looking for relatives of mcdonnell

Attached are three civil birth records...Michael (29 Aug 1880) and his two siblings John (1873) and Bridget (1879). Their mother's name was Mary Devine.

One more....Mark & Mary's civil marriage record. His father was Anthony and her father was Thomas. Note that Mark was a widower.

Attached are copies of the records from the Bohola parish register for that marriage and the three children mentioned above.  Note that Bridget's baptism occurred at the beginning of June, though she was born near the end of May.  I had all of the pages handy, having downloaded them when tracing my own Bohola ancestors.

For more info about the townlands where they lived, as indicated in the records, you can check out these links, which include interactive maps showing the townland locations:

https://www.townlands.ie/mayo/gallen/bohola/toocananagh/carrowkeel/

https://www.townlands.ie/mayo/gallen/meelick/meelick/clooneen/

Carrowkeel is just to the southeast of the hamlet of Bohola, and Clooneen is to the northeast.  Treenduff is not an official townland name, but you can see its location on Google Maps, if you search there (you can see the other two on Google Maps as well).  It's not far to the southwest of Bohola, so all three locations are very close to one another.

In Griffith's Valuation (mid-1800's), there are no McDonnell's listed as tenants in Carrowkeel, and only one in Clooneen, whose name was in fact Mark, as you can see at this link:

https://www.askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/index.xml?action=doNa…

That might be your Mark, or perhaps his father.  There are no Devine's listed in either townland, but Mary could easily have been from a nearby townland, or even a neighboring parish.

Civil birth records didn't start until 1864, but if you want to try looking for other family records, the parish records which are available online for Bohola go back to 1857, and can be found at this link:

https://registers.nli.ie/parishes/0122

Since they were married in 1872, it's unlikely that you'll find baptismal records for your Mark or Mary (even though people in East Mayo often married very young in those days), but you may find some of Mark's younger siblings, which could reveal the names of his parents.   Any other baptisms you find which indicate residence in Carrowkeel or Clooneen would be very likely to be siblings of Mark, if there was only one McDonnell family in the immediate area.

Another possible search avenue is to look in the neighboring parish of Swineford (Kilconduff), which borders that part of Bohola to the east.  The Swineford records go back three decades further, and can be accessed at this link:

https://registers.nli.ie/parishes/0133

In addition to Bohola, I have ancestors from several other nearby parishes, including Killedan and Killasser, and I've found a few records in Swineford which relate to my family lines (which include McDonnell's, by the way, from Killasser).

In case you're interested in the history of the name, here's probably more than you care to know about the McDonnell's:

According to MacLysaght’s “Surnames of Ireland”, the McDonnell surname in Ireland is of four separate origins, two of them related to one another.  There was a gallowglass (in Irish, gallóglach, or “foreign fighter” = mercenary) family living in the Glens of Antrim (many people in Ireland have ancestry in such gallowglass families), and a western Connacht sept (or sub-tribe), living principally in what is now Mayo, which is related to that first group.  The other two septs, apparently unrelated to the first two and to one another, lived in what are now:  (i) County Fermanagh (western Ulster) and (ii) County Carlow.

I don’t know much about those latter two, but as to the first two, in his “Lore of Ireland”, Ó hÓgáin explains that the McDonnell’s in Antrim were related to the Scottish MacDonald clan, having come from Scotland to settle in the Glens of Antrim in the 13th century.  By the 15th century, they controlled all of North Antrim.  If you’ve been to Ireland, the ruined Dunluce Castle which is a popular tourist site near the Giants Causeway on the North Antrim Coast was a McDonnell family castle.  A large number of those McDonnell’s were brought from Antrim to what is now Mayo in the late 14th century, to assist the ruling family of that area, the Anglo-Norman Burke family.  Some now also live across the border in neighboring counties (the county boundaries were a later creation).

The County Antrim McDonnell’s were part of the MacDonald branch known as “Clan McDonald of Dunnyveg”, who were headquartered on the island of Islay (pronounced “EYE-luh”) and they also ruled Kintyre, both places being very close to Ulster, as the crow flies.  There’s a good short article at Wikipedia about Clan McDonald of Dunnyveg, at this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_MacDonald_of_Dunnyveg

There is also a separate article at Wikipedia which explains the connection of the Antrim McDonnell’s to Clan McDonald of Dunnyveg:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacDonnell_of_Antrim

In additioon, there’s also a YouTube video on the family tree of the MacDonald Clan.  It’s very interesting, and in the latter part of it you can see the connections to the McDonald’s on Islay and the McDonnell’s in Antrim.  It doesn’t trace all of the many branches, though, so there’s no mention of Mayo.  Here’s the url:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5pW5k61enA

The surname in Irish is Mac Domhnaill, which means “son/descendant of Donal”, but it is spelled MacDhòmhnaill in Scottish Gaelic (with the same meaning).  The “d” at the end of MacDonald is a later addition to the anglicized version of the name.  MacDonald is more common in Scotland (and among later Scots settlers in Ireland, especially in Ulster), but McDonnell and McDonald were both used in Ireland as anglicized forms of the surname, sometimes within the same family.  The MacDonald settlers who came to Ireland (mostly to Ulster) after the Reformation tend to be Presbyterians, whereas the descendants of the earlier migrants largely remained Catholic (as is largely the case in Mayo).