Dwyer Line

The ancestry of Edwin Cornelius Dwyer (1897-1969), father of Jerry Dwyer: Irish on both sides. John Dwyer and Mary Ryan, Irish-born, followed the work through New York: Canajoharie about 1848, Ohio, the iron mines at Moriah, the iron works at Black Brook in Clinton County (1860, 1870) and the mills of Cohoes (1875), and by 1880 a farm at Birch Cooley Township, Renville County, Minnesota. Their son Cornelius married the girl next door, Martha Tisdell, about 1882, and took the family to Otter Tail County, Montana, Turlock in California’s Central Valley, and San Francisco. Edwin married Winifred Flynn at Portland in 1935 and founded the Edwin C. Dwyer Company, a printing-machinery business, at Seattle that year; Winifred later owned it and their son Jerome worked in it.

The Tisdells: Henry Tisdell, born in Ireland about 1837, married Elizabeth Connelly, born in London of an Irish family, at St. Louis in 1860; they were at Burnsville, Dakota County, by 1865 and from 1870 on a homestead at Birch Cooley.

How sure it is

The Dwyer research file (research/dwyer/Dwyer_Master_Research.md, October 2026) checked every link from Jerome to Cornelius’s parents and Martha’s against census, draft, marriage and death records: all are proven. It also found that the Ancestry tree, like FamilySearch, had merged Cornelius’s father with another John Dwyer, of Rice County, and given him a Kilkenny ancestry (Gowran, 1816; Martin Dwyer and Mary Walsh) that no record supports. The merged man’s records and nine of the children are left out here (research/decisions.md, 5 October 2026). Elizabeth Connelly’s parents in the trees (Thomas O’Donnell and Mary Lonergan) are disproven by her death record, which names Thomas Connelly.

Open questions

• John Dwyer and Mary Ryan’s origins in Ireland, and their deaths after 1885. Their children’s Catholic baptisms in New York would name sponsors.
• Cornelius’s birthplace (Black Brook or Troy) and his 1882 marriage record.
• Henry Tisdell’s origin in Ireland (a Dublin baptism of 1837 is a possibility).