American Presidents with Irish Ancestors
By Sean Murphy MA
We received some time ago a generous present of Gary Boyd Roberts's authoritative study, Ancestors of American Presidents, published in Santa Clarita, California, in 1995. Roberts has compiled his book by drawing together the work of a large number of individuals and groups, and the research of his co-workers in the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston is particularly in evidence. The core of the book is a series of ancestor tables of the 41 Presidents from Washington to Clinton, which tables number each incumbent 1, his parents 2 and 3, his grandparents 4-7, his great-grandparents 8-15, and so on. Also included are lists of printed sources by President, sections on royal and Mayflower descents and kinships among Presidents, as well as exhaustive indexes by place and name. Roberts's work is impressive, and it supersedes and sometimes corrects a previous standard work, Burke's Presidential Families of the United States of America (1976 and 1981 Editions).
Roberts's book also of course provides much grist to the mill of one of our national obsessions - spotting Presidents of the United States of America who possessed Irish ancestry. These Irish-American chief executives of the great republic are rightly seen as a barometer of the growing success and rising influence of their ethnic group, and their visits to the old country are always important, not to say triumphal occasions. Yet despite America's reputation as the great melting pot, it is salutary to be reminded of the fact that most Presidents have been of primarily White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ancestry, and there is a predominance of what Roberts calls the 'New England family'. Nevertheless, the rise of Irish-Americans is underscored by the progressive increase in the number of Presidents with Irish ancestry, latterly including even those of Catholic stock. Thus while only 8 out of 28 Presidents from the institution of the office in 1789 until 1921 possessed elements of Irish ancestry, since Kennedy took office in 1961 every President bar one, Gerald Ford, has had some Irish blood. Of course, ongoing research may yet identify additional Presidents with Irish ancestors, it being claimed for example that one of Lincoln's great-great-great-great grandmothers was born in Ireland, but this requires further checking.
Although President Bill Clinton's term of office is now long over, the file on his Irish ancestry remains open, in that claims that his maternal Cassidy ancestors came from Roslea, County Fermanagh, have been shown to be baseless. As a matter of fact, there is little or no competent published work on the Irish ancestry of American Presidents from Irish genealogists, a glaring and indeed symptomatic omission. When I approached the Office of the Chief Herald for information on Clinton, it was unwilling to give assistance, and insisted that certain of its files were not open to public inspection (as it has done in the case of its entanglement with the bogus Gaelic chief Terence MacCarthy 'Mór'). Reflecting the confusion first sown by an infamous June 1984 Magill article and having no authoritative Irish source to guide him, Roberts cites the surname in the 1829 Ballyporeen baptism entry for President Reagan's great-grandfather Michael as possibly being Ryan, whereas we are satisfied that it is in fact Regan. It is ironic that the reasonably competent research into Reagan's Irish ancestry has been widely disbelieved, whereas the less than competent research into Clinton's ancestry was widely accepted. Furthermore, it had hitherto been accepted that President Kennedy's ancestors had definitely been traced to Dunganstown, Co Wexford, but a recent official history of the Office of the Chief Herald, citing closed 'uncatalogued' records, has revealed that the connection with Dunganstown remains speculative (Susan Hood, Royal Roots, Republican Inheritance, Dublin 2002, page 224).
The 2000 election to select a successor to Clinton was particularly close, and indeed for some time after the poll the result was in some doubt due to controversial recounts in Florida. However, Vice-President Al Gore eventually conceded defeat and George W Bush was declared the winner. We are reasonably well informed concerning the Irish elements of President Bush's ancestry as a result of the research performed in relation to his father, President George Bush Senior. One of President George W Bush's five times great-grandfathers, William Holliday, was born in Rathfriland, Co Down, about 1755, and died in Kentucky about 1811-12. One of the President's seven times great-grandfathers, William Shannon, was born somewhere in Co Cork about 1730, and died in Pennsylvania in 1784. It has also recently been claimed that on his mother's side, another of the President's ancestors, one William Gault, resident in Tennessee in 1796, may have been born in Co Antrim, but evidence for this is not yet to hand.
