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

The Will of Catherine Bonynge of Ratoath

The Four Courts, 30 June 1922
Photo courtesy NLI Commons

30 June 1922:  Three days into the Battle of Dublin, the first conflict in what will become the Irish Civil War, fire breaks out at the Four Courts, home to the Public Records Office, leaving the building a burned-out shell and destroying most of its 800 years' worth of holdings.  To this day the precise point of origin of the conflagration remains unclear; the building had been under heavy shelling by the Free State army for the previous two days while anti-Treaty Irregulars were holed up inside. The one indisputable fact of the destruction of the Four Courts is that much of Ireland's official recorded history went with it, including nearly all of the wills held by the Principal Registry.  This background is necessary to explain why the survival of any of Catherine Bonynge's will, let alone as large a portion of it as we have, is somewhat remarkable.

Catherine Bonynge (or Bonnynge) was one of the two sisters memorialized at Glasnevin Cemetery by Dr. Laurence O'Reilly of Ratoath, Meath, buried in the same plot as Dr. O'Reilly and his brother and (possibly?) sister, James and Bridget O'Reilly.  She and her sister, Bridget Bonynge, were spinsters who lived at Ratoath, and evidently owned quite a bit of Dublin real estate.  Both died within days of one another at Ratoath in 1841, and were buried together in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, beneath a monument bearing their names and Dr. O'Reilly's.  The Prerogative Court, which proved Irish wills until the Principal Registry was established in 1858, did leave a surviving index of the wills recorded there, and shows that both Bridget and Catherine left wills.  Those originals would have been among the records destroyed by the Four Courts Fire in 1922, but a hefty portion of Catherine Bonynge's will survives, published with other Irish charitable bequests, among the Parliamentary session papers of 22 January-28 August 1846.  Unfortunately, whatever relationship existed between the Bonynge and O'Reilly families remains unanswered by this portion, though it is not outside the realm of possibility that Dr. O'Reilly may even be the unnamed executor.  Whatever questions it leaves unanswered aside, one thing it does provide us with is a small historical window into Dublin in the first half of the 19th century.  I have reproduced the surviving text in full and annotated it below:

The Mystery of the Misses Bonnynge

Last October, while I was in Dublin, I took a trip to Glasnevin Cemetery on the northside of the city to visit some family graves.  My great-great-great grandparents, Laurence and Bridget (Treston) O'Reilly, are buried there as are four of their children and two of their grandchildren.  While those plots are unmarked, as many in the cemetery are, I did find a marker on another plot that raised some questions.

In the area of the old chapel (since demolished), the section of graves are still called the Chapel Circle.  My great-great-great grandfather's predecessor at Mount Albion House in Dundrum, James O'Reilly, and his brother, Dr. Laurence O'Reilly, as well as a presumed sister of theirs, Bridget, are all buried in the Chapel Circle section.  Now, I still haven't determined the precise relationship between these O'Reillys to mine, but my working theory is that James and Dr. Laurence are most likely uncles of my Laurence.  The surprise here is that the grave was marked after all (a previous attempt my parents made on an earlier trip had not found the correct location, it turned out), and not only that, the O'Reillys weren't alone.  The marker on the grave reads:

Photo © the author, 2016

Erected in memory of the
MISSES BONNYNGE.
By DOCTOR O'REILLY - Ratoath.
In life respected
In death regretted.
May they rest in peace amen.
J. Farrell F^t 1841

I knew this was the right O'Reilly, because he was a doctor and did live in Ratoath, but the Bonnynge name was wholly unfamiliar to me.  So who were they?  How were they connected to the O'Reillys?  Once I'd arrived back in the States, I emailed the cemetery's office and received confirmation that the O'Reilly plot and the Bonnynge plot were, in fact, one and the same.  I've also since uncovered some more information that superficially answers one of my initial questions - who they were.  That's an entire post in itself, though, so it will have to wait.

Additional historical note: the bottom left of the inscription is the mason's signature.  The "Ft" is probably an abbreviation of the Latin "fecit" - literally "J. Farrell made it".  To this day, the company of Farrell & Son continues to make headstones and monuments just down the road from the cemetery.  The Irish Times published an article on the history of the company back in 2008.

Post-Travel: Dublin

St. Kevin's, Harrington Street, Dublin

As you might have noticed, I've been on hiatus for quite a while.  Longer than I realized, even!  I spent quite a bit of last year prepping for a trip to Ireland at the end of the year, in which I managed to achieve some of my genealogical goals there, missed out on others, and created a few brand new ones.  Since then I've had a bit of a travel hangover, and subsequently got more than a little distracted with current events in America, but the less said of that, the better.

Accomplished: visiting one of the neighborhoods my Dublin ancestors lived in, walking down their streets and even stepping inside their parish church, St. Kevin's (pictured).  This one was a big one for me!  I also got to visit Glasnevin Cemetery, where many of them are buried, and got to see their gravesites as well as the graves of many people who are important to Irish history.

Missed out: visiting the National Library, National Archives, and Registry of Deeds.  Unfortunately, none of the days I was in Dublin corresponded with times any of these repositories were open.  The only weekday we were there was Halloween, which is a big public holiday in Ireland and so they were all closed that day too.  Next trip over I'm definitely staying in Dublin during the week!

Stained glass window, St. Kevin's

Brand new research goals:  I'll leave those to their own posts!  That's honestly been part of the problem picking up again and blogging, I can't decide where to even start.  Let's just say I've uncovered some interesting new research angles to explore with my Irish relatives, including a recent discovery of additional ties to Dublin in another branch of the family.  Of course, my main goal is to go back!  Dublin is an incredible city, and despite it not being "home", thanks to spending much of the last few years researching it, it felt comfortable and familiar.  There's so much to see and do there as well.  It truly is a global treasure and I couldn't help but understand why so many people in my family made it their home.

Photographs of St. Kevin's © the author, 2016.