McGUNNIGAL, Michael ¹

   Another name for Michael was McGUNNIGLE, Mickey.²

   User ID: N1.

  General Notes:

"Name: Mickey McGunnigle
Estimated Birth Year:1788
Date of Registration:1873
Death Age: 85
Registration district: Inishowen
Volume: 17
Page: 91
FHL Film Number: 101586"

from Deaths Index ²

  Research Notes:

MAC GONIGLE

According to Edward MacLysaght's Irish families, MacGonigle is one of the Irish surnames that are rarely found outside of particular counties or baronies, apart from in the names of immigrants to Dublin and other large urban areas. He lists it in Appendix F and identifies South West Donegal and West Tyrone as the areas where it is most commonly found.

The Irish form is Mac Congail, which when rendered as an English surname creates a great variety of spellings. Outside of Donegal county, the English rendering may take the form of Mac Conwell, or more commonly in Ulster and Great Britain McConville, or one of its variant spellings. These surnames historically have been associated with the Roman Catholic Church and its causes, producing bishops and Jacobites alike.




MICHAEL

Michael McGunnigal is the oldest individual in the McGunnigal direct line of the family of James McGonigal.

An absence of documentary evidence hinders our intentions to know more about Michael McGunnigal. We have not a single one of the documents that we could expect to relate directly to him personally; no birth or baptism certificate, no marriage certificate, no death notice (see one possible notice of death in General Notes).

We have his name and occupation from only one document, that of his son, James, who came to Scotland in the mid-1860s with his family. Michael McGunnigal was named and recorded as a 'farm labourer' in his son James' death certificate in 1888. Even that record is a bit shaky, since we know that the informant of his father's death, John, was not the most reliable of witnesses.

Family tradition considers County Donegal in Ireland to be the place where the McGunnigals, or as this branch of the family later became, the McGonigals, came from. Some DNA information and limited documentation point to Inishowen as the area of County Donegal from which the family came. It is most probable that Michael, like his son James, did not write, at least in English. The Penal times had imposed constraints upon Roman Catholics in many areas of social and cultural life, education being one of them, that were not righted until long after the Penal Code itself was repealed.

Michael was probably born at the end of the eighteenth century, or at the very start of the nineteenth. We know his son James was born about 1820, but we do not know his place in his birth family. His father is likely to have been more than twenty years old when he married and began to have a family, so we could postulate a birth year around 1790 for Michael, and a possible marriage date of around 1815. The death certificate of his son, James, recorded Michael as dead in 1888. It is possible that he may have died before James and his family left Ireland for Scotland. At present, we just do not know with any degree of certainty. ^{1 3}

Michael married Mary KELLY. (Mary KELLY was born about 1790.)