Visiting the Relatives

Between the Mountains and the Sea

Lynch Cottage (Lower) (Ruin), Lot 8, Roads, Cahersiveen, Kerry, Ireland

The Lynches lived between the mountains and the sea in the remote townland of Roads, in Cahersiveen, County Kerry, Ireland. It’s isolated — the end of the road. While some may follow “The Winding Way Down to Kells Bay,” few carry on still further — behind the mountains to this hidden landscape. Perhaps that’s why my ancestors’ homes, despite being abandoned so many years ago, are still sitting there (albeit in ruins) in fields overlooking Dingle Bay. Many crumbled cottages are scattered around Roads, former homes of the Lynches, Sullivans, Coffeys, Brutons, Maunsells, and more. They hunker down against the sea wind, representing the Ireland of the past. Handsome modern houses in the neighborhood reassure us of Ireland’s resilience, rebirth and attraction to those from abroad.

In 1841, there were 12 plots of land in this place that held 158 people. Most were extended families. On old land surveys, it says the Lynches had five buildings on Plot 8, but I could identify only three in my recent visit. This broken cottage was huddled down by the cliff with its back built into a dip in the land to protect it from the harsh weather. From one direction, the remains are clear to see. From another, they disappear.

To me, this raw and rainy place is overwelmingly beautiful. It lives up to Western Ireland’s advertising slogan, “The Wild Atlantic Way.” However, this was a very difficult place for me to draw, with passing showers, big empty spaces, and an ever-changing sky. Kells Mountain, behind, played hide and seek all afternoon. At one point, I had to chase my blown paper across the field. This is an uncooperative place. I learned my history lesson: This is a tough place to work outdoors in fields, and to make a house, stone by stone. Lucky for me, I had a warm, dry studio to which to return, to finish my work.

1860 Land Valuation, Roads, Cahersiveen, Kerry, Ireland

Workhouse II

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
-W.B. Yeats Irish poet.

Workhouse, Bahaghs (Interior), Iveragh Peninsula, Kerry, Ireland

The workhouse at Bahaghs, in the southwest corner of Ireland, is even more gloomy inside than out. And that’s saying a lot. The roof is gone. There are no floors. And trash is thrown around the ground, among the tall weeds. Nonetheless, I sat and drew for quite a while. As stated in my last post, it’s my belief that my ancestors lived here for a few years before emigrating to America.

What was a “workhouse?” Some background from DiscoverIreland.ie: The story of the Irish workhouse is a sad yet little-known part of Ireland’s past.Throughout history, 163 workhouses were built in Ireland — the last resort of the destitute from the 1840s to the1920s. The workhouse was a system of social welfare based on indoor relief. Entire families had to enter the workhouse together. To qualify for admission, people had to give up any land they had. On entering the workhouse, family members were split up into separate quarters, sometimes never to see each other again. Children aged two or younger could stay with their mothers, but young and old alike were expected to work. In return, the “inmates” received enough food to survive. Life in the workhouse was harsh and disciplined. As an institution, the workhouse was despised; the conditions during the famine years remained in the memories of those who experienced it for generations.

After two years in a workhouse, a family would qualify for “assisted immigration” (sent abroad for free), and that’s exactly what my ancestors did in 1884. They went to America, never to return. No family ever returned. That is, until I found their forgotten hometown 138 years later.

The Workhouse I

Workhouse, Bahaghs, Iveragh Peninsula, Kerry, Ireland

Like a bad memory, it has faded, but still unsettles. The workhouse at Bahaghs still stands in a muddy field three miles outside the town of Cahersiveen in County Kerry. Originally built as a lodge for the wealthy McCarthy family, it was converted to a “sanctuary to the destitute” in 1842, and served the region as its poorhouse until 1922. Bahaghs was conceived to accommodate 800 “inmates,” but within a decade, the Potato Famine exploded its population, requiring further expansion.

My visit to this grim ruin was a poignant one, as well as a wet one. It’s my contention that my ancestors were driven here for a few years before they left for the United States. The less well-known famine of 1879 hit western Ireland quite hard. Tenant records show John Lynch (my gr-grandfather) abandoning (or being evicted) from his family’s rented plot in 1881—the same year two of their young children died of whooping cough. In 1884, the Lynches were sent to America on a huge ship, The Furnessia, which docked — very unusually — nearby, scooping up many of the local population in a “sponsored emigration” scheme. Two ships did the same the year before. Newspaper interviews in New York City with passengers from my ancestors’ ship state that they came from the workhouse. The press were less than happy at the arrival of these “paupers.” From Manhattan, the Lynches found their way to southeastern Connecticut where relatives had settled before them. There they made an abrupt change of lifestyle from a difficult life of farming to a hard life of textile factory work.