President Bush's Irish connections do not end there, for US genealogist William Addams Reitwiesner has discovered that President Bush is distantly related to an Irish President, Erskine Hamilton Childers, who died in office in 1974, and whose father Erskine Childers Senior was executed during the Civil War in 1922. President Bush's eleven times great-grandparents, William Hutchinson and Anne Marbury, both born in Lincolnshire in the sixteenth century, are also ancestors of President Childers's mother, Mary Alden 'Molly' Osgood, who was born in Boston (see http://hometown.aol.com/wreitwiesn/candidates2004/bush.html). While not initially perceived to be as personally interested in the Irish Peace Process as his predecessor Bill Clinton, George W Bush did continue his predecessor's supportive role and visited Ireland north and south during his term of office. Alas, the exigencies of the 'war against terror' meant that there were no Clinton-style walkabouts to meet the people, and indeed one of President Bush's 'only known Irish relatives', Nessa Childers, a Green Party politican and daughter of the late President Childers, was quoted as opposing her twelfth(?) cousin's visit to Ireland (Evening Herald, 23 March 2004).
2008 Presidential Campaign
As the 2008 presidential campaign proceeds it has been established that the Democratic candidate Barack Obama and the Republican candidate John McCain both have some Irish ancestry, and new information is being discovered during the final months of the contest. While it would be trivial to state that ancestry should determine suitability for high office, nonetheless detailing the forebears of candidates can tell us something about their heritage and formation. Obama, who stands a chance of being the first black US President, is of course Kenyan in his paternal ancestry, but his forebears on his maternal side include a great-great-great grandfather Falmouth or Fulmuth Kearney or Carney, born in Ireland about 1832 and emigrated to the US in 1850, whose father is stated to be Joseph Kearney, a shoemaker of Moneygall, County Offaly (http://www.wargs.com/political/obama.html). US genealogist Megan Smolenyak first established Obama's Moneygall connection, and for further information on her researches see http://www.rootstelevision.com/blogs/megans-rootsworld.
The jury is still out on whether McCain's main paternal line originated in Scotland or Ulster, with several unsourced online claims that the Senator is descended from an Alexander McKean who left Coleraine about 1719 and appeared in the Pennsylvania and Maryland areas in the 1720s. Citing ongoing research, Gary Boyd Roberts has written that McCain's 'male-line immigrant ancestor was a Scots-Irish Hugh McCain who came to Caswell County, NC, about 1778' (http://www.newenglandancestors.org/research/services/articles_ancestry_john_mccain.asp), so that further announcements can be expected on the subject. One confirmed Irish ancestor is McCain's great-great-great-great grandfather Captain John Young, said to have been born in Ballymore, County Antrim, in 1737, and whose wife Mary White was also of the same place (however, there does not appear to be a Ballymore in Antrim, although there is one in Armagh). A most interesting connection has now been noticed between McCain and an Irish family with links to the Battle of the Boyne, the Coddingtons. William Addams Reitwiesner first publicised the fact that one of McCain's five times great grandfathers was Dixie Coddington, born Holmpatrick, Skerries, Co Dublin, in 1693, married Hannah Waller and died in Queen Street, Dublin, in 1776 (http://www.wargs.com/political/mccain.html). Dixie's father, and McCain's six times great grandfather, was Captain Dixie Coddington, who is stated to have served with King William at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Captain Dixie's eldest son and Dixie junior's brother was John Coddington, who acquired the Oldbridge estate in County Meath from the Earl of Drogheda in 1729 (Burke's Irish Family Records, London 1976, page 252). This branch of the Coddingtons remained at Oldbridge until the 1970s and finally sold off the estate in the 1980s. Oldbridge encompasses the historic site of the Battle of the Boyne and has been acquired by the state for use as a heritage site, the Coddington's former house being opened as a Visitor Centre on 4 May 2008 by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Northern Ireland First Minister Ian Paisley. We will have to wait and see whether Obama or McCain wins the presidential prize and if their future visits to Ireland include a trip to the areas where their Irish ancestors resided, and in McCain's case, fought in a major European battle.
