Last year I wrote about the mysterious disappearance from records of Augustine Hoy. This time around, I want to unravel his wife’s maiden name, which is just as mysterious! Was she Frances Scully or McHugh?
The commonly held wisdom is that Augustine’s wife Frances (or Fanny) was born Frances Luby Scully. I’ve known this to be so ever since I started researching the family in the 1980s. But time and the gradual collection of both documentary and DNA evidence have undone my belief that this is the case. Today I want to illustrate why I have concluded that Frances Scully was actually Frances McHugh.
It is also unashamed ‘cousin bait‘. At last count, there were 189 trees on Ancestry alone that almost all attribute the name Scully to Frances, most unsourced. If just a handful of them stumble over this blog and are open to looking at the evidence, it may go some way to prevent the further proliferation of the name Scully (at least in that part of the tree!). Also, I’m hoping someone holding further documentary evidence one way or the other that I have not yet found may get in touch!
Who was Frances?
Frances was the wife of Augustine Hoy. She was born in approximately 1814, probably in the West Indies (according to her death certificate) though of Irish background. A small but significant bit of African DNA that pops up among descendants regularly shows she was possibly of mixed race. This may support the claim on her death certificate that she was Caribbean-born.
The first documentary evidence I have of her existence is her marriage to Augustine in Eccles, Lancashire, England in 1833. They had three children together before emigrating to Melbourne in 1841 with the surviving two, thankfully after the 1841 Census where they were living in Liverpool.
After settling in the Western District of Port Phillip Colony, later Victoria, they went on to have a further six children together. Five of these lived to adulthood. She was rumoured to have been a cook for the whalers at some point during that time, though no evidence of this other than family stories has yet been found. She died in Warrnambool in 1895.
Which Documents Show Her Maiden Name?
Documents that potentially reveal her maiden name include those relating to her own marriage and death, and the civil registration (birth, marriage and death) and possibly baptismal records of her children. An obituary with lots of lovely detail would be welcome but none has been located as yet.
Only one child’s birth was registered in England. One was born well before, and the other just five days (AAARGH!) before civil registration commenced.
Civil registration did not begin in Victoria until 1853, so the births of all but her last Australian-born child could not be registered and it seems the last one was just not registered. Luckily, Victorian marriage and death certificates contain the mother’s full birth name where known.
See the table below for what records I have found containing a maiden name for Frances. It is worth noting that her marriage certificate was signed with an ‘X’, indicating she was illiterate. This would account for the spelling variations in her surname. McHugh is by far the most common variant of this name and is why I’m using this in the face of so many possible spellings!
What About DNA?
As usual, I then turned to DNA to utilise the other form of evidence that may help answer the question.
At AncestryDNA, I have a great-great-granddaughter and great-great-great-granddaughter (from a separate line) of Frances amongst my kits who have been sorted into ancestral groups. So I did a search for Scullys and McHughs amongst the group which I know to be related through Augustine and Frances’ family.
The only matches with a Scully in their trees were those who had attributed this as Frances’ surname. No other Scully families at all. There were a bunch of McHughs and McCues, all from County Mayo.
Repeating the process over at MyHeritage where I also have the DNA of a now-deceased great-great-great-grandson as well as the above two, I found the same thing. Again, predominantly from County Mayo, although there were a couple apparently from County Galway too.
Frances Scully or McHugh?
Wherever Frances gave her own maiden name, it was a variant of McHugh (written on her behalf as it sounded to the writer). This is significant. Who would know better than she whether she was Frances Scully or McHugh?
Her daughter’s civil marriage certificate also gave this name. It’s often the case that daughters know their family history better than sons.
Three sons used another name for their (first) marriages, two Scullys and a Tully. Two of them married twice. Both of them gave a variant of McHugh instead at their second wedding.
Son Thomas only married once and was one who used the name Scully. However, his witness was his brother Augustine who had also used the name Scully at his own first wedding and may have helped him fill in his wedding certificate. (Thomas may have stuck with this belief. The authorised agent who acted as the informant at his death used Scully too – who gave him this information? His wife was dead, so maybe one of his children?) The other sons just didn’t know their mother’s maiden name at all.
Interestingly, son Augustine was the informant at Frances’ death and gave her parents’ names as ‘unknown’. Perhaps he was too emotional to remember at the time that her father at least would have been a McHugh or a Scully. He also got one sister’s name wrong, though can be forgiven as she died before he was born.
The DNA appears to support the McHugh surname but not the Scully surname.
So was she born Frances Scully or McHugh? Based on the evidence I have so far, my deduction is that Frances was born Frances McHugh.
So Where Did Scully Come From?
So let’s now jump into the land of supposition and guess where Scully might have come from. I believe there’s a good chance it will turn out to be a family name, just further back in the tree (this would also make it less likely to turn up in DNA matches). For example, if Frances talked about Scully relatives to her sons (especially Augustine) at some point, maybe the assumption was that she was born a Scully. Time will, I hope, tell.
The other name that is often associated with Frances is the middle name Luby. I’ve only heard this from other family members, but on multiple descendant lines, so this belief goes back several generations. I am yet to see any document containing this middle name, nonetheless, it appears to be associated with her. Luby is also an Irish surname. So I’m keeping my mind and eyes open in case this may provide a clue.
Next steps
- I’m currently trawling through the McHughs in the area around Eccles and Liverpool to see if I can find any evidence of other members of her family there. She was quite young when she married, so there is a chance that she wasn’t originally there alone. She may turn out to have witnessed a wedding or been a sponsor to a child of a family member if this is the case. Utilising the ‘FAN Club‘ may be very useful.
- I’m also building out trees of DNA matches to see if I can find the McHugh connection between them. I’ll be extending the search to ungrouped matches and other sites where I have DNA kits for her descendants uploaded.