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!