West Cork Update

This blog post comes to you from the city of Cork, Republic of Ireland. I had initially planned this trip to be tagged on to the end of the International Congress of Entomology (that is, of the study of insects and their relatives) that was scheduled to take place in Helsinki in the summer of 2020. Of course, all such plans went by the wayside, and it’s only now that I’ve made it to Ireland. The plan is to spend a few days in Cork City, and then to move on, first, to Skibbereen, and then on to Baltimore. So, the topic today is an update on some of my research on the Driscolls of West Cork and then to introduce a man that I’ve found to be very interesting.

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

Peadar Ó hAnnracháin, police photo taken after his arrest during the time of the War of Independence. From the "Private Papers of General Sir Peter Strickland KCB KBE CMG DSO." https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1030002664

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.”

Portrait of a younger Peadar. Image originally posted on Ancestry.com by user langthomas_1. Used with permission.

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.

Three of the children of Peadar Ó hAnnracháin. From left: Neasa Ní Annracháin, photo from biography published at https://www.ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=5005; Kieron Moore and wife Barbara White, image from https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/kieron_moore; marriage of Fiachara and Anne O'Byrne, 28 May 1953, photo originally posted on Ancestry.com by user alexwhite1.

Poster advertising the movie Anna Karenina, starring Vivian Leigh and Kieron Moore.

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.

Headstone of Peadar Ó hAnnracháin, wife Máire, son-in-law Seán Ó Briain (husband of Neasa), and daughter Bláithín. Image from findagrave.com

The (lost) family of Tim Driscoll

We’ve all done it: you shake a can of your favorite carbonated beverage, pop the top, and… well, you know what happens next. This happened to me a few months ago when I tried to explore some of my DNA matches.

The number of DNA matches that you’ll get is overwhelming, literally thousands. Most of these, as you’d expect, are pretty remote. One of the rules of thumb is that any match of less than 7 cM has a pretty high chance of being just a random match. That’s 7 cM out of a total of something near 7,000, or 0.1%. Most of the names of my DNA matches are entirely meaningless, and I have to try to dig in deeper to discover how they’re related. My usual strategy is to start with matches that are associated with their own family trees, the bigger the tree, the better. The next criterion is to research matches that have “unusual” names. If all you have to work with is the name, and the name is something super common like, say, Mary Jones, you’re going to run into a lot of false leads.

All this is to explain how I popped the top on my can of soda. It was a match on 23andMe; I’m going to purposely be vague on identification of these users because, you know, this can be a touchy issue. My other little dirty secret is that, for living people, Facebook is simultaneously a blessing and a curse. Some folks are extremely reticent to post anything of a personal nature on Facebook, but others spill their guts! For this DNA match that I began to explore I was able to find his/her site on Facebook. Unfortunately, that didn’t really help me out very much, that is, until I started exploring one of their friends, a sibling. Pop!

It took about two weeks worth of work, but I was able to follow this lead back five generations before it ran dry. At the end of the line was a couple by the name of Daniel O’Brien and Mary Driscoll. Of course, the wife's surname caught my attention since that was the maiden name of my great grandmother.

View of the townland of Bawngare, home of Daniel O'Brien and Mary Driscoll.

Mary Driscoll married Daniel O’Brien on 24 Feb 1846 in the parish of Skibbereen and Rath in West Cork. They lived in Bawngare in the parish of Aughadown. In the 21 years between 1847 and 1868, Mary gave birth to eleven children. I’ve been able to trace 16 DNA matches to the descendants of the children of Mary and Daniel O’Brien so far: four to their son Daniel, six to their daughter Katherine, one to daughter Margaret, two to daughter Hannah, and two to daugher Mary. It was pretty clear to me that we’re related to Mary Driscoll, but the question is: how?

Husband Daniel O’Brien died in 1874 at the age of 57. Mary, however, lived until 06 Jan 1914, and at that time the civil registration of her death claimed that she was 88 years old (so, roughly, born in 1826). The description of her funeral that was published in the Skibbereen Eagle turned out to be the key to the job of piecing together her family. Here’s the beginning of the obituary:

Mrs. Mary O’Brien, Bawngare, Aughadown.

It is with feelings of deep regret we have to chronicle the death of this respectable inhabitant, which took place at her residence on Tuesday morning. She was greatly respected by all who knew her for her high person, worth, and character. Belonging to one of the oldest and most respected families in the neighbourhood, where her ancestors have settled for many generations past in the district. Her death is sincerely mourned by a wide circle of relations and friends. The funeral, which took place for the Abbey, was, notwithstanding the inclemency of the weather was one of the largest seen in the district for some time.

