Dublin to Queens.
An Irish family from Dublin and Westmeath — William’s crossing to New York and back, the Curry and Kelly lines, and Margaret Mary Dowling in Queens.
Famine-era NYC & Jersey City
Margaret Mary → John Joseph × Anna Curry. William the reverse migrant. Kellys of Castletown Delvin.
Open the family pageirishgenealogy.ie — no login
Pro-Cathedral 26 Dec 1822: Petr × Marcella, Nurnys Court. Burial index 23 Jul 1865. Civil image still needed.
Open the search listThe name
Dowling in Ireland is the Dictionary of American Family Names reading: a shortened Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó Dúnlaing, a North Leinster name meaning “descendant of Dúnlang,” an early personal name. Patrick Woulfe (1923) lists the same stem — Ó Dúnlaing / Ó Dunlaing — anglicized Dowling, O’Dowling, Doolin, Doolan, and related spellings, pronounced Ó Dúllaing. Edward MacLysaght and John Grenham place the main sept among the Seven Septs of Laois, with territory once called Fearann ua n-Dúnlaing (O’Dowling’s Country) on the west bank of the Barrow.
That is the name’s Irish history. It is not automatically this household. This documented line is pinned to Dublin — William’s baptism and his death in the South Dublin Union — not yet to a Laois parish. Dublin is in Leinster, so Ó Dúnlaing is the default reading. The English nickname Dolling (“dull fellow”) is a different surname. Anglicized forms can also hide Ó Dubhlainn (Galway) and Ó Dubhláin. Those are not collapsed here without a record.
The in-laws on this page are Curry and Kelly, the Kellys from Castletown Delvin, Westmeath. This is not “they all fled the Famine.” William arrived in 1848, served in the U.S. Army, and went home in 1864. Andrew Kelly arrived in 1860; his parents stayed in Delvin. Andrew Curry arrived in 1846, at the height of the blight.
The record
The documented bridge, generation by generation. Martin is a merge in the tree — the 1869 Manhattan marriage is the next certificate, not a finished father.
The registry
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