Connolly's study of the early Syrian creed (Zeitschrift _fib, die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, 1906, p. 202) deserves careful consideration.
At the outbreak of civil war in 1641, a conspiracy of the Irish septs, under the direction of Roger Moore, to seize Dublin Castle, was disclosed by one Owen Connolly on the eve of the day on which the attempt was to have been made, and the city was thus preserved for the king's party; but the Irish outside began an indiscriminate extermination of the Protestant population.
In January 1774 it was occupied by an armed force under Dr John Connolly, a partisan of Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, and by him was named Fort Dunmore (which name, however, was never formally recognized), this being one of Dunmore's overt acts ostensibly in support of his contention that the Fort Pitt region was included in Augusta (disambiguation)|Augusta county, Virginia.
In the following April Connolly took forcible possession of the court-house at Hanna's Town (near the present Greensburg), the county-seat of Westmoreland county (which then included the Fort Pitt region), a few days afterwards arrested the three justices who lived in Pittsburg, and for the remainder of the year terrorized the settlement.
A year afterwards Fort Pitt was occupied by a company of Virginia soldiers by order of the Virginia Provincial Convention (assembled at Williamsburg in August 1775), but this move apparently was more for the defence of the frontier in the coming war than an expression on the Pennsylvania-Virginia boundary dispute; and, in November, Connolly was arrested at Fredericksburg, Maryland, on the charge of furthering Dunmore's plans for invading the western frontier.