A big family history day for Kelly

 I hope Kelly (let’s call her KP from now on) will allow me to share her big family history day out today. We travelled from Dublin to Fermoy, for our Cork adventures tomorrow. But KP had family history on her mind. Much of our itinerary has been based on places in her family tree. And she did not come unprepared.

She had earlier contacted a DNA match on a particular line - let’s call him D1. They met in a Dublin cafe and talked genealogy and a whole lot more. ‘But it’s D2 you’ll want to see down where the family, let’s call them Twohill, came from’. We’ll come back to him below.

We detoured through County Offaly, and it was a close call whether we would go out of our direct route for barely the name of townland school. We found the school, the only place still using the name of the place where KP’s convict ancestor came a-cropper. We watched the adults and kids in the playground watch these strangers and the bell rang and they went inside. 

Go on KP we said, knock on the door. ‘No says KP, the principal of this tiny school, a relative as it turned out, would surely be teaching. I can’t disturb the class’. We loitered for a bit taking photographs of the surrounds and the cows, when the principal himself came out to talk to us. I feel an ancestral bond was pulling him to us. Let’s call him GG.

It was if he knew we were from Australia chasing the home land of convict JG, because others had been to the school before on the same quest. He introduced himself, hands were shaken, and then he says ‘and that’s the family home across the road!’ Well lots of family stories were told, and lineages were clarified. We said goodbye, promises to write. We all liked GG, and he even took KP into the class to introduce his cousin from Australia!

A slightly later house than the convict’s but still the Family home.

He gave directions for the cemetery where some G family were buried, and we couldn’t find it without help. The ‘crossroads’ turned out to be a corner with some street signs in the middle of the town, with one road of the cross even closed to traffic!

What a great day KP said, two lovely relatives met and so keen to talk to her. We travelled onto the home of D2, which was very near our B&B for the night - an ancestral place of course. D2 was very happy to talk, and had a clever wit about him. 

In fact although he and KP were related through maternal lines, he had ended up owning the ancestral farm of her family - we were standing right on it.  He’d been part of a community project to gather most of the house histories in the parish which included brief genealogies. Sure enough KPs x2 or x3 great grandparents were in there and a number of siblings she’d never heard of.

She is probably poring over the book right now, as he lent it to her tonight to ‘chew over’, as he said. We’ll be on our way now, says we, as D2 is a dairy farmer and those cows were getting ready to be milked. All was under control though, so he thought he’d show us where the Family were buried in two cemeteries, and would KP like to see the ruins of the ancestral home on the way?

Not much left of the stone house.

And I guess she will be poring over the images of the headstones too, but we think this one is very old and is of the common ancestral couple of KP, D1 and D2.

Headstone of Edward Twohill

You don’t often get that kind of a find every day of your family history-themed holiday. It was a very big day.

We went back the following day to be really sure about the monument inscriptions, and that was worth it. Apart from deciphering most of Edward’s headstone, it was clear that Daniel Towel next to him was very likely his father, who died in 1779.

The church of Kill-St-Ann (was she a martyr?) was interesting. A large Roman Catholic Church was allowed to become a ruin, while the new Church of Ireland edifice was built INSIDE the earlier one. 

James was one of the men working to keep the greenery down a bit off the walls. Of course he knew of all the families in the area and the cemetery. He had a few more clues about local family historians for KP to contact. And yes there was a record of the monumental inscriptions, ‘on paper’ somewhere.

It was a very lovely cemetery. Also in one of the two mausoleums were several of the Barry Earls of Barrymore, although one was the Evil Earl.

There is a mystery Barry connection in KP’s tree!

View of the graveyard at Castlelyons.