The puzzling connections between the Foleys and Galweys of Waterford

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: County Waterford, Ireland
Surnames/tags: Foley Galwey

Reconciling the conflicting information given in various sources about the connections between the Foleys and Galweys of County Waterford would require the skills of a detective like Sherlock Holmes - whose creator Arthur Conan Doyle was the son of one of the Foleys!

This page has been created as a repository for some of this conflicting information, listed by source.

The surname is usually spelled Galwey and the county is usually spelled Galway, but many of the sources below also use Galway for the surname.

Contents 1 Burke 2 youwho.ie 3 WikiTree 4 ennistymon.blogspot.com 5 Andrew Lycett 6 Glenbeg House 7 Sir Hal Blackall 8 Landed Estates 9 Limerick Chronicle

Burke

According to Burke's Irish Family Records (1976, p. 465):

1. Thomas Nelson Trafalgar Foley, JP, of Ballygalley, co Waterford, married Alicia Galwey (b. 1806), younger daughter of William Galwey and Mary Byrne; and
2. Alicia's niece Mary Ann Josephine Galwey b March 1819, m her 1st cousin, Edmond Foley, of Owbeg, co Waterford, and had issue. He d 12 March 1860.

This suggests that:

1. Edmond's wife was only 13 years younger than Edmond's mother; and
2. Alicia's husband Foley-3057 was the same person as Edmond's father Foley-5465.

youwho.ie

However, youwho.ie shows that:

• Nelson Trafalgar Foley of Ballyinn, Co Waterford, son of Peter (sic) Foley and Elizabeth Cliffe, married Alicia Gillman;
• his sister Mary Foley was the mother of Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes and Doyle spent many summers with the family on the Ballygally estate; and
• Nelson Foley [junior] of Tourtane, Lismore and Gailoa Posillipo, Naples married Jane Adelaide Rose Doyle, sister of Dr Arthur Conan Doyle on 17 Dec 1895 at Thornton in Lonsdale.

WikiTree

If this were all correct, then Nelson junior and his wife Jane would have been first cousins. However, WikiTree on 12 Sep 2023 was showing them as half-second cousins, as Jane's maternal grandparents, who should be named on her parents' 1855 Scottish marriage record, are shown instead as William Foley and Catherine Pack. Furthermore Elizabeth Cliffe's husband and Catherine Pack's husband are shown as half-brothers, but the former appears to have been born an implausible 86 years before their father died.

ennistymon.blogspot.com

A biography of Edmund Galwey Foley (c1852-1922), grandson of Thomas Foley (Foley-5465, d. 28 Aug 1828), states that:

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Esq (1859-1930) - famous author of Sherlock Holmes - was a maternal cousin who had spent several summers visiting relatives in Waterford during Edmund’s lifetime.

The phrase "maternal cousin" should probably read "paternal cousin" (Foley was probably a maternal cousin of Doyle and Doyle probably a paternal cousin of Foley). This suggests that Doyle's greatgrandfather Thomas Foley (Foley-1039, d. 1857), whose reputed year of death has already been questioned, was closely related to, if not the same person as, Foley-5465, whose precise date of death is more plausible for a man supposedly fathering children in 1771.

Andrew Lycett

Some of the puzzles are solved by the family tree on page xii and the following text from pages 10-12 of The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Andrew Lycett (Simon and Schuster, 18 Nov 2008):

Shortly after the Devonshires' arrival in 1748 ... Thomas Foley was appointed agent of their estate ... the pride the family took in the distorted legend of old "Black Tom" Foley and his son Patrick killing a member of the Whiteboys ...
Patrick Foley was the eldest of Thomas's nine children from three wives ... His half-brother, also called Thomas, was required, as the son of his father's second wife, to look further afield. So he became a lawyer, a calling that gave him the wherewithal to live comfortably at his nearby seat, Tourtane.
William, the first child of old Thomas Foley's third wife, Hannah Lowe from Cardiff, also sought advancement through the professions ... his father was originally a Catholic, adopting Protestantism as a convenience when he married his first wife Margaret Fitzgerald ... Patrick, the first of two children from the marriage, continued in his mother's religion, and ... married Elizabeth Cliffe ... by the time his father married for the third time, his commitment to his first wife's religion seems to have slipped and he reverted to Catholicism, the faith in which his son William (some thirty-five years younger than his half-brother Patrick) was brought up.
... William ... 1835 ... married Catherine Pack ...
... in August 1841, William Foley died suddenly in Clonmel wihle still in his early thirties ...
... In April 1847, aged only thirty-eight, she was forced to put her Kilkenny property up for sale and, shortly afterward, she moved with her two young daughters, Mary and Catherine, to Edinburgh.

As Thomas Foley died in 1828, 80 years after the Devonshires' arrival in 1748, his appointment as agent must have been a number of years after 1748. However, Ireland's Own misquotes Lycett's reference to give 1748 as the precise year of his appointment.

Glenbeg House

The history of Glenbeg House further muddies the waters by claiming that Nelson Trafalgar Foley's sister, Mary, married in Scotland and gave birth under difficult circumstances to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. If Mrs. Doyle's parents married in 1835, then she was a generation younger than a man apparently born in 1805.

Sir Hal Blackall

The Galweys of Munster by SIR HENRY BLACKALL adds further to the confusion by, inter alia, merging two generations:

Alicia [Galwey], b. 1806 m. Thomas Nelson Trafalgar Foley who we may conjecture was b. 21 Oct. 1805) J.P. of Ballygalley, Co. Waterford, by whom she had, with other issue, John Matthew Galwey Foley, County Inspector, R.I.C., and Edmond Foley of Owbeg.

Landed Estates

There is no genealogical detail in the Foley (Lismore) entry in the Landed Estates database.

Limerick Chronicle

The Limerick Chronicle of 30 March 1911 reported on the retirement of

County Inspector Galway-Foley, R.I.C., North Riding of County Tipperary. Mr. Galway-Foley is a member of an old and much-respected Co. Waterford family. He [sic] father, Mr. Edmund Foley, of Owbeg, Lismore, was for many years Sub-Sheriff of Co. Waterford. Mr. Galway-Foley is a grandson of the late Mr. J. M. Galway, M.P. of Abbeyside, Dungarvan, and [a greatnephew] of Mr James Galway, for many years Inspector-General of Prisons in Ireland.

The omission of the crucial words "a greatnephew" leave the impression that Mr. Galway-Foley's grandfathers were both Galway.