Irish roots of Cardinal Dolan?

May 22, 2012 5:11 PM

An elderly relative (married to a "Dolan") is very eager to find out if her husband might be somehow related to Cardinal Timothy Dolan - even if he's just from the same county (Galway.) I've scoured the internet but could find nothing about the Cardinal's Irish lineage in the Auld Sod. At one point Dolan had said he had done some personal research but was "so embarrassed" by what he found he stopped looking. God knows what that means...possible Republican history?
posted by Tullyogallaghan to Human Relations (2 answers total)

Perhaps one of them "took the soup" (during the Famine, many Protestant churches would demand conversion before they gave charity).
posted by brujita at 5:18 PM on May 22, 2012

The quote suggests that the embarrassing discoveries occurred in Ireland, but there was a little bit of scandal on this side of the Atlantic. His great-grandfather Timothy P. Dolan was a saloon keeper in Webster Groves, Missouri. Timothy's brother John P. Dolan also kept a saloon, and was almost certainly the same guy convicted in 1904 of helping provide forged naturalization papers to Italian immigrants for the purposes of voting. He was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

As for his Irish origins, Timothy's obituary helps identify him as the son of Patrick and Catherine (Dolan) Dolan, who married in Hamilton County, Ohio, in 1853 (Timothy was born in Cincinnati in 1855). In 1860 I find Patrick and Catherine living in Edgar County, Illinois. In 1870 Patrick and Catherine were living in Douglas County, Illinois. Catherine was widowed by 1880, when she was living in Coles County, Illinois with her children.

From this blog entry it appears that Cardinal Dolan traced his ancestor Patrick to County Cavan in Ireland.
posted by Knappster at 7:08 PM on May 22, 2012 [3 favorites]