The officiating clergymen were Rev J O’Sullivan, P P, Aughadown; Rec T Hil, C.C., do.

Then, the important part:

The chief mourners were – Daniel O’Brien, R.D.C. (son) [RDC = Rural District Council], Mrs O’Brien (daughter-in-law), Mary, Kate, John, William, Ellie, Dan, Stephen, Denis, Bridie, Kathleen, Michael, (grand-children), Mrs. Collins (sister), Timothy Driscoll (nephew), Mrs. McCarthy, Mrs Holland, Margaret M Collins (nieces) ....

Aughadown Cemetery, from the Skibbereen Heritage Centre. While Mary O'Brien lived in Aughadown Parish, I don't know in which graveyard she was buried.

Mrs. O’Brien, Daniel’s wife, was named Mary Anne Dwyer (1866 – 1952). The grandchildren listed were all the children of Daniel and Mary Anne. I still have not identified exactly who the nephew Timothy Driscoll was. After some digging, I was able to uncover that the sister, Mrs. Collins, was named Hanora. Margaret Mary Collins, as I expected, was her daughter. The other two nieces were more difficult to identify. I finally discovered that Mrs. McCarthy was another of Hanora’s daughters, Rebecca. The mysterious Mrs. Holland was more of a struggle. I will return to her shortly.

Five of the daughters of Daniel and Mary O’Brien – Mary, Margaret, Annie, Hannah, and Ellen – emigrated to the United States and settled in California, living in San Francisco and Alameda Counties or a bit farther south in the coastal farmlands of Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties. Knowing that, my interest was piqued when I started pursuing a new and different set of DNA matches, matches who lived in exactly the same area of California.

Panorama of the city of Watsonville, California.

These new matches, as far as the records would take me, traced back to a couple named Jeremiah Driscoll and Johanna Hickey. The American records say that Jeremiah was born around 1830 and died in 1884. He originally went to northern California to work in the mines, and then moved south to settle in the Pajaro Valley of Santa Cruz County, near the modern town of Watsonville. He and Johanna had nine children together. I’ll have more to say about Jeremiah’s family in a subsequent post. I have three DNA links with Jeremiah’s descendants, both through his son Richard.

In the 1860 Federal Census Jeremiah, age 27, is recorded living with his wife Hannah and their newborn, first-born daughter, Mary. Also listed is a man named Daniel Driscoll, age 29, a farm laborer born in Ireland. On the basis of this record, I have seen some speculation that this Daniel was Jeremiah’s brother.

To briefly review, my 2nd great grandfather, Timothy Driscoll, was born sometime around 1836. Mary Driscoll, a relative of some sort, was born around 1826. She had a sister Hanora (Mrs. Collins). Jeremiah Driscoll was supposedly born in 1830. And, finally, Jeremiah may have had an older brother Daniel. How to reconcile all these facts? I suspected that all of these people – Timothy, Mary, Hanora, Jeremiah, and Daniel – might be brothers and sisters. But that guess was based only on the DNA matches and the rough similarity of their ages (born about 1826 to 1836).

The Mysterious Mrs. Holland

There was one more loose thread: the mysterious niece, Mrs. Holland, mentioned in Mary O’Brien’s obituary. Who was she? To resolve this I used the church and civil registrations of births and marriages in Ireland. The civil registrations began in 1864, and I presumed and hoped that a niece of Mary would likely have been married after that date. This was important because the church records usually would only show the names of the bride and groom and the names of the witnesses. They might also include the name of the officiant, and even less commonly where the couple came from. The civil records, in contrast, give all of that information, always with the homes of both bride and groom, and the names of the couple’s fathers as well. So there’s a lot more information to work with there.

Home page of IrishGenealogy.ie, a source for transcriptions and images of church and civil records in Ireland.

In the civil records (accessed through irishgenealogy.ie) I found that between 1890 and 1914 there were eight marriages recorded in the D.E.D. (District Electoral Division) of Skibbereen records and two in the D.E.D. of Schull in which the groom was named Holland. (Thank goodness for uncommon names!) I also assumed that when the newspaper reported that Mrs. Holland was a niece of the deceased Mary O’Brien they were being literal. That is, that Mrs. Holland was either the daughter of one of Mary’s siblings, or she was the daughter of one of Daniel O’Brien’s siblings. Therefore, if Mrs. Holland was the daughter of a brother or sister of Mary, then her maiden name would either have been Driscoll (if she were the daughter of a brother) or her mother’s maiden name would have been Driscoll. I could get this information from Mrs. Holland’s marriage record or from the marriage record of her mother. Similarly, if Mrs. Holland were the daughter of one of Daniel O’Brien’s siblings, then either her maiden name was a variant of O’Brien or her mother’s maiden name was. Finally, the civil registration of the marriage of Mrs. Holland would tell me the name and residence of her father.