1879-83 Lot 8, Roads, Cahersiveen, Kerry, Ireland

Burial Ground

There are over 1200 small, nameless stone markers in the ancient burial ground at Srugrena, County Kerry, Ireland. They represent a fraction of the poor farmers and their families who died nearby, including my ancestors. Some of the newer graves of Lynches, O’Sullivans, Sheehans and more, are probably related to me as well. This has always been a remote place — fields and bogs and mountains — just down the road from which was the region’s workhouse, home of the most desperate. The dead from the workhouse are laid to rest here as well, in mass graves, alongside the many who perished in the Great Famine. A local farmer had the contract to find spots in the rocky ground for the dead. The cemetery also holds the shell of a medieval church, with more graves within.

Wandering alone over the uneven ground that day, I found this to be a solemn place, but not a quiet one. There was a flock of sheep grazing about, bleating their hearts out — I suppose in fear that I was coming too close to their lambs. I drew quietly. I wouldn’t want to disturb the family.

1859-60 Land Valuation, Roads, Cahersiveen, Kerry Ireland

Rock Pile

Lynch Cottage (Ruin), Lot 8, Roads, Cahersiveen, Kerry, Ireland

In a sloping, rocky field in southwestern Ireland, off the Ring of Kerry, lie the crumbling remains of three stone cottages. To the four sheep who currently live there, they probably hold little interest. But to me, they are everything. Finding them was like discovering Pompeii, or finding the Rosetta Stone, or perhaps the Dead Sea Scrolls. My quest took years of research. It was certainly not as dangerous as finding the source of the Nile. But it was thrilling to find the source of the Lynches. My Lynches. This was the home of my paternal ancestors, who left this land in 1881 and Ireland in 1884 for America. Any possibilities here had been exhausted.

I was the first to return to this forgotten spot, 138 years later. Drawing is a form of paying very close attention. Never has a pile of rocks been so meaningful to me.

1850 Land Valuation, Roads, Cahersiveen, Kerry, Ireland

Into the Woods

Reverend Josiah Bridge House, Wayland, Massachusetts

John Woods lived here in Wayland, Massachusetts, but not in this old house. Dated 1761, the “Reverend Josiah Bridge House” was built over a hundred years after John, with his wife Mary and family, moved eight miles west as one of the thirteen founders of the town of Marlborough. Back then, this place was in the town of Sudbury and there was a long row of small houses along this road, including the Woods house right about here. John’s next-door neighbor was Peter Bent, another ancestor of mine—both 9x great-grandparents. They were immigrants, Puritans from England, arriving around 1638. Sudbury held a bunch of my ancestors, whose families all intermarried.

Map of the first lots in Sudbury by J.S. Draper

John Woods (along with Bent) eventually set out to found a new frontier town of their own in 1657, but they were not exactly moving onto uninhabited land. The remnants of a once-strong population of Penacooks still lived there as they had for generations, presumably. Diseases brought by white Europeans devastated their numbers—so much so that the native population then called their place Whipsuppenike meaning “the place of sudden death.”

Mar 31, 1668 John Woods chosen as a “Captain” in Marlborough

The Europeans and the Indigenous lived peacefully together for a while, but non-stop encroachment there and all over New England eventually sparked a backlash now known as King Philip’s War in 1675. “Sergeant” John Wood, who was one of the town leaders, helped form a defense plan for the town including making his own home a garrison. Suffering attacks, Marlborough was largely abandoned in 1675. When the war ended in 1678, the the large extended Woods family had survived, only to have John die three months later. Peter Bent died only one month after the war. Their wives lived much longer, dying in 1690 (Mary) and 1704 (Elizabeth).

Survivor

104 Burnett Street, Providence, Rhode Island

She looked like Queen Victoria to her grandson (my father), but her life was anything but regal.
Teresa O’Day grew up along with the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1860s and ’70s. As the Bridge grew, so did the shadow over her neighborhood in southern Manhattan. She was a daughter of immigrants who survived the Irish Famine, yet untimely deaths followed her.

Her mother, Ellen Shea, and her grandmother, Ellen O’Connell, came to New York from Kilgarvan, County Kerry in 1851. Having survived the Great Hunger, they were shipped to New York by their English landlord, Lord Lansdowne. He decided that deleting his impoverished tenants was more cost-effective than helping them. Hundreds of uprooted neighbors and relatives from the region of Kenmare filled the Five Points slum near City Hall.

