A Clue In A House Book

     

House Book Town of Errill 

     As things stand now, six of my Irish great-great-great-grandfathers have a county and parish.  Four of those have a definite townland and the other two a strongly suspected townland.  In three cases, I have found the actual plot of land upon which they once dwelt.  I've also found several fourth-great-grandparents; one set, Patrick Crotty and his wife Ellen Keily lived in Cullencastle, County Waterford. The other, Andrew Dwyer and his wife Anne lived in Tipperary's South Riding near Annacarty. 

     These progenitors of mine span the entire island from Waterford to Kerry and of these, the White family has proven one of  the most elusive members of the tribe.  It took me many years and the advent of DNA testing to find they hailed from Queens (Laois) County.  Irish church records for the relevant time period were unavailable but using older records and newer ones here in the USA I was able to determine they were from Rathdowney Parish.

     One of the DNA matches I found at Ancestry.com was from the kit of a gentleman living in Ireland.  His progenitor was John White who I very strongly believe is the brother of my James White Jr.  James White Jr's marriage to my great-great-grandmother Anna Ryan in New York provided the names of his parents, my third-greats, James White Sr. and Margaret Keyes.  Unfortunately, my cousin in Ireland does not have the names of John's parents. I was none too happy to see that John White had been a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary, but you can't pick your relatives.  While looking around to see if anything new had turned up on the White family, I again looked at the Tithe Applotments for James White Sr.  There is only one in Rathdowney Parish and he is living in Errill with 2 acres of second class land and 3 acres of third class land.

     Griffith's Valuation shows several James Whites in Rathdowney Parish, but only one in Errill.  Looking at the House Books, this particular James White had a house and shop, several sheds, and a bakery oven.  Bakery oven?  I'd viewed this entry a few times before and thought it probably wasn't mine, however, the last time I looked I was not aware of  Officer John White with the matching DNA.  This time when I viewed the page, the entry at the top leaped out at me; it read, Police Barrick!(sic)

1844 House Book Errill, Rathdowney, Queens

     Was this a coincidence or something more?  There's really no way to tell, but it is interesting.  There was a notation in the House Book that a Quarto Book existed for Errill but a search at Find My Past produced no Quarto Book for anywhere in Rathdowney Parish so it may not survive.  You can see that the original holder of the lot appears to have been a William White.  I've actually speculated that James Sr.'s father may have been named William since James Sr. named a son William.  I'm hopeful that given enough time something will turn up, after all, when I first looked at the house book the presence of that police barracks meant nothing to me.  It's just a matter of  finding the puzzle pieces and assembling them.

The Stuff Of My Nightmares

     OK, that title may be a bit hyperbolic, but I've been anxious about this.  It's been so much fun using old and modern maps to find my ancestor's holdings, that I was lulled into a sense of rolling hills and green fields.  Surely the home of the Gunn family in Ballygologue County Kerry, in the far west of Ireland, would be the same?  It's not.

     This is what the place looked like in my ancestor's heyday, covered by an orchard and other trees.  The cabins are barely visible at the base of the triangle:

     Here it is today:

     Kind of disappointing.  Their home was along Upper Church Street, now a highway, about where the driveways through the trees can be seen.  Across the street where the fever hospital once stood is now St. Michael's College.  Of course I didn't expect the fever hospital would still be there, but I wasn't prepared for the complete transformation of the old orchard into a housing development.  My McGarr ancestor's home in Ballyraggan and the Ryan's in Goldengarden are still very rural; in that setting it's much easier to imagine what the area might have looked like a hundred and fifty or so years ago.  
     
     Even the home where great-great-grandmother Maria McGarr O'Hora from Ballyraggan finally settled in Littleville, New York still stands, surrounded by farm fields much as it did in 1869 when she and her husband and children arrived there. This Ballygologue was the picture of urban sprawl. 

     I had a romantic notion in my head that the west was the place  to encounter a trace of, "old Ireland", maybe hear some Gaelic spoken.  I should have kept in mind Ballygologue's proximity to much larger Listowel.  I don't begrudge the current residents their progress and hopefully prosperity, but I can't help thinking it would be nice to find just one ancestor's cabin still standing. The Ryan lot in Goldengarden today bears not a trace of their home.

      However, thanks to Dara at Black Raven Genealogy, to whom I am eternally grateful, I do have a picture of a small part of the McGarr cabin, a stone window sill and partial wall that was incorporated into a shed after the home fell down.  It's looking like that's the closest I will come to an intact cabin.  But that photo, which I look at all the time while contemplating their lives there, holds the promise that someday I may be able to touch part of their old home and to me, that's a really big deal!

