O'Reillys of Kilbeg, Co. Meath

The earliest I've so far managed to trace this particular family is to Charles Reilly of Robertstown, who lived at Robertstown Castle and operated a tannery on the grounds.  According to the local oral histories recorded in the National Folklore Collection, he also had four brothers, but their names were not mentioned.  Charles had a son, James, whose family group I was able to put together from the deed records in the Registry of Deeds Office.

• James Reilly of Kilbeg

1.  Charles Reilly of Kilbeg b. abt. 1792 d. 1870 Kilbeg, Co. Meath
2.  Dr. Laurence O'Reilly of Ratoath b. abt. 1796 d. 1878 at 11 Goldsmith Street, Dublin
3.  Rev. Bernard O'Reilly of Sarlat, France b. abt. 1803 
4.  James O'Reilly of Clooney and of Mount Albion, Dundrum b. abt. 1806 d. 1872
5.  Margaret Reilly
6.  Bridget O'Reilly d. 1879 at 11 Goldsmith Street, Dublin
7.  Frances O'Reilly m. Michael Grehan 1835, Castletown-Kilpatrick, Co. Meath

Charles Reilly of Kilbeg died in 1870, leaving behind three children whose names I have discovered so far: Fanny, Farrell, and John.  

Farrell O'Reilly, born abt. 1839, inherited the lands and house at Kilbeg upon his father's death in 1870.  He married Catherine Forde in 1879 in Lisdoonvarna, Co. Clare, and from this marriage came four children: Charles Farrell, John Valentine, James William, and Mary Kate.  Farrell O'Reilly was a good friend of a Dublin physician by the name of Dr. Henry Gogarty, whose son, the poet Oliver St. John Gogarty, would reminisce about Farrell in a poem published in November 1945 in The Bell, a Dublin literary magazine founded and edited by the writer Seán O'Faoláin, and again in May 1946 in the American literary journal Poetry.  Farrell died in 1908 at Kilbeg, and as far as I am aware descendants of his eldest son Charles Farrell O'Reilly continue to live at Kilbeg to this day.

Additional reading:
Gogarty, Oliver St. John. "Farrell O'Reilly." Poetry, May 1946, pp. 70-72.

Related posts:
Irish Deed Memorials, 1844: O'Reilly to O'Reilly
Robertstown Tannery

Robertstown Tannery

Lately I've been working on transcribing some of the Irish local accounts collected in the National Folklore Collection, UCD as part of the Meitheal Dúchas transcription project and came across this one involving one of the people named in an earlier post here.  A while back I wrote about a deed among members of the O'Reilly family of Kilbeg, County Meath.  The deed mentioned that all the parties to it were the grandchildren of a Charles Reilly or O'Reilly of Robertstown.  This Charles is the subject of the particular local history piece I came across, that of the Robertstown Tannery.

Robertstown Castle,
Photo © Mike Searle (cc-by-sa/2.0)

Evidently Charles O'Reilly owned a tannery in Robertstown, and lived at Robertstown Castle, a fortified early 17th century house originally built by the Barnwall family.

The story about Charles O'Reilly and his tannery recounts the story about his wooden false-bottomed tanning pits (supposedly to fool the tax assessors), something that was also corroborated in other stories collected in the area.  What also stands out to me about this particular version is that this story mentions the existence of four unnamed brothers of this Charles O'Reilly, any one of which could have been ancestors of my line of O'Reillys.  Due to a member of my O'Reilly family inheriting from one of the Kilbeg O'Reillys mentioned in the 1844 deed, moving into his house after he died, and sharing a large overlap in family names between their family group and the Kilbeg family, a fairly close kin relationship of some kind seems almost certain.

For those of you who know where in Ireland your people were from, I highly recommend taking a look through the stories collected on the website.  Many still require transcriptions, so you may find something relevant that hasn't yet been made searchable on the site just by perusing the images, as I did with this story of "Charley beag the currier" and his tannery and castle.

