What
happened to our Ballyduff family at the time of and after the famine 1845-50?
Generation Three
Generation Three
Thomas Donoghue and Ellen Connor
Mary
Donoghue and Thomas Ryle
John
Donoghue and Johanna Boyle
Recall
This is the third in a series of articles about the
family which I have published over recent months.
As there can be long
intervals between my blogs, I need to restate earlier information if you,
members of the extended family, are to make sense of all this. In my last blog I described what happened to
Sylvester Donoghue (b.1821), who was the grandson of another Sylvester the
older brother of my ggggrandfather, James Donoghue and the Sylvester of the
tomb in Rattoo.
James and his wife, Julia
Boyle, had at least six children: Patrick, Ellen, James, Thomas, Mary,
John. They lived in Ballyduff, north
Kerry. It is their story and that of
some of their children that I will tell in this series of articles.
The main Donoghue players
and their partners in this story are shown below
James
and Julia - ggggrandparents
Patrick and Catherine DeePatrick and Anastasia Boyle
Ellen and Daniel Costello
James and Elizabeth Boyle
Thomas and Ellen Connor – gggrandparents
Mary and Thomas Ryle
And their children
John and Joanna Boyle
As guidance, when I show
(b. with a year) it will be either birth or baptism and should in most cases be
regarded as approximate.
Thomas
and Ellen Connor
Thomas, my gggrandfather,
was born in 1806 and Ellen in 1808. I
believe that she was the daughter of John Connor who rented land in Ballyduff
between the holdings of Sylvester and his brother Bartholomew in 1825.
They had seven children:
in Ballyduff, Julia (b.1834), James (b.1836), Catherine (b.1839), John
(b.1841), Thomas (b.1844, my ggrandfather), and Ellen (b.1847), and in Poplar,
Mary Ann (b.1852). The stories of these
children I will save for a later article only referring to them now as they
affect their parents’ stories.
Thomas had a smallholding
in the east of Ballyduff from 1846, which he had given up by 1848.
He was a farrier and as horses
were the main mode of transport and haulage in the mid-19th century
it makes sense that he would have gone to London where an awful lot of
construction was taking place: railways, docks and sewers. The fact the family settled in Poplar
suggests the docks for Thomas. He is
never described as anything other than a labourer in the census; it is on his
son Thomas’s marriage certificate that farrier is shown. Ballyduff had two blacksmiths in Thomas’s
time, one run by a Carroll family and the other by Paddy Connor, who may have
been part of his wife’s family. If he
was, that is where Thomas would have received his training.
While
migration to anywhere was a major upheaval, at least in relation to England it
could be planned in a sensible way as long as you had the resources. Family members went ahead to reconnoitre the
new territory. I have also been told
that those in England stayed in touch and periodically travelled back to see
the family in Ireland, resources permitting.
Thomas and Ellen appear
in Orchard Place, St Marylebone parish in 1851 in an area totally dominated by
Irish including other Donoghues. Whether
they were all related I cannot yet say (another project!); some of the first
names are not traditionally ours. The
spelling variations are interesting but do not mean anything. They were all born in Ireland.
8
Orchard Place: John Donough (b.1816).
13
Orchard Place: Thomas and Ellen Donohoe, almost certainly my gggrandparents,
with a lodger J.Connors (b.1834), who was probably Ellen’s nephew.
There
were forty-one people living in No.13.
There was a No.13 ½ listed in this location as well with
another sixteen residents.
18 Orchard Place: Thomas and Mary Donuhue (b.1811) with a son, Denis. Patrick and Jeremiah Conners (read them as Connors) are shown as lodgers; they might be more of Ellen’s family.
19 Orchard Place: Kate Donohoe (b.1802), a widow.
26 Orchard Place: Stephen Donahue (b.1830).
Orchard
Place was at the convergence of today’s Baker Street and Oxford Street. There were a lot of people living in each
house and it must have been a bit of ghetto, certainly the census enumerator
had a lot of trouble
‘In
Orchard Place and Grays Buildings are about 450 [people]. 100 rooms occupied by
separate families, one half of whom were unable to make out their returns or
schedules which the enumerator had to complete without a table to write on or a
chair to sit on…’
But where were Thomas and Ellen’s children?
I suspect they must still have been in Ireland, or somewhere else in
England, waiting for their parents to fetch them. Eldest daughter Julia was 17 in 1851, so old
enough to look after them, or perhaps they were staying with their grandmother
in Ballyduff. On a later census (1901)
Julia stated that her birthplace was Dublin – I suspect she may have thought
she was answering the question ‘Where did you come from?’ I wonder if Dublin was where they took the
boat to Liverpool and then travelled down to London by train. If they did, they would have travelled on the
London & North Western Railway and arrived at Euston (see above right in
mid-19th century).
Ellen went to live with her daughter, Julia, who had been married in 1854 to John Carrington. She died in 1889 and was buried with Thomas.
Ellen
was unable to read or write in English.
Their children would have gone to the Wade Street School (two blocks
east of Sophia Street, see above left for a photo I took in the 90s and Note 1),
which was run by their local church, St Mary and St Joseph’s. This was originally just a chapel attached to
the school, but in 1855 a Kentish rag-stone building was completed in Canton
Street (see right) to accommodate the growing Catholic community of which our
family was clearly part. It was a very
familiar place to the later generations.
