To get to County Clare

County Clare is the primary home county for both Kelly and I, in that the names we were born with came from ancestors from Clare.

I left you in Cork city (well the horse stud out of Cork), and we travelled to Blarney just west of Cork City. Most of the day was spent retracing Kelly’s Cork ancestors in graveyards, going to Cove and then back to visit the mother of Kelly’s DNA match in Dublin. Rose aged 80 something had lived in Australia, in Sydney, and trained as a nurse and midwife. And she had lived in a town in the Snowy Mountain developments that sounded like where Denis and Terry Byrne lived, but she did not know them. However, she loved Australia and was thrilled to be making tea for us in her Australian mugs.

Rose knew people who Kelly knew and sometimes actually met. They had lots to talk about. We drive onto Blarney where I had an early night. We stayed above a pub. Luckily for me, I was not woken by the rowdy crowd leaving the pub at 1am, and allegedly (by Kelly) being rowdy for an hour.

That is my dormer room at the closest to the train, and being on the third floor, while Kelly was on the second floor, I heard nothing at all.

This is my favorite sort of pub - an empty one.

I can’t enjoy the cheery yelling over the music, the constant cacophony - and then someone is trying to sing or play an instrument.

Kelly and Nick like pubs and happily enjoy the atmosphere for hours, chatting to locals and fellow travellers alike. It is a gift.

We left Blarney with the aim of catching the ferry across the Shannon Estuary. This meant leaving Cork, entering Kerry briefly and then into Limerick. Or it might have been the other way around. Our ferry was called the ‘Shannon Dolphin’. Sorry Piper, we did not see any dolphins although they do live there, and are being studied. Apparently, said the lady in the snack shop, they saw some only a little while ago - probably on the crossing before ours!

I braved the quite cold breeze and watched my beloved ‘home’ gradually appear. We passed a lighthouse, a power station and some cows. Why there was also a little beach.

I had a mission then to find the Madigans of Killofin. Not on the map, apart from a cemetery, we went to Labasheeda. While K&N lounged on a bench, I approached a lady painting her gate (black, and I liked that). Well it seemed she was the local post mistress, Mary, and she had a list of all the burials in Killofin Cemetery. It seems I was not the first person to ask this type of question. Mary did not know of any Madigans around there, so she called over her neighbor Joan who did know everybody. 

Did I say it was a Sunday, that’s why Mary was out painting her gate, and getting way too much vitamin d, with no hint of sunblock. It was a very warm day.

It took a while but Joan started to remember. Joan is the older lady in blue. Sure she had her baby at the same time as Ellen Maloney who was once Ellen Madigan. And didn’t Ellen die one week later from cancer, having just given birth to a son after four girls! Memorable.

She remembered another girl Madigan who married a Power, but she died young and Mr Power remarried. All I could hope was that I would find these couples in the Irish records. 

So we went to Killofin Cemetery and found the graves of these two girls. If I track them down I will record it here. We could not find any houses or a place called Killofin, though Mary said it existed. Sorry Eleanor, who is descended from Catherine Madigan.

We Daniels, then Ellison’s, are descended from Mary Madigan, and Eleanor and I are a mitochondrial match, so I feel confident that Killofin is also our ancestral town - if it still exists apart from the cemetery.

So Mary was about 15 in 1847 when she set fire to a house for the purpose of being transported. This was at the height of the Great Famine. Was Catherine already in Victoria, as Eleanor believes although there is no passenger record of this. There are many inconsistencies in Mary’s records: tried in County Clare in Ennis, where I am tonight as I write this post, a native of Clare, but on her death certificate informed by her husband of 50 years, she was from County Limerick.

I had found a family which included the three siblings recorded on her gaol record - Catherine, John and Patrick, but no parents named. This family was from Limerick. But now with DNA I have found over 30 descendants of Catherine Madigan who match Uncle Kevin, me and my siblings. So our relationship is close. We don’t have that many with the Buchans, who I have been collecting for two years.

From there we headed up the Wild Atlantic Way, ie the west coast of County Clare to the Cliffs of Moher. See post ‘Wild Ireland’.