Beyond 2022 - Reconstructing an Archive

As I've written about before, Irish research can be difficult because gaps exist in the records due to the destruction (both intentional and accidental) of so many of them, including the catastrophic loss of most of the holdings of the General Record Office in 1922.  All is not lost, however!  A project launched last year, Beyond2022, aims to create a digital reconstruction of the holdings of the GRO using copies of records held by other sources.  The project, being carried out by Trinity College Dublin and several archival partners, is set to debut online on the 100th anniversary of the GRO fire, 30 June 2022.  As a genealogist, I'm particularly interested in how much of the missing wills can be reconstructed - I'm well aware most are probably gone forever, but I've personally managed to dig up a few abstracts myself in old British government publications as well as a few complete copies of wills that had been deposited in various archives in the UK and recorded in the deed memorial books of the Registry of Deeds in Dublin.  It'll really be something to see how much this project can uncover and restore with the partnership of so many major archives at their disposal.

Have a look at the project's trailer video below, and learn more and bookmark the project site at http://beyond2022.ie.

The Fagans' Rocky Genealogical Road to Dublin

The earliest known ancestor in my Fagan line is Peter Fagan, whose family were living in Hazleton, Pennsylvania by 1850.  He, his wife, Elizabeth, and their oldest three children (Julia, Garret, and Elizabeth) were all born in Ireland.  As the family tombstone states both he and his wife were born in Westmeath, I had thought that's where I'd find the family records, but recently uncovered evidence that there may be yet another Dublin story in my family tree.  The records I found also appear to knock down a little brick wall regarding discrepancies in the records of Elizabeth Fagan's maiden name.

Garrick, Samuel Walters
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Gift of CIGNA Maritime Collection

The past few years of focusing on my O'Reilly ancestors has given me some valuable experience in dealing with Irish records and the problems they can have.  If I've learned anything, it's that sometimes there's more to a record than just what it says - names can be misspelled, dates can be estimated, and sometimes you have to look at the overall pattern of the document instead to determine if it might be "your" people.  It was a passenger record that fits this description that actually got me started.  This was the manifest of a ship named the "Garrick", which left from Liverpool and arrived in New York in September 1848.  The ship was in its time the fastest packet traveling the New York-Liverpool route, and a wonderful painting of the Garrick exists in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, depicting it at sail off the northern Welsh coast.  The manifest of the September 1848 arrival in the port of New York included a family group recorded as:

• Pat Fegan, age 33
• Eliza Fegan, age 19
• Julius Fegan, age 5
• Garrett Fegan, age 3
• Eliza Fegan, infant

Now, I could look at this and reject it in hand on grounds that my family was spelled Fagan, the father's first name was Peter, and the eldest child was a girl: Julia, not Julius.  But when you take into consideration that these manifests were written by other people (many of the passengers were themselves illiterate), likely working in a hurry to record hundreds of names per voyage, you can forgive human errors in the records.  Much else about this manifest corresponds to the known ages and names of the Fagans (particularly the children) in the Hazleton records.  The overall pattern fits.  And taking into account that this ship left from Liverpool rather than Queenstown (Cobh), I gambled on a notion that there was a possibility the Fagan family had passed through Dublin first, perhaps picking up better paying work in the city to pay for their passage.  On a hunch, I decided to search the Dublin church records for them, and did it ever pay off.

The image shows a page from the register of St. Andrew's Catholic Church in Westland Row, Dublin, containing a marriage record - dated 30 January 1842 - between Peter Fegan and Eliza Grogan.  A further search through that parish between that marriage year and 1850 turns up only three baptisms for Fegan/Fagan with parents named Peter and Eliza/Elizabeth.  In birth order, those children were named Julia, Garret, and Eliza - exact matches to the known Fagan children born before the Fagans came to the United States, and their baptismal dates line up with the ages of the Fagan children in the Garrick's passenger manifest.  This marriage record also can rule out two of the possible surnames for Elizabeth Fagan that were listed in the death certificates of her children Robert Fagan - Rogan - and Elizabeth Fagan Dougherty - Brogan.  If the couple married in this record are the correct people - and I believe that they are - the correct surname for their mother is evidently the name that was recorded on the death certificate of another of the Pennsylvania-born Fagan children, Michael: Grogan.

Sources:
"New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1891." Database with images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 14 June 2016. Citing NARA microfilm publication M237. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.
Painting, Garrick - The National Museum of American History
Irish Catholic Parish Registers - unindexed images may be browsed at the National Library of Ireland and an index may be consulted for free at FindMyPast with registration of a free site account.
Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, Death Certificates, 1906-1964 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014.

