Patrick McCarroll and Isabella Breadon - Parents of Mary Ann McCarl Feltis?

Quite a long time as passed!  5 years?!?  So much has happened in that amount of time it's unbelievable to look back that far.  But I have still found some time along the way to keep up with genealogy endeavors.  Oddly enough I made a great discovery on some of my Irish ancestry the day before St. Patrick's day!
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Tracing the ancestors of William Feltis and his wife Mary Ann McCarl has been quite difficult.  Jessie Maye Pierce Michalek compiled much of the Feltis family's oral history in her book Descendants of William Feltis and Mary Ann McCarl, 1822-1980.  Unfortunately not a lot of knowledge regarding the family origins was retained by the older generations she consulted when her project began. 

Mary Ann McCarl and William Feltis

                             

The first paragraphs of the book state:

          William Feltis, Sr. was born March 20, 1822 in Rhode Island.  Not much is known about his background.  When he was very young, his parents “bound” him out because they had such a large family that they could not take care of all of them.  He ran away from his foster home at the age of twelve and never located his family. 

          Mary Ann McCarl (spelled McCarrol on her death certificate) was born in Moretown, New York on June 19, 1824.  Her sister Eliza, was five years older.  Her parents came from Ireland.  A little girl was born while they were on the ocean and died before they reached New York. She was buried at sea.  A brother David, was born after Mary Ann.  Their parents died while the children were quite young and they were raised in foster homes.  Mary Ann lived with several families until she was eighteen.  Shortly after her eighteenth birthday (exact date unknown) she was married to William Feltis and moved to Québec, Canada.

          In 1865 the family moved to Iowa.  They stayed all night in West Decorah, at a home where Bill Noecker now lives.  They went to Burr Oak Township the next day and moved onto a farm west of the Halvor Ramlo farm.  Later they moved to Burr Oak where they bought a little house west of the Burr Oak school.

          Mary Ann and William became dissatisfied with their life together and decided to separate. William went to North Dakota where he lived with his son, Samuel.  He died July 29, 1895 and is buried in LaMoure, North Dakota.

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The jury is still out on William's parentage.  It appears that the name was originally spelled Feltus and going back a few hundred years would have been Feltuce or Felthouse, in England.  There are some extensive Feltus family histories that mention brothers from England settling in Ireland, County Carlow in the 17th century, eventually over to County Wexford and then many other counties by the early 19th century.

Concerning William Feltis's death, I do recall reading an old county history or some similar document I found online that was related to his son Samuel.  It mentioned that William died while he and Mary Ann were in LaMoure visiting their sons.  I know I saved it in one manner or another but am unable to reproduce it at the moment.  My office has become less organized over the last few years, now being boxes and stacks of unrelated papers.  When I find it I will have to carefully site it in my family tree file!  But, my recent discovery was actually relating to Mary Ann McCarl.

From Jessie's history we have:

 -Mary Ann was born in Moretown, New York

 -She had siblings Eliza and David

From what I can tell, Moretown, New York doesn't (and didn't) exist.  Mooers is a town though, and so is Morristown both of which are within minutes of what used to be Huntingdon County Québec, where William and Mary Ann started their family.

There is also a small town named Moretown in Washington County Vermont.  This is about 100 miles from the Canadian border. However, many census records state her birth place as New York, so we can assume that part is probably correct.

Both Eliza and David were probably remembered by the Feltis descendants because they both moved to locations near Burr Oak briefly. David's family lived near Hokah, Minnesota for a time before heading to Winona.  Eliza (married to Moses Greer) lived near Burr Oak as well before relocating to to Watertown, South Dakota.

In Bernice Feltis's photograph collection there was a photo of "Dad with his cousin Maggie Greer Bailey"...

William Feltis Jr and Maggie Greer Bailey, photo taken in Decorah

But these are old discoveries.  The other week I discovered the following baptisms in the Drouin Collection (Québec Church records) on Ancestry.com for children of Patrick McCarroll and Isabella Breadon/Braden:

Child	Baptized on	Church	Sponsors
Robert	20 Jul 1823	Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal	Patrick Mc?nly  & Anne Curran
Sarah	11 Sep 1829	St. Patrice de Hinchinbrooke	John Campion & Margaret Bergen
Mary Anne	11 Sep 1829	St. Patrice de Hinchinbrooke	John Campion & Margaret Bergen
Margaret	11 Sep 1829	St. Patrice de Hinchinbrooke	John Campion & Margaret Bergen

In Robert's baptism record it mentions that Patrick is a day laborer, which would explain the family's financial struggles and need for the children to leave home to work as soon as they were able to.  Additionally, Sarah McCarroll was married to Merritt Gordon.  This would finally explain the origin of Mary Ann Feltis's daughter's name, Sarah Gordon Feltis - she was named after her aunt.  Descendants of Sarah McCarroll Gordon have Patrick and Isabella's origin listed as County Tyrone in Northern Ireland.

This is of course only a hunch, that the Mary Anne here is our Mary Ann.  I believe it will be difficult to obtain hard evidence, unless Mary Ann and William's marriage record is found and it states their parents' names.

However, on the 1851 census, David McCarl (age 17) is living in Hemmingford Township with Matthew and Isabella Leach both natives of Ireland.  Matthew is 38 years old, and Isabella is 60.  Perhaps this is his mother, and she is Isabella Breadon McCarroll who has been remarried to Matthew Leach?  Isabella and Matthew moved to Franklin Township of Huntingdon County and appear there in the 1861 and 1871 censuses, living next door to Sarah McCarroll Gordon's family in 1861.

A myriad of small clues.

 (Cropped from map of electoral (?)  districts in southern Québec. The Salaberry-Suroit area used to be Huntingdon County. Anyways, the townships where the McCarrolls, Feltis's, Greers, and Gordons lived are: Hinchinbrooke, Ormstown, Franklin, Havelock, and Hemmingford which all border New York state.)