Jeremiah Driscoll family of Ballymacrown
In my earlier post, The (lost) family of Tim Driscoll, I described how DNA connections and a particularly informative description of a funeral led me to uncover the numerous brothers and sisters, and parents(!), of my 2nd great grandfather, Timothy Driscoll. He lived and farmed in the townland of Ballymacrown, near the port village of Baltimore in West Cork. One of the things that I originally found confusing was that in the 1901 Census of Ireland there was a Timothy Driscoll living in that townland. However, he was not my direct ancestor. He was born, roughly, about the right time, but he was the husband of Ellen Sullivan, and the son of the couple of Jeremiah Driscoll and Johanna Brian.
I’m already plucking at a couple of the strands of the spider web. First, Johanna Brian is a link to the O’Briens of Bawngare that I earlier described. (As usual, don’t worry about spelling variants!) Second, we have numerous DNA links to the descendants of Jeremiah and Johanna. I don’t have documents to “prove” it, but the amounts of DNA that we’re talking about are consistent with the hypothesis that the two Driscoll families living in Ballymacrown were closely related. The simplest explanation would be that John Driscoll Bawn and Jeremiah Driscoll were brothers.
I came to this idea through a combination of DNA, parish registers, and civil registrations of births, marriages and deaths. Recently, though, I’ve had a brief correspondence with a descendant of Jeremiah. He tells me that, indeed, Jeremiah and John were brothers. He also had another surprising thing to say, and that is that the Driscoll Bawns now live in the townland of Lackaghane! With this lead I’ve been digging into those families as well. The story is not complete yet, and there seem to be some twists in the road to complicate things. So, stay tuned on that score.
John, son of John Driscoll Bawn
In my post describing the family of John Driscoll Bawn I included a table showing all the children for whom I had found baptismal records. For some of them, I’ve been able to find and document numerous descendants. For example, I’ve had the opportunity to correspond with current family members related to Jeremiah, Mary, Hanora, and Margaret Driscoll. On the other hand, there were several children of John Driscoll Bawn and Mary Hourihane for whom I had only the record of their baptism. Recall that that these children were born shortly before the Great Famine, An Gorta Mór. This part of West Cork is notorious as one of the areas that was hardest hit by the potato blight. It seemed likely, therefore, that one or more of the children could have died young and left no descendants.
One of these was the son named John. In fact, it seemed likely that John had died as a baby. In the baptismal record in the parish register his name is accompanied by a small cross. This, in my experience with Swedish records, was commonly used to indicate that the person had died. But no: following up on DNA matches, I discovered that he survived and, in fact, is recorded in the 1901 census living in Ballymacrown. John married Mary Anne Shehy and had (at least) seven children. Four of them emigrated to the U.S. and lived in the Bay Area in California. Again, I’ve had the good fortune to communicate with the wife of one of his descendants.
Mary Hourihane, wife of John Driscoll Bawn
The family of Mary Hourihane is really the spark that stimulated this blog post. I can’t be absolutely sure, but I believe that Mary’s death is recorded in the civil registration in 1870. The given name Mary and surname Driscoll are both exceedingly common in West Cork, and so I must be a little cautious here. Given her age attested on that death registration, she would have been born roughly in 1791-1792. This predates any parish registers in West Cork, and the civil registrations of births did not begin until 1864. Therefore, there doesn’t seem to be any direct way to identify her parents or any other members of her immediate family. Here again, though, DNA evidence enables us to “peek under the covers” and get a suspicion of interrelationships. After sorting through the DNA matches for the Driscoll children, I had been left with a number of matches that I couldn’t account for. In truth, there are still quite a few of those. Often, these DNA matches either have no family tree available to study, or they have branded their tree as private. As a result, the only option is to try to build trees for them myself and hope that, somewhere down the line, their trees and mine will intersect.
For one set of DNA matches, I was able to push the family tree back to the limit of available Irish records. These led to a man named John Hourihane. I have no idea when he was born or died, but his wife Mary (surname perhaps also Hourihane or Harrington) died in 1884 and probably was born sometime around 1794-1795. Just as with the case of Jeremiah Driscoll that I earlier described, it seems to me that the most straightforward hypothesis that is consistent with the data is that this John (or his wife Mary) Hourihane was the sibling of my 3rd great grandmother, Mary Hourihane.