In what surely must be one of the most 'Irish' of American presidential elections, we find as well that both the Democratic and Republican vice-presidential nominees possess significant Irish ancestry. Obama's running mate Senator Joe Biden has Finnegan forebears as well as two great-great grandparents born in Ireland, Patrick Blewitt and Catharine Scanlon, counties of origin at present unknown (http://www.wargs.com/political/biden.html). Megan Smolenyak has shown that Biden's great-great grandfather Owen Finnegan was most likely from Carlingford, County Louth (http://www.rootstelevision.com/blogs/megans-rootsworld). McCain's vice-presidential nominee, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, has strong Irish roots via her mother Sarah Sheeran (http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~battle/palin.htm). US records show that both sets of parents of Governor Palin's great-great grandparents, Michael James Sheeran and Maria E Burke, were all born in Ireland (US Federal Census 1880, form for family of M J Sheeran, Faribault, Minnesota, accessed via Ancestry.com). Megan Smolenyak again has now identified Michael James's parents as Michael and Mary Sheeran, who were born in Ireland and probably emigrated to the US during the Great Famine in the 1840s (http://www.irishabroad.com/news/irish-voice/news/Articles/sarah-palin-irish-roots-030908.aspx). Peter Clarke has listed Michael's year of birth as 1820, his year of emigration to the US as 1844, and his wife's full name as Mary Kline, but unfortunately he does not indicate the full range of records from which this information was drawn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Peter_Clarke).
Efforts are continuing to establish the Sheerans' county of origin in Ireland, but unfortunately in comparison to the United States, fewer digitised copies of Irish genealogical records are available online and indeed there is a smaller quantity of surviving nineteenth-century records here, so progress in such cases is slower and more difficult. It should be noted that the surname Sheeran, Gaelic Ó Sírín (pronounced 'oh-shir-een'), is particularly associated with north Connacht and northwest Ulster, while Burke is numerous in Connacht and especially in Counties Galway and Mayo. Using one important online Irish resource, the writer notes that there was a significant cluster of Michael Sheeran householders in Rossinver Parish, County Leitrim, after the Famine in the 1850s, which is of course is merely indicative as opposed to conclusive evidence (Griffith's Valuation, accessed via http://www.originsnetwork.com/IrishOrigins). However, it should be noted that clusters of the surnames Burke and Cline are also to be found in Leitrim, which adds weight to the suggestion that Governor Palin's ancestors may possibly have come from this county. Unfortunately, few County Leitrim baptism registers go back as far as 1820, and unless some other relevant records are discovered, it may never be possible to establish conclusively Governor Palin's Irish county of origin, a situation which as noted above applies also to President Clinton.
There follows now a listing of the 16 Presidents with definite Irish ancestry, and of course we would be glad to receive communications correcting or extending our information.
1 Andrew Jackson, 7th President 1829-37
2 James Knox Polk, 11th President 1845-49
3 James Buchanan, 15th President 1857-61
4 Ulysses S Grant, 18th President 1869-77
5 Chester Alan Arthur, 21st President 1881-85
6 Grover Cleveland, 22nd and 24th President 1885-89, 1893-97
7 William McKinley, 25th President 1897-1901
8 Woodrow Wilson, 28th President 1913-21
9 John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President 1961-63
10 Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President 1963-69
11 Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President 1969-74
12 James Earl Carter, 39th President 1977-81
13 Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th President 1981-89
14 George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st President 1989-93
15 William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd President 1993-2001
16 George W Bush, 43rd President 2001-