Mary
and Thomas Ryle
Mary and Thomas were
married in 1839 in Ballyduff and had at least six children: Julia (b.1840),
Michael (b1842), James (b.1846), Ellen and Thomas (b.1852) and a daughter,
Mary, who was present at her mother’s death but for whom I have been unable to
trace a baptism record.
I have been lucky enough
to be contacted by Gerard and Sean Ryle, descendants of Thomas’s father
Michael, who have provided valuable information.
Thomas is thought to have
been the son of Michael Ryle and Julia Leahy, who lived initially in
Ballinoebeg and later moved to Bishopscourt, very close to Ballyduff, where he
is recorded as renting 24 acres in 1825.
They are living right next door to John, my ggggrandfather’s brother,
who was renting 14 acres. This is the current
working hypothesis supported by the names they gave their children, but I have
not found a birth or baptism record for a Thomas born to these parents.
From 1848, Thomas was
renting the house and garden next door to Julia, my ggggrandmother. By 1851, Mary is living just down the road
from her mother in a house with an acre of land. Julia, by now well into her 80s, was no
longer in her house in 1860/1 and the property appears to be split between Mary
(house & garden) and her husband (house).
Mary is still there at least until 1876, but Thomas has let his go by
1868/9. Perhaps he had died, Mary died
in 1885.
It seems that Mary,
presumably helped by her sister Ellen in Ballincrossig, must have looked after
her mother, Julia, for many years after Julia’s husband, James, died.
Their son, Michael, moved
to Poplar where he joined up with Patrick Donoghue and Ann Boyle as described
in an earlier blog.
John
and Joanna Boyle
They were married in 1839
and Joanna was from Sleveen close to Ballyduff.
They had at least three children: Julia (b.1840), James (b.1843) and
Mary (b.1845).
John is such a common
name that it is hard to track this couple down.
If there is truth in the family story that an ancestor, called John, was
shot by the British as part of a rebellion then it might be that this John was
involved in the Young Irelanders revolt in 1848 and was killed. I have, however, found no record of this.
The Poplar electoral
registers from 1880 to 1885 show a John Donoghue at both 7 Market Street and 2
Upper Grove Street, Poplar, both addresses are very close to our family. Thomas’s widow Ellen was living with her
daughter, Julia, at 14 Market Street in 1881 and at 49 Bygrove Street in 1886,
so this does seem a good fit.
Unfortunately I cannot find this John in the 1881 census.
I have searched locally
in north Kerry for the marriage of their daughter, Julia. While there is a couple in the right
timeframe very near to Ballyduff, none of their children’s first names help the
case.
This couple has defeated
me so far….but I will keep plugging away.
What
have we learnt?
…apart from an intense
sense of gratitude and respect for what our ancestors endured to enable us to have our much
more comfortable lives!
Ballyduff was not as
badly hit by the famine as some other adjacent areas but there was no future
for people afterwards because the landlords had left and the work had gone with
them. So our ancestors left – at least
the male ones did. The Donoghue
daughters married well and stayed…and looked after their mother.
If any of our family
died, it was most likely the children actually born in the famine years, who
would have had the least resistance to the cholera that was rampant. Thomas and Ellen’s daughter, also Ellen
(b.1847), was born in the worst year of the famine. Patrick and Anastasia’s Mary (b.1844) and
James (b.1847) are similar cases.
Society in Ballyduff and
the surrounding townlands was very close-knit and people did not go far to find
a spouse. As I have explained in an
earlier blog many marriages were arranged by the couple’s parents.
This closeness was
carried to the places families went to outside of Ireland and lasted for at
most two generations. Communications
within the family and their spouses’ families, wherever they were, was actively
maintained and home trips made, at least from England.
Families sent out scouts
to have a look for potential work and places to live in the target area.
The conditions in which
those who went to Poplar lived were awful, but I guess everything’s relative as
it was not much fun in Ballyduff either.
Proximity to water seems
to have been a feature of all the Donoghue men’s destinations.
On the whole the
traditional Irish naming practice seems to have lasted no more than one
generation.We almost certainly have many more family members in the UK and the States.
Rod O’Donoghue
August 2015
Note 1
The parish
In 1729 the local
Anglican clergy reported to their Bishop that there were “a number of Catholics
living in Poplar, one of them, Owen Fitzgerald, lived in North Street (near the
present Church) who was suspected of being a priest’. In 1816 there were enough
Catholics in the area for a school to be built in Wade Street.
Poplar was established as a Parish in 1818 and
the first parish priest Fr. Benjamin Barber took lodgings in Hale Street. The
first Baptism was recorded on 4th October 1818 and the first Marriage on
October 10th the same year. By 1819 there was a small chapel and in 1835 a
larger chapel connected to the school was opened.
The school
Originally the school comprised a chapel, house and
school erected in Wade Street in 1818. Until
1908 it was known as the Wade Street School and from 1908 until 1983, SS Mary
and Joseph's Roman Catholic School. The
mid-nineteenth-century buildings were remodelled in 1905 and extended in 1922.
A separate building was erected in 1929, bringing the capacity of the school up
to 1,000 places for boys, girls and infants. The present buildings consist of the
two-storey 1929 block, designed by Thomas H. B. Scott, with additional classrooms
constructed in the mid–1970s.