A Little Porter Never Hurt Anyone

     

     A few weeks ago I subscribed to Find My Past for a month.  One of the most interesting databases available on that site is the one containing the records of the Court of Petty Sessions.  Petty sessions was what one would expect, petty crimes like letting your livestock wander, cursing your neighbor for letting his livestock wander, or stealing a loaf of bread.  It was also where cases of public intoxication were adjudicated.  I found my Connor Ryan of Goldengarden Tipperary in those records several years ago, this time I found my fourth-great-uncle David Crotty of Cullecastle in County Waterford.  Both were charged for imbibing, but the circumstances differed.

     Connor was arrested in Tipperary in 1852 for being "drunk" in the neighboring town of Grenane while David was taken into custody four years later in Waterford with a group of ten other men who were, "found in the unlicensed premises of Julia Quinlan in Tramore", which was a few miles south of Cullencastle.  David and his companions were accused of, "having the appearance of being recently drinking or tippling within".  They weren't charged with drunkenness, just tippling whatever that is.  A British legal term no doubt.  Their fine however, was double what Connor had to pay, two shillings and six pence in addition to another shilling for costs.  That seemed like a stiff penalty, Connor only gave one shilling plus one for costs.

     The image above is a list of those arrested with David.  You can see only James Gaule at the very bottom pled guilty, and next to the names of all but two of the men is written the word "paid".  Those two men were Uncle David Crotty and a man named Patrick Power, both residents of Cullencastle.  This was very interesting to me as David's sister Honora Crotty was my third-great-grandmother, her husband, my third-great-grandfather, was Edmond Power, and they lived in Cullencastle.  It seems quite possible Patrick Power was a relative of Edmond's.

     There was no mention on that page of an arrest of Julia Quinlan, but another search soon found two arrests for her, one related to the incident in which David was arrested:

For that you the defendant, not being a person duly authorized to sell porter or to have such for sale on her premises had a quantity of porter and did sell or cause to have sold a certain quantity of porter to several persons in her house situate at Tramore on the night of Sunday the 19th October 56. 

     That was when it struck me, Julia operated a shebeen.  In the court records Julia was described as a spinster, part of the social group that might have been expected to run such a place.  From the histories I've read, it was often the case that widows and single women kept shebeens to give them a much needed source of income.  In the countryside they were commonly the ones brewing the illegal spirits.  Julia's fine was more severe than David's, I can't quite make out the exact amount she was required to pay, it was either four or five shillings plus costs.  I wish I knew more about Julia, I don't even know her age or place of birth.  All I know for sure is she lived in Tramore in the late 1850's; and was harassed by the local constabulary.  Of course that doesn't mean I'm giving up...

I Found The Actual Holding!

    Still working on my third great-grandfather Cornelius, aka Connor, Ryan.  Everything else went on the back burner while I concentrated on finding Connor's lot and I'm ecstatic to be able to say I've done it.  It's incredible how much can be discovered if one puts one's mind to it.  And if one has internet access and time on their hands.

     I found Connor in Griffith's Valuation living in Goldengarden Tipperary, and the baptism records of his children confirmed he was there for an extended period.  The problem was the lot number he was assigned in Griffith's and the various pre-publication books, Field, House and Tenure Books, all put him on a lot whose number did not exist on the maps.  The Valuation Office in Dublin cleared that up-- the lots had been renumbered.  Below is a map of the townland of Goldengarden sent to me by the Valuation Office showing Connor's oddly shaped lot 12 down in the right corner and below that, a close up of the lot showing Connor's house which I found at Geohive.  I added the number 12:

     I wasn't sure what the lines near the house were, but another map, also from Geohive, cleared that up:

     It was water and it marked the southwest boundary of the lot!  That might make it easier to find the land if and when I get to Ireland to hunt it down.  Next I went to Google Maps hoping I could use street view to take a stroll through the area.  I typed in Goldengarden Tipperary then clicked on the satellite view but I had some trouble finding the lot from that angle.  Connor's holding sat right at the edge of Goldengarden's border with the much smaller townland of Farranaraheen as you can see below:

    

        I returned to Google Maps and did a search for Farranaraheen, then switched to satellite view, this is the image that came up:

 
     It was Connor's lot!  Just to the left of the plowed field with the red marker.  Still the same tiny, odd shape all these years later.  And it was right on the road so I wouldn't have to irritate any Irish farmers by tramping across their fields to reach it.  It was near a highway which the smaller road it sat on ran off from, so it should be simple to take a "walk" down there.  For some reason however, I could only get part way down the road from the highway.  Disappointed, I figured I might as well try setting the little Google street view man down on the road right next to the lot though I didn't expect much.  But it worked!