Irish Deed Memorials, 1844: O'Reilly to O'Reilly

Recently a fantastic new source was made available for Irish research - the deed memorials books from the Irish Registry of Deeds.  The majority of the books are available online now on the FamilySearch website, with a few remaining to be digitized.  The indexing system is far from perfect - you have to know either the grantor (either the landowner or a tenant who is subletting to an additional tenant) or the townland; there are separate index sets for both covering various date ranges.  The deed books are arranged in numeric order from their beginning up to 1832; starting in 1833 they are grouped by year with the book numbers beginning again at number 1 for every subsequent year.

Search the Registry of Deeds books at FamilySearch.

I've started exploring the books to try to find out the origin of my great-great-great grandfather, Laurence O'Reilly.   As I've previously written, I believed he was related to two brothers, Dr. Laurence O'Reilly of Ratoath and James O'Reilly.  So far I still haven't pinned down exactly who his parents were, but surviving records strongly suggest he is related to an O'Reilly family at Kilbeg, Co. Meath.  A deed I discovered in the Registry's records provided me with a full family group for these O'Reillys and confirmation that the doctor and his brothers were from the Kilbeg family.

Rather than transcribe the convoluted language of the deed in full, I'm just going to abstract and quote the most relevant portions to this family group.  I've cleaned up some of the early 19th century idiosyncrasies in punctuation, capitalization, and abbreviation and tried to cut out extraneous language to keep the relationships between the people involved as clear as possible.

Irish Deed Memorials 1844: Book 3, Number 101 - O'Reilly to O'Reilly
Registered 3 June 1844; memorial of an indented deed of assignment dated 1 June 1832; from Dr. Laurence O'Reilly, Frances O'Reilly and Bridget O'Reilly, all of Ratoath Co. Meath and Rev. Bernard O'Reilly of Sarlat, France; to James O'Reilly of Clooney, Co. Meath.  Mention of two earlier leases from the 1790s from George Williamson to "Charles Reilly of Robertstown".  Charles Reilly "grandfather to the parties in said deed" and James Reilly "father to the parties"... died intestate leaving children Laurence, Bernard, Frances and Bridget, the said James and also Charles Reilly, Catherine Reilly and Margaret Reilly the surviving children of  the said James Reilly... the last mentioned Charles Reilly of Kilbeg in the County of Meath, heir at law of the said Charles Reilly his grandfather and of said James Reilly his father had become entitled to lands... as such heir and further... said Laurence O'Reilly, Bernard O'Reilly, Frances O'Reilly and Bridget O'Reilly agreed to assign... said James O'Reilly their brother all their respective... interest in... said lease.

So, what is learned from this deed: the names of their father and grandfather, and their additional siblings.  We can also infer from the reference to their brother Charles as the "heir at law" that he is the eldest (and also that he died prior to 1872, the year James died, when Dr. Laurence O'Reilly is described in newspaper reports of probate proceedings as the "eldest surviving brother" of James O'Reilly).  It is also possible to use the land indexes to look up additional deeds relating to the properties named to try to find any additional ones that might involve the people in question.  One of the things that also struck me about the names included in this deed were just how many of them repeated in the O'Reilly family I know to be mine.  My great-great grandmother had brothers named Laurence, James, and Charles, as well as sisters named Catherine, Margaret and Frances.  I've also been looking into an additional family of O'Reillys located at Newgrove, which is located in the same barony as Kilbeg (Kells) and which documentation suggests were acquainted with the ones at Kilbeg and may have been a branch of distant cousins.  In both these families, there seems to be a clear pattern of chosen names which are then passed down.  I don't believe it's a coincidence that so many of my great-great-great grandfather's children bore the same names as the O'Reillys from Kilbeg.

[text has been amended to correct a previous misidentification of an O'Reilly sibling as a brother rather than a sister, which a subsequent discovery among the civil death registrations has cleared up]

The Dublin of Joyce and O'Reilly

The baptism of James Augustine Joyce, St. Joseph's Church, Terenure (NLI Registers)

This past Friday was a literary holiday of sorts, particularly in Dublin, marking Bloomsday, the day that Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses, made his sojourn through Dublin on 16 June 1904.  A group of Dublin's literati began to mark the occasion by recreating Bloom's adventures in a pilgrimage of their own, and so the Bloomsday tradition was born.  Now, a discussion of Irish literature might seem an odd topic for a genealogy blog, but Joyce's Dublin is actually also "my" Dublin.  The same city as he knew it was the city as my ancestors knew it, in the places they lived and went to church and in the streets they traversed, and so I'm sharing a few of those places and what their significance was in my research on the O'Reilly family in Dublin.