Peadar Ó hAnnracháin
In exploring John Hourihane’s family, I came across an individual whom I simply must introduce to you: Peadar Ó hAnnracháin (1873-1965). I’ve used the full-blown Irish version of his name, and you’ll understand why shortly. Believe it or not, though, his surname has also been rendered as Hanrahan, O’Hanrahan, Hourihan, and Hourihane. Peadar, of course, is one version of the name Peter. The O’Hanrahan version of the name probably comes closest in an English rendering (Béarla) of Ó hAnnracháin.
Peadar was the son of John Hourihane (1833-1912) and the grandson of the same John Hourihane in the preceding section. He was born in the townland of Inchinagotagh and baptized in Skibbereen on 30 Oct 1873. According to a later biography, he was one of 13 children born to John and Mary Donovan.
Peadar first achieved prominence in Munster as a teacher. He was an ardent advocate of the Irish language and culture. He worked for the Gaelic League as a young man. The League, the Conradh na Gaeilge, was founded in 1893 and is still active (cnag.ie). Its “…main aim is to promote the use of Irish as the standard language in Ireland.” Peadar was one of the League’s original organizers and was appointed to work for it in 1901. He was a travelling teacher until 1916, commuting from place to place on his bicycle, offering instruction in the Irish language, singing, and dance. As I understand it, Peadar’s parents spoke Irish, but he grew up with English as his first language. Later in life, then, he taught himself Irish; his command of the language was such that a reviewer of his book, Fé Bhrath an Chonnartha (Under the Flag of the Gaelic League), commented that “…the Irish is impeccable.”
In 1914 Peadar was arrested on the charge that he refused to give his name to two British constables. They had come to investigate why the door of the pub was open on a Sunday night and found Peadar there along with the landlady. The constables asked his name and address to which he replied in Irish. They didn’t understand, asked again, and got the same response. After a bit of to-and-fro, Peadar was arrested and put on trial for being on licensed premises and refusing to give his name. This case caught a bit of local attention, and at the end of the trial the charges were dismissed. That story might give a bit of a glimpse into popular sentiments in the years leading up to the Easter Uprising in 1916 and the War of Independence. Peadar was reportedly part of the preparations in Cork that were to accompany the Easter Uprising in Dublin. Those activities in Cork, though, failed to be put into effect. Over the next few years Peadar was arrested on several occasions and served time in prisons both in Ireland and England.
Peadar was also very active with the Skibbereen newspaper, The Southern Star. He served on its board of directors for many years and, off and on, was its editor. For more than 20 years he had a weekly column in the paper called “Our Dublin Letter,” written under the pseudonym of Cois Laoi. The title of the letter points to his primary job in his later years in a post in Dublin on the Pigs and Bacon Commission. (It’s good to remember that, until quite recently, the Republic of Ireland was very much a rural society.)
Peadar and his wife Máire had six children: Fachtna (1920-2010), Neasa (1922-2014), Ciarán (1924-2007), Colm (1928-1979), Bláithnín (1928-2008), and Fiachcra (1930-1993). They were very prominent themselves. Fiachra was a lawyer who practiced in South Africa, and Neasa was an actress with Raidio Éirinn. Colm, Bláithnín, and Fiachra were all musicians: Blaithnín was a harpist with the National Symphony Orchestra and Fachtna was the music director of Raidio Éirinn. Ciarán, under the stage name of Kieron Moore, was a film actor in Britain and Hollywood. He co-starred with Vivien Leigh in the movie Anna Karenina in 1948. Unfortunately, many of the reviews concluded that he was miscast in the role of Count Vronsky.
Peadar Ó hAnnracháin died on 29 March, 1965 in Dublin, and he is buried in St. Fintan’s Cemetery in Sutton, Co. Dublin. His honored stature in Irish society was evidenced by the attendance of Eamon de Valera, President of the Republic of Ireland, at the removal of his remains to the church for his funeral.
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