     How utterly amazing!  I was on the road Connor must have walked a thousand times!  I took a look around trying to find the water seen on the maps but all I saw was what might have been a ditch in the field.  Possibly that was the water seen on the map?  I went further down the road, turned, and tried coming at it from the other direction, the one I had first tried but wasn't able to get all the way down:

     Eureka!  There was the water, this was it, it really was the right lot.  I was so excited I nearly cried.  This was the spot Connor's daughter Anna Ryan, my grandmother's grandmother, was born in 1831.  Put that way it doesn't seem so very long ago.  When my grandmother passed I inherited the prayer book Anna had given Grandma when she was a girl.  My grandmother knew the woman who grew up on the banks of that little stream in Tipperary.  Then I did cry a wee bit, I had found a piece of my past, it felt like coming home.

It Takes A Little Persistence/1880 Mortality Schedule

     I spent this snowy Sunday adding to my online tree at Ancestry.  I was working on the Griffin family who lived in Palmyra, New York and later in Macedon, New York, those places being right next to each other.  Both Michael Griffin and his wife Sarah Browne, whom he married in 1852 at St. Anne's in Palmyra, were born in Ireland.  Sarah was the sister of my third-great-grandmother Margaret Browne Gunn who I believe was born about 1827 in Coolaclarig near Listowel in the county of Kerry.  Margaret stayed in County Kerry where she gave birth to my great-great-grandmother Mary Gunn, who came to America in 1879.  When Mary was married in Palmyra she asked her aunt Sarah Browne Griffin to be her witness.  I'm hopeful that studying Sarah Griffin will give me some clues about her sister Margaret Gunn.  

     For instance, an advertisement in the Missing Friends column in the Boston Pilot Feb. 9, 1856

Of George Brown, of Coolarig [Coolaclarig], parish of Listowel, Co. Kerry, who left Ireland in 1852 and landed in this country in 1853; when last heard from was in Virginia. Information received by his sister, care of her husband, Michael Griffin, Palmyra Wayne Co, NY.

     There was only one Michael Griffin in Palmyra in 1856, Sarah Browne's husband. Clearly Sarah, Margaret, and George Browne were siblings.  I couldn't find a baptism for any of those Browne's but I did locate one for a Mary Browne in Coolaclarig in 1831 whose father was George Browne and her mother Mary Moore.  Margaret Gunn named her children as one would expect if those were her parents, and so did Sarah in New York.  In fact Sarah named two daughters Mary, the first one having died in infancy in 1862.  Eleven years later she named another child Mary but sadly this daughter only lived to age seven.  She passed away in February of 1880 which got me thinking, she should be in the census mortality schedule of that year.  

     I checked the 1880 mortality schedule for Macedon, Wayne County, New York where the Griffins were residing in 1880 and naturally Mary Griffin wasn't in it, although others from Macedon were.  That made no sense, she should be listed.  In frustration I did a search of the whole county and the only Mary Griffin who came up was in a schedule Ancestry had labeled, Lyons, Wayne County.  That made no sense either.  Lyons, while in the same county, was no where near Macedon.  The month of death in the schedule was correct however, as was the age of the girl.  Looking at the top of the census page I noticed it didn't actually say Lyons at all.  It only said Wayne County, New York with the space for town left blank.

Mary Griffin age 7 is seven up from the bottom, cause of death meningitis

     The whole thing was odd, notice, in front of the nine names at the bottom was written the word, County.  What on earth?  I'd never seen a mortality schedule that looked like that.   I puzzled about the problem for awhile then decided the best way to go at it was to investigate the residences of everyone else on the page.

     First though, I did a newspaper search for Mary's doctor as shown in the schedule, Dr. Kingman, who it turns out was a physician from Palmyra, which as you recall, is right next to Macedon.  I obviously couldn't search the 1880 census for the individuals who appeared in the mortality schedule, so I did the next best thing.  I searched for them in 1870; and all those I could locate were living in Macedon.  Except the inebriate Lewis Arnold at the bottom of the page who was living in Walworth, which also borders Macedon. 

     I don't understand why the schedule was done this way, it looks like someone made a mistake back in 1880 and Ancestry compounded it, but I'm satisfied I have found Mary Griffin.

I Really Need To See Those Books

          As often happens, the more I learn about Connor Ryan the more my theories change and the more questions arise.  I still have no explanation as to why his name appears in the Primary Valuation of Goldengarden printed in November of 1850, yet doesn't appear in the Valuation Revision Book of that same year; or for the next seven years.  His name should be in those Revision Books.  Unless the lady in the Valuation Office somehow missed it, which doesn't seem likely.  And too, the record of that unfortunate misunderstanding which resulted in the arrest of Connor Ryan of Goldengarden in 1852, can't be forgotten.  The court believed he was living in Goldengarden in 1852.

