The story · Chapter 5

The Dooleys, from Antrim to Texas

The Dooley line as the tree has it, from Ulster around 1700 to Texas.

The Dooley name came to America about 150 years before the Whites did. The tree traces it back this way:

That is the classic Scots-Irish route: Ulster to the Virginia backcountry in the early 1700s, then down the Great Wagon Road and out through Kentucky and Tennessee to Texas.

The earliest steps come from other people's trees, not from records we have checked, and they don't hold together. The tree has Thomas Henry O'Dooley born in 1670 and dying in 1774, which would make him 104. His son Thomas is given 1711 to 1830, which would be 119. His daughter Anne is born in 1746, eleven years after her mother Rebekah Sharp died. The birth year 1670 has no record behind it at all; the death in Bedford County in 1774 comes from colonial directories. Open question

The likely explanation is that two or three generations of men named Thomas Dooley have been folded into one person: an emigrant born in Antrim around 1670, and a son or grandson of the same name who died in Bedford County in 1774. Sorting them out needs the Virginia land grants, deeds and wills for Augusta, Bedford and Botetourt counties. The automatic date checks list this and every other entry in the tree that can't be right. The two most recent generations are backed by family papers kept with the tree: Jesse Thomas Dooley's 1925 marriage record and 1930 census entry, and a pedigree chart for Albert Coley Dooley. Those papers have not been transcribed onto this site yet.

This chapter will grow as each generation gets checked against deeds, wills and census records.