1910 Census. Twelve children, five alive.

Ellen Shea met James O’Day in Manhattan and bore twelve children—Teresa being the second. Seven siblings died young – six in childhood.

Theresa met and married Michael Lynch, an immigrant from County Kerry, who lived in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1894. The had eight children, four of whom died as children. Michael died at the age of 46. Her son Richard lived to be 27.

Deaths of Regina (age 1) in 1902 and Veronica (age 1) in 1905

Teresa died at 77 in 1945. Her house on Burnett Street in Providence, Rhode Island, is gone now and its twin sits alone on the small lot they once shared. John Lynch, Teresa’s son (my grandfather) lived to be 89. Her grandson, Frederick (my father) is alive and well at 88. I’m appreciating how things are trending.

Which Warren

This house won’t be around much longer. Nor will my interest in it, I’m afraid. I’ve moved on. When I visited the remains of Arrigo Farm on the borders of Watertown, Waltham, and Belmont, I thought I had an ancestral connection. This 4.2 acre piece of land is one of the oldest continuously farmed places in the United States. It’s been owned by only two families since 1650: the Warrens until 1922, and the Arrigos since then. Now I’m not sure what’s up with this place. In 2013, the city of Waltham was hoping to preserve it, but it’s sad and abandoned now, with an old rotting house and barn. A small group of pine tree plantings are the only sign of activity.
The first white owner of this land was John Warren, a founder of nearby Watertown. He owned a great deal of land stretching as far away as what is now Weston. But after hours of research, and the creation of this drawing, I realized that I was incorrect in linking myself to this family. He was not the Warren I was looking for—not the immigrant grandfather of Sarah Warren, a 7x grr-grandmother born in Boston in 1697.

This discovery, or unraveling of what I thought was a discovery, lead me to Peter Warren, a mariner in Boston and ancestor to Revolutionary War hero Dr. Joseph Warren of Bunker Hill fame. Again, after a deep dive, I hit a dead end with that one.

I wondered next if it could be that my ancestor was Richard Warren from the Mayflower? Nope. Another dead end. No Pilgrims yet in my family.

I’m quite sure now that my immigrant ancestor was John Warren, who arrived in Exeter, New Hampshire, from England in 1649. He had some children there with his wife, Deborah Wilson, the daughter of a local miller. So, off to Exeter I will go in the near future with my research and sketchbook hoping I’ve dug up the right Warren.

Sailor Man

Daniel O’Keefe came to America in 1908 and had tattoos—like Popeye—on both forearms. He had served as a young man in the Irish Navy on the HMS Howe in Queenstown (now Cobh) not far from where he grew up on the southern coast of East Cork. His father was a shoemaker, and his brothers were blacksmiths.

When Daniel, (a great-grandfather of mine) emigrated to America at age 31, he had a wife (my great-grandmother Ellen Ivers) and two young children. Having followed a few siblings to Providence, Rhode Island, he lived in and around this house on Doyle Avenue for many years. The family grew and Daniel worked a number of jobs, all within walking distance of where he lived. For a decade, he was a fireman in a nearby mill and later in life was a night watchman at the fancy Moses Brown prep school where Ellen worked as a maid, and his son Michael was a groundskeeper. Daniel died in 1938 at 63 of heart disease, but Ellen lived another 37 years to the age of 102. She’s the only immigrant ancestor I ever knew. The O’Keefes never went back to Ireland, but I’ve made connections there with extended family. I look forward to visiting next summer where I’ll be drawing the Irish places left behind by Daniel and Ellen, but still populated by many extended family that stayed.

Changing Places

near School Streeet, Pawtucket, Rhode Island

From the birth of his first child in 1896, until his untimely death in 1912, Michael Lynch moved his growing family at least 12 times. Perhaps that’s why they were missed in the 1900 census. Maybe they were changing places. But because of a birth in the family—a daughter named Regina—I know the Lynches lived right around here that year, on what was School Street in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. That was long before all the houses were wiped away by the construction of interstate highway Route 95.

While the family was moving, it was growing, as well. Michael’s wife, Theresa, had eight children, four of whom died in childhood (including Regina, who died one year, three months, and 25 days after her birth).

Michael Lynch was an immigrant who was born in rural, seaside Cahersiveen, County Kerry, Ireland, on June 16, 1866. He was shipped to America in 1884 along with his parents and siblings, where he did not thrive. Every single form for Michael gives a different birthday or year, all incorrect, and none match the official documents from Ireland that I’ve dug up. He moved from job to job and from place to place around Southern New England, not climbing the social ladder. More like staggering under it.