      Connor's son Andrew Ryan was born at Goldengarden in 1827 as were his next two children in 1829 and 1831.  The 1844 Tenure Book indicates Connor had been a tenant there only since 1835; but that actually makes perfect sense since he had left Goldengarden and was living in Alleen in 1834 when his son John was born there that year.  He then returned to Goldengarden in 1835 like the Tenure Book says, before his daughter Sarah was born there in 1838.  If nothing else, it makes me more confident that I have the right Connor Ryan as the land and church records agree.  Connor is also in the House Books for Goldengarden in 1847, '48, and '49. 

      I initially thought perhaps he wasn't in the Revision Books because he lived with someone else, but I'm no longer inclined to believe that since in the Primary Valuation Connor was shown with a house and he appeared in those House Books...with a house.  Also, the Valuation Revision Books did show him in 1858-1860 and 1860-1861, again with a house.  It's very perplexing.

     Keeping in mind, you can't throw a stone in South Tipperary and not hit a Ryan, I still think the Michael Ryan living in Goldengarden could possibly be Connor's father or brother; but after reading through the Valuation and all the pre-publication materials, I've noticed something else.  Right above Connor's name in all of them was a William Ryan on a twenty-four and a half acre lot.  The numbers on lots changed dramatically during the process of placing a value on the properties.  Connor's lot was once 26, then 22, then 20 and finally 12 in the final product.  It doesn't appear he was moving around, his neighbors remained quite consistent in order of  their names in relation to his in the books and the size of  Connor's lot doesn't change until 1850 when it gets a bit a bit larger.  

Tenure Book 1844 2 rods of land. Note the lot number 26 crossed out.

Field Book 1849 20 perches of land

Going from 2 rods of land in 1844 to 20 perches in 1849 seems like a change, but the math wizard at Google says they both work out to .125 acres.

     William's name was right above Connor's until the Revision Book for 1858-1860 showed William Cummins, not William Ryan next to Connor.  I'm redoubling my efforts to find a travel companion who'd like to see Ireland and the Valuation Office in Dublin!

       

It Wasn't An Easy Life

     For at least the past thirty years, probably longer, I've read every history book about Ireland I could lay my hands on.  Particularly social history and one of the things that has stood out to me is, to all appearances, the officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary thoroughly enjoyed arresting Irish individuals no matter how minor the offence.  I don't mean to generalize, but their obsession has been documented.  Irishmen were tried and convicted at twice the rate of their counterparts in England.

     Spending this week primarily researching my great-great-great-grandfather Cornelius Ryan in Goldengarden, Tipperary has made me curious about his circumstances.  I know his landlord Lord Hawarden didn't give leases so Connor had very little security.  He had a wee, one acre lot and at least three of his eight children probably still living with him as shown in the 1858 Revision Book, but it seems much too small a lot to support a family.  So when I see his name in the records of the Court of Petty Sessions and read he was fined two shillings, (or two days imprisonment), for the "crime" of being drunk in 1852 it makes me wonder what that meant to him, financially speaking.

     To answer that question I turned to Google Books where I found this--Journal of the Statistical Society of London, Volume 25. These statistics were compiled in 1860, so around eight years later than Connor's arrest, but it gave me an idea what his situation probably was, since between 1834 and 1860 a laborers income rose only about two shillings.  Below is the table showing average weekly income, Tipperary is at the bottom.

   
     Next look at the table for food expenditures below, Tipperary is again at the bottom.

     A bit of a discrepancy there I'd say.  Connor's wife Alice and their children must have contributed to the household income but women earned less than men and of course there was also rent to pay and clothing to purchase.  Not to mention ridiculous fines that took a large chunk of the week's pay, assuming there was pay that particular week.  This is from the same 1860 book-- 

The Tipperary labor market is overstocked at present, laborers are very much distressed for want of employment owing to the wetness of the spring; but a more permanent effect is produced on the labor market of this county by the gradual but steady system pursued by proprietors in laying down their tillage lands for dairy or pasture purposes.

     Meaning the outlook for laborers in Tipperary wasn't good, and was getting worse.  This could well be why Connor and Alice, along with four of their children, sailed from Liverpool in July of 1860 to join their three children already living in America.  In 1870 Connor appears in the census of Palmyra, New York, a seventy year old invalid living with his wife and their widowed daughter Mary Sheehan.  Seven years later Connor would pass away while Alice lived on thirteen more, dying in 1890.  They are buried together at St. Anne's Catholic cemetery in Palmyra where I visit them often.