St. Joseph's, Terenure (Dublin City Libraries)

The first stop on this historical journey through Joyce's Dublin is the church where he was baptized, St. Joseph's in Terenure.  I've written about St. Joseph's before, and how the registers of that church provided information on the location of relatives who had gone to America.  Part of Joyce's baptismal entry in the registers, from February 1882, can be seen in the image at the top, the full page may be seen here.  My cousin Isaac O'Reilly was also baptized at St. Joseph's just a few years before Joyce, and Isaac's wife Julia Mannering was also from that parish.  As I've previously written on these O'Reillys, Isaac and Julia were married at St. Joseph's in 1897, and since all of Isaac's immediate family were living in America, his uncle Laurence O'Reilly was his witness.  Laurence's address was given as 5 North Richmond Street.

A first edition of Ulysses
Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities, Austin, Texas
Photo: A. R. Dotson

At the time my great-great granduncle Laurence O'Reilly listed his address in his nephew's marriage record, number 17 North Richmond Street was occupied by a large family represented in the Thom's Dublin directory under the name of "Joyce, John, esq."  This head of house was John Stanislaus Joyce, the father of James, who in February of 1897 would have just turned 15.  North Richmond Street was a short street consisting of only 20 households, and uncle Laurence had children of his own around the same age as the Joyces.  It's quite possible the two families were acquainted.  What we do know is that North Richmond Street left enough of an impression on the young James Joyce to appear in two of his works: a short story in Dubliners entitled "Araby" and in Ulysses.

The Bleeding Horse, Camden Street
Photo: A. R. Dotson

Laurence, who had been promoted to superintendent in the Dublin Metropolitan Police by the time he resided on North Richmond Street, had moved his family to that address from number 29 Lombard Street West, a Victorian terraced house in Portobello, where they had lived just around the corner from his widowed mother Bridget.  Lombard Street itself is part of the Dublin of Ulysses, being a former address of Joyce's protagonist Leopold Bloom.  A short walk from what was the O'Reilly home, just around the corner past their church, St. Kevin's, is Camden Street and yet another landmark of the Dublin of Ulysses.  "I saw him a few times in the Bleeding Horse in Camden street with Boylan the billsticker" says a character named Corley in reference to Bloom (Ulysses, Episode 16: "Eumaeus").  Even today, you can stop in at the Bleeding Horse for a pint.  It's still there, just as it was when the fictional Leopold Bloom was seen there, and just as it was when my very real ancestors lived in the neighborhood.  Who knows, they may have been seen in there a few times themselves!  

Catherine (Ryan) Treston, 1916 Rebel

Cumann na mBan members, 1916 (Richmond Barracks)

As Treston is one of my Irish ancestral names, and not a particularly common one at that, it caught my eye when I saw a Treston on a list of women participants in the 1916 Easter Rising.  I investigated, and though this particular Treston turned out to be a distant relative by marriage and not by blood, what I found is still pretty interesting.

According to the records of Richmond Barracks, Catherine "Cathleen" Treston, née Ryan, was a member of Cumann na mBan's Central Branch, and had been a nurse in the GPO garrison during the Rising.  She was detained in both Richmond Barracks and Kilmainham Gaol in the aftermath, and presumed to have been released on the 8th of May, though the Kilmainham records from this period have been lost.  She is present in the group photo here, taken in the summer of 1916 in the garden of Ely O'Carroll.  The woman in all white in the next to last row, wearing what appears to be a white nurse's cap, has been identified as Mrs. Catherine (Cathleen) Treston.  Cathleen would have been about 26 years old in 1916, going by her age in the 1911 census.  Her name is included in the 1936 Roll of Honour of participants in the Rising.

The 1911 census tells us a little about her home life in the years leading up to the Rising.  She was married to a dentist, William Treston, and was already the mother of two infant daughters.  She and her family lived with her widowed mother, two sisters who taught at the National School, and an aunt in a house in Ballybough Road.  Her husband's family, from what I can tell, descend from the Blackrock branch of the Treston family, who originated at some point in Mayo and are distantly related to mine.  So while Cathleen herself was not a cousin of mine, her husband and daughters certainly were, albeit distantly.

Sources:
Richmond Barracks, A list of women who were detained at Richmond Barracks
National Museum of Ireland, Women of the Roll of Honour
Sinéad McCoole, No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years, 1900-1923