Like I said in my previous post, from what I have been able to trace back on my Dunnigan namesake, it looks like Cork is where my family came from. The farthest back I have been able to trace the Dunnigan family tree back is to Charles Donegan/Dunnigan in Quebec, born in Ireland around 1805. I was able to find a Charles Donegan baptised in Cork in 1809, the only birth record of a Charles Dunnigan (of any spelling) anywhere near that time frame in Ireland. A few other people on Ancestry.com have tied Peter to this Charles, but it is tough to say for certain that this is the correct man though because so many church records have been lost through the years for various reasons.

I found this Charles Donegan through a baptism record on a website where all Irish churches have been organizing their historical documents into a database for people to search. After finding this record I was thrilled to find that the church that this baptism took place at, St. Finbar’s (South), was still standing, and not far from where we were staying:

It doesn’t look like much on the outside, its age really shows. The inside was pretty contemporary though, except for one very old piece:

This baptismal font has been in the church since 1629, so if that Charles Donegan is indeed my Great-Great-Great Grandfather, this would have been the very font he was baptised in. Having pieced all this together that day and then finding the church and font was awesome.

Here is the newer font the church now uses:

The church had a pretty sweet altar: