Mathew (Matthew) Dwire (Dwyer, Dwyre)
I had been deadlocked at my great grandfather on my mother's side for years. No living Dwyer's knew who his parents had been, my postings on Dwyer - related Internet forums went unanswered, and my search for records in my home town had bottomed out. I had found his burial records and baptismal records for his children at the Catholic church his family had attended, but I could not find his marriage or birth records anywhere. I had essentially given up. Two things happened that changed that - my mother had a vague impression that he might have come from Waterloo, a town about six miles away, and I found in a town history that the Catholic church the Dwyer family had attended was not built yet when my great grandfather was married. There was an older Catholic church in town, but too far from the part of town they all lived in for convenience.
I checked with the parish historian of the other Catholic church, and got permission to look at the "old records", a crumbling, just about disintegrated book of notations from the earliest days of the old church, kept in a safe in the church office. A former priest had decided he would not allow the local Historical Society to microfilm those records. In ten more years they will be dust. Amazingly, it was there! My great grandparents' wedding, with names of their parents! All in Latin of course, but hey, it had only been 45 years since I had high school Latin! No sweat!
Armed with the names, I visited the Seneca County Historian's Office in Waterloo. That was a bit troublesome. The address of the "new" county offices in Waterloo did not match any street on the map. I actually stopped the car and asked for directions, an almost unprecidented exercise in will power, but all anyone seemed to be able to do was point southeast and say "off that way." So I went off that way. Eventually, way beyond what I thought was the town limits, I found some new looking, obviously governmental buildings. It turned out the street address was simply their driveway. And I was there an hour before the Historian's Office opened (10 am? The county government?) So I waited.
It was well worth the wait. The County Historian wasn't there, of course, but the Assistant, a part-time near-volunteer, searched out everything I could possibly hope to find and more. I now knew not only that my great, great grandfather had lived in the Town of Varick (I can show you pictures. Nothing in sight around there for miles but woods) but that he had filed "intent" papers, the first step toward American citizenship, in Waterloo in 1860. I also learned that he came from Ireland with a wife and two children (named, with ages), and the names and dates of birth of children they had subsequently in America. I even learned quite a bit about the marriages and children of those new cousins. I learned that the descendants of my great grandfather, who had moved to the west side of the lake, used the spelling "Dwyer", while the descendants of his brother, who stayed on the east side of the lake, used "Dwire."
One slight problem. To keep this from simply producing a new bottleneck one generation back, I had to know more than just "Ireland" as his place of origin. Matthew/Mathew Dwyer/Dwire is just too common a name in Ireland to identify him there. Another year went by before I could find anything more. Then on one of my summer trips to the area (I live 700 miles away), I had planned a visit to the Cortland County Historian's Office. That day it was raining cats & dogs and I didn't want to drive that far (60 miles each way) in a downpour. On a sheer whim I went to the Yates County Historian's Office, about 15 miles away. Again, the people there were fantastic. And what did they find? My great, great grandfather's naturalization papers, along with those of his oldest son. No, they had never lived in Yates County. So why had they filed again there, and received them there? I have to accept the answer I got from the Yates County Historian. "The line was shorter there."
From those papers I learned that he couldn't write and signed with an X, that the clerk who filled out the papers spelled his name Dwyer, Dwire, and Dwyre, all on the same page!, and that he had come from County Limerick in Ireland! From his son's papers I found the date they emigrated! All because it poured rain that day. Otherwise, I would have never made that visit.
Now if I only knew the parish in Limerick they came from ........
- phila
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