US PRESIDENT Joe Biden will be given evidence on his Irish visit this week of his ancestral connection to Donegal.
He will see evidence that Anthony Scanlon, son of a coastguard member serving in the Killybegs area is another of his Irish ancestors.
This new research was carried out by the Irish Family History Centre in Dublin.
It shows that the US President has even more connections to Mayo, as well as Counties Donegal and Galway.
The research will be gifted to the president privately this week.
The article titled ‘President Joe Biden’s Irish roots – The Scanlon Family’, was co-written by Fiona Fitzsimmons and Helen Moss. It was Ms Fitzsimmons who discovered President Biden’s Mayo and Louth cousins in 2016 and, before that, Barack Obama’s Irish relatives.
The current Democratic president’s Irish roots have been well documented since – the Blewitts from County Mayo and the Finnegans from County Louth.
The Donegal link to the most powerful man in the world was only revealed to the public in the April 2022 edition of the popular family history magazine ‘Irish Lives Remembered.’
Meanwhile US Congressman Brendan Boyle, who is travelling with the president, is well aware of his Donegal roots, his father Francis having emigrated from Glencolmcille in the 1970s to Pennsylvania. His late mother Eileen was the daughter on an emigrant family from Sligo.
Since being first elected to the US House of Representatives in 2014, Brendan Boyle has been guided by his distinct Irish roots, most notably in the recent Brexit negotiations as Britain prepared to leave the European Union. He and President Biden were in Belfast yesterday.
Researchers from the Irish Family History Centre explained that President Biden’s great-great grandfather Patrick Blewitt was born in Ballina, County Mayo, in 1832.
Patrick left Ireland in the autumn of 1850 to settle in America.
In 1859, Patrick Blewitt married Catherine Scanlon, these being President Joe Biden’s great-great-grandparents.
The US census records show that Catherine was born in Ireland between 1835 and 1838.
The couple’s first child, Edward, was born in Louisiana in 1859, but, by the time of the 1860 Census the young family had settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
“We know that Patrick hailed from Ballina in County Mayo, but where was Catherine Scanlon from?” the researchers wrote.
Following lengthy and exhausting research, they discovered Mrs Blewitt was the daughter of Anthony and Honora (Heffron) Scanlon.
The latter belonged to a wealthy family of the west of Ireland, the former for many years a member of the coast guard in the British service, stationed at Killala Bay, County Mayo.
In 1848 he brought his family to Carbondale, Pennsylvania, in the US.
In 1850, as deduced from the US federal census of that year, the researchers found a number of members of the extended Scanlon family, all born in Ireland.
In 1904, Anthony Scanlon Jr. (brother of Catherine’s Scanlon Blewitt), died.
“We found an obituary in the 18 December, 1904 Elmira Telegram newspaper, which adds one last element of mystery to the family story,” the researchers wrote.
“In the late 1820s, the Scanlons lived in everybody’s favourite Irish county – County Donegal.”
In the obituary, it stated that: “Although of Connaught stock, Anthony Scanlon was born in Donegal, Ireland. His father was a coastguard, and occasionally brought his wife with him on his tours. On one of these trips the subject of this sketch was born. As a boy and a youth he accompanied his father on these tours and saw much of Ireland before he started for (t)his country. His first landing here was in the city of Quebec.”
According to Griffith’s Valuation, 1847-1864, there was only one Scanlon household in all of County Donegal. They were living in Killybegs, one of Ireland’s most important fishing ports and where a number of coastguards would have been stationed.
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