Two of the things that have driven my research in the last few years are my desire to find out if Michael had any family in Ireland and if he came from County Kilkenny.
Several years ago, a friend of mine found a baptism entry for a Michael (Mc)Cormack. Michael’s parents, in the entry, are Patrick Cormack and Catherine Brodrick. This document was the very first time that I may have had a glimpse of the name of Michael’s mother. Through my research, I only know of one of Michael’s parents, his father Patrick. The name of Michael’s mother is a complete unknown to me.
This was the entry was found in the baptismal and marriage records for the St. Canice civil parish of County Kilkenny.
I looked at several years before and after the date of the entry in the same file for any other (Mc)Cormack entries. I didn’t find any additional (Mc)Cormack entries, but I may have overlooked an entry or two.
I decided that perhaps I should try a slightly different approach. Since I didn’t find any more entries, I felt that I need to look in other places around County Kilkenny to find any evidence of a marriage between Patrick Cormack and Catherine Brodrick and also any other children.
I started with a few of the many spelling variations of McCormack. The terms I came up with were Cormack, Cormick, and McCormack. I looked for different spellings of Brodrick. But there are just two main variations, Brodrick and Broderick. My final list of surnames that I came up with was Brodrick, Broderick, Cormack, Cormick, and McCormack. With those terms, I needed to find just where in County Kilkenny they were located.
The place to find that information is JohnGrenham.com. How the website works is that you supply a surname to locate and it will show you where in Ireland your surname is located by county according to Griffith’s Valuation. The first surname that I tried was McCormick. But there were no entries for McCormick in County Kilkenny. I had better success when I repeated that approach for the rest of the surnames on my list. I then listed each surname by the civil parish to see which parishes matched across the surnames and how many in each parish.
I left out the parishes that only occurred in one surname. I tried to get the parishes that had the most occurrences in a parish and also occurred in other surnames.
I will update everyone with any results that I happen to find!
I would like to thank everyone for stopping by and hopefully learning something new about the McCormack clan.
Copyright (c) 2020, Jeff Ford
The Otter Lake Express 
