered so closely together. I chose the latter. (2) When the names of the individual members of these different Buckley households in Toem are listed out, there is a remarkable degree of overlap and clustering of certain given names, again either suggesting odd coincidences or possible family connections.
Taken individually, neither of these factors is perhaps strong enough to prove the case that these families are related. Taken together, however, I am persuaded that they make the presence of family connections more likely than not. This is the threshold conclusion that makes all further analysis worthwhile.
b. Assumption: It is much more likely than not that multiple Buckley households co-existing in the same Townland are closely related to one another.
Basis: This is obviously a special case of the preceding assumption. While it is possible that unrelated individuals sharing a more common family name (such as Ryan) might appear together in one Townland, it seems very much less likely that a relatively much less common name like Buckley would appear so coincidentally in such a rural setting. This seems even more likely given the pattern of these households persisting on the same parcels together for generation after generation, as the property records indicate is the case. In some cases, two Buckleys are listed together on a single line in the property record, making their close relation a virtually certainty: e.g., “John & Darby Buckley” (Cahernahallia TA), “Willm. &Edmd. Buckly” (Shanacloon TA), and “Willm. & Edmd. Buckley” (Moher TA) |