Civil registration of the marriage of Patrick Holland and Annie Driscoll.

The only marriage that fit these criteria occurred on 19 Feb 1903 in Rath Church in which Patrick Holland and Annie Driscoll were wedded. Annie was recorded to be living in Ardagh at the time of her marriage, and her father’s name was Patrick Driscoll. I then checked the civil birth records for an Annie born to father Patrick Driscoll in the years 1864 – 1883 (so that Annie would have been at least 18 when she married). There were three such cases, but all born in Cork City. I then expanded my search into the church records, and found a baptism for a Nancy Driscoll, 15 Jun 1865, in the parish of Rath and The Islands. The parents of this child were Patrick Driscoll and Margaret Driscoll. Now while there is a townland called Ardagh a good distance east of the area of my focus, there were also two others in the immediate area: Ardagh North and Ardagh South. If you enlarge the image of the registration of their marriage, you'll see that one of the witnesses has a familiar name: Margaret Mary Collins. Therefore, this lead seemed very promising, and so this is where I concentrated my attention.

In the 1901 Census of Ireland for the D.E.D. of Tullagh there is a record for an Annie Driscoll (age 28) living in the home of her brother Michael (age 36) and his wife Mary in the townland of Ardagh South. I could not confidently recognize either of Annie’s parents, Patrick or Margaret, anywhere in this census. In a search of the civil death records I found one Patrick Driscoll of about the right age in the period from 1865 – 1901. This man died in 1877 at the age of 62 (therefore, born around 1815). I failed to find a Margaret, at least one that I could confidently identify as the mother of Annie. There were several possibilities, but with little information to distinguish them.

I went back and searched the birth records for children born of parents Patrick and Margaret Driscoll. I found seven, Annie being the youngest. Five of these children emigrated from Ireland and lived in either Santa Cruz or Monterey Counties in California. Coincidence? I think not! I have one DNA match with a descendant of Patrick and Margaret (and six additional matches with the descendants of that match). This reassured me that I’d been lucky enough to find the right Mrs. Holland!

Now I have another potential sibling of my 2nd great grandfather, but was it Patrick or Margaret? Both had the surname Driscoll. All told, I had six potential brothers and sisters. The next step was to try to pull all these threads together, and if they were siblings, who were their parents?

Pulling the Threads Together

For years I had despaired of learning more about the ancestry of my great-great-grandfather Tim Driscoll. Both his given name and his surname are very common in the area of West Cork. I could find lots of Tim Driscolls in the records, but I had no way of knowing which one was the right one. The same is true for all of the rest of the names I’d uncovered: Patrick, Daniel, Jeremiah, Mary, Hanora, Margaret, and Johanna. Then the thought occurred to me that even if I couldn’t confidently associate an individual with a specific record, perhaps I could make some progress if I looked at this as a family. My question, therefore, became: how many families in West Cork had children with all of the names Mary, Jeremiah, Timothy, and Hanora? I didn’t include Daniel in this list because the evidence was pretty slim that he was actually Jeremiah’s brother. Also, I didn’t know if it was Patrick or Margaret who was a member of this group.

I have a long list of reasons why this search strategy could fail. But basically, here’s what I did. I tabulated the parents and the baptismal date for all the Driscoll children with these names who were born between 1820 and 1840 in the parishes of Aughadown, Caharagh, Muintervara, Rath and The Islands, Schull East, Schull West, and Skibbereen. A total of 479 families in these West Cork parishes had at least one child with the name Mary, Jeremiah, Hanora, or Timothy. But I was pleasantly surprised – no, ecstatic – to find that only one family had kids with all four of these names.

The parents in this family were named John Driscoll and Mary Hourihane. The baptismal dates for the four children where Mary, 15 Apr 1825; Jeremiah, 08 Feb 1829; Honora, 09 Jun 1833; and Timothy, 18 May 1835. This is exactly the same birth order that I’d gleaned from other records, and the dates are close. Remember, that in those days people were a lot more free and easy with this information than we are today. For two of the baptisms the townland is recorded: Ballymacrown. This is the same place that my 2nd great grandparents Tim Driscoll and Ellen Collins had lived. I then searched the baptismal records of Skibbereen to find any other children of that couple, and I came up with four more names: Daniel, baptized 04 Feb 1827 from Ballymacrown; John, 23 Jan 1831 also from Ballymacrown; Michael, 08 Apr 1837; and Johanna, 15 Jun 1840.

Registration of the baptism of Deniel Driscoll in the register of Skibbereen (Creagh and Sullon) parish.