Descendants of Morgan and Winifred CONDREN

Extract from the marriage register of the Old Cathedral, St. Louis, Missouri, for 25 May 1853 (from the Drouin Collection, online at ancestry.com)

Morgan CONDREN / CONDRON is a fairly rare name, and all the instances in my database seem to trace back to the Arklow area on the borders of County Wicklow and County Wexford, Ireland. I think it's a fair bet that all male CONDR*Ns with first name Morgan and most who have Morgan as a middle name derive from families who lived in this area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Continuing the occasional series on CONDR*Ns from County Wicklow, this post focuses on the descendants of Morgan and Winifred CONDREN who had at least eight children baptised in Arklow in the 1820s and 1830s. Their children that I know of are Sarah (born about 1820), Michael (1822), Edward (1827), Alexander (1829), Mary (1831), Winifred (1833), Eliza (1834) and Morgan (1835).

Alexander CONDREN married a Frances Maria PARR at St. Mary's Pro Cathedral in Dublin on 5 February 1857. They had three children baptised in Avoca, Co. Wicklow: Catherine (1858), John Morgan (1859) and Frances Winifred (1860). Alexander died in 1866, and his widow Frances subsequently remarried a James REDMOND in 1868. John Morgan CONDREN and his wife Sarah Annie had a daughter, Mary (1886), in Dublin, but then migrated across the Irish Sea to north Liverpool where they had three more children: Frederick (born 1889 in Bootle), William (born 1891 in Litherland) and Joseph Morgan (born 1897 in Litherland). Frederick married a Mary Jane EDGE in 1911 and hereafter this branch of the family seem to have gone by the name CONDRON. The couple had four children: Edmund (1911), Frederick (1912), William J. (1915) and Sidney (1922). A number of present-day CONDRONs in north Liverpool and in Southport are descendants of Frederick and Mary Jane CONDRON.

Of Morgan and Winifred CONDREN's other children, I know of the marriages of only two of them. Morgan junior married a Margaret TUKE in St. Nicholas church in Dublin in 1859: I don't know whether they had any children. And Mary (1831) turns up in an unexpected place. The marriage register of the Old Cathedral, St. Louis, Missouri, shows the marriage of a Mary CONDRAN and a Charles LAMBERT. The bride's parents are given as Morgan CONDRAN and Winefried LACY. Given the rarity of the name Morgan, and the coincidence of his wife's first name, I think that these parents must indeed be the Morgan and Winifred who were baptising children in Arklow in the 1820s and 1830s. In that case, we have learned also that before her marriage to Morgan CONDREN, Winifred's maiden name was LACY.

I'd be pleased to hear from any descendants of these CONDR*Ns, in Ireland, England, the US or anywhere else! And if you have a Morgan CONDR*N in your family, also please let me know. I can be contacted by leaving a comment below or by emailing me at condran[AT]one-name.org (replace the [AT] with an @).