Barking up the wrong street

My primary mission on this trip is to fill in the details of my family story, including sisters and their families, of whom I didn't take much notice last time. However, like any obsessed genealogist, I'm always looking to fill in the family tree; as in finding someone's parents and going back another generation. Today I ran into the Holmes family, in Limerick or Dublin I think, because they had a daughter named Mary. Mary Holmes is my ancestor and I don't know her parents' names. But then I saw the list of deaths, and this Mary died young. As a matter of fact, several of the children died, and then their mother. There's no mention of the father's death in these records. I suspect that after so much tragedy he must have moved away.