Chapter 21
Chasing the Dead: Amateur Adventures in Genealogy

“To marry the Irish is to look for poverty”
J.P. Donleavy

“The bogs, rivers, mountains, and shorelines are more than preservers of old myths, bones, and memories. They are energy banks and time sponges, and what is held within them seeks release.”
― Manchán Magan

Mangan’s quote comes from his essay Listen to the Land Speak: A Journey into the Wisdom of What Lies Beneath Us; Perhaps no one has written as wisely or as widely about the way the language in the land lie together.That connection is crucial for understanding Ireland. To go to that place obliges talk about the land. It starts right away with everyone enthusing about how green and beautiful and rolling and ancient and magical it all looks. Accordingly, while my brothers and I drove to the next graveyard, land started in that manner as the subject of conversation in the car. It’s all about the land. The Oxford English Dictionary can’t deny that the origin of our word ‘land’ might be as much Irish as Germanic. The old Celtic word ‘landa’ seems an obvious root of the word we use today. And significantly ‘lann’ meaning enclosure is in the etymological mix for how the term was born. The Irish have ever been concerned with what ground is theirs, what can be shut off as one’s own. That’s why land is a loaded word in Ireland; it has been for many centuries ever since people started grabbing it from the current inhabitants whoever they might be. The green surface bewitches, but there are layers to that land, And the people who came and went conquered and lost lived and died are all their own layers.

According to the 11^th Century Lebor Gabála Érenn  (literally ‘The Book of Ireland’s Taking’), that snatching and seizing started before the biblical flood and saw groups as varied as the Fomorians, “the people of Cessair, the people of Partholón, the people of Nemed, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the Milesians before we even get to the ‘so-called’ Irish people, the Gaels.

But in the Hall of Fame of Irish land snaffling, the English are the permanent champions. Their excuse for it stayed the same for at least a Millennium: the Irish were too inferior to be trusted with the Emerald Isle. Gerald of Wales, a monk who Accompanied the English King Henry the 1171 invasion of Ireland wrote in his book The Topographia about “the landscape, legends, history and customs Ireland.” His verdict would be echoed down the centuries. The Irish were a race of “ ancient and wicked” people filled with “iniquity … This race is inconstant, changeable, wily, and cunning.” As the poet John Hewitt summarized the theft in his poem The Colony:

We took the kindlier soils. It had been theirs,
 this patient, temperate, slow, indifferent,
 crop-yielding, crop-denying, in neglect—
quickly returning to the nettle and bracken,
sodden and friendly land. We took it from them.

Nobody has taken anything from us personally; that's important to remember lest we get all medieval with some Manchester United fan. Still with that many real or imagined possessions, believing in leprechauns is not necessary to sense that generations of spirits still linger over each field (Gort in Gaelic) hill (Knoc) stream and river (Sruthán and Abhainn), waterfall (Scárdán), each stretch of rich land (Talamh Méith). It's not just that their corpses lie in the earth although that fact is why we've come to Monaghan but the effects of their constructions and disruptions are still here even though the causes and effects may be unknown to visitors like us.

Magan explains beautifully that if we want to explain about land in Ireland “the best place to start is with Colpa, a word that describes a certain amount of it… The size of a piece of land measured by its grazing potential.” And then he lets us understand how the shifts in language to terms like acres and hectares took us away from the sense of what the land was for and more into how it might be measured.

What it is for matters. Visitors like us may find it very pretty to look at but the point of land in this isle centers on what is/has been/will be done with it. The land where my people come from is much more than some amalgam of microorganisms, nitrogen, potassium, magnesium and whatever. Mixed into the sand, silt, clay, and plentiful stones are the habits of the inhabitants that played out on the ground that was often too solid or not solid enough, unyielding, and sometimes even cursed. We are never going to know all those aspects as we attempt to understand those ancestors so that we might better understand ourselves. We can read all the histories we want to apprehend our familial past, but our perception of their land cannot capture exactly how the living felt. It’s like reading an ancient poem; no matter how evocative the words and how sensitive our reception there will be something of the time in which it was written that will not come to us. This land—even the things they left alone in it—with its dents and spires gets to retain some mystery.

Absent any journals or other written descriptions of how life and land mated, almost all the Elliotts up on the Flats were illiterate into the second-half of the 19th century at least, the most substantial way in which the amateur genealogists can ken the land is through records of ownership, transfer, and eviction. While the other three headwaters of our ancestry — Ryans, Sweeneys, Connaghans — might make a claim to be those much put upon Gaels, the Elliotts took somebody’s land when they arrived after being kicked out of their own properties in Scotland. And the land they took in this county, Monaghan, like much of the rest of the Ireland land was for farming. That’s good and bad news.

As noted by one historian commenting on pre-20th century circumstances, “Over the centuries the fortunes of farming families in county Monaghan have been precarious to say the least. Many farmers with small holdings barely providing above subsistence level, were particularly vulnerable to the adversities that face them: weather, pestilence, the vagaries of the markets, landlords and their agents, all figure in the story of farming in Ulster.” The verdant fields and hills now visible outside the windows of our SUV contrasted with what we had seen yesterday upon Elliott Flats, but that was deceiving because of those adversities. Despite not knowing all the details, our ancestors being able to live under these conditions seemed remarkable. And those adversities? The historian continued with a list:

• in the years 1817, 1821 and 1822 — Famines
• a hurricane force wind on 6th January 1839 which caused tree blowdown, fire, death and wide scale destruction
• severe outbreak of typhus in 1817 which carried off many victims
• three years of harvest failures in the 1870s

Layers of the land: each one of those injuries added another one like a sort of scar tissue for the fields and the people wedded to them. And that’s before we consider the Great Potato Famine in this area.

Yes, there had been those other famines, but the ability of the Irish peasantry even the poorest to survive those may have disguised their deep vulnerability to the BIG one. As John Kelly wrote in The Graves are Walking, the most compelling book on that catastrophe: “The robust appearance of the Irish peasantry gave much of the contemporary writing about prefamine Ireland a slightly schizophrenic quality. In one sentence the author would be decrying the wretched state of Irish dress, in the next, praising the athleticism of the men and the beauty of the women. Adam Smith, of all people, was among the first to notice this Irish paradox and he was quick to credit the potato for it. In London, noted the economist, the strongest men and most beautiful women were largely drawn from the “lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are fed on this root.” The Halls, an English couple, who visited Ireland in the early 1840s went even further than Smith, crediting the potato with producing the hardiest peasantry in the world. And, indeed, on metrics of physical well-being like height and strength, the early-nineteenth-century Irishman was a wonder. Half an inch taller than the Englishman and an inch taller than the Belgian, the Irishman was stronger than both. On a Victorian contraption called a dynamometer, the average physical strength of the Irishman was 432 lb. compared to 403 lb. for the Englishman and 339 lb. for the Belgian.”

According to historian Patrick Duffy, Monaghan did not suffer the extreme destitution of the West of Ireland during the worst years of 1845-1850. Our maternal grandmother, Mary Ryan Elliott would have had parents, uncles, and aunts who would remember the horrid situation in their home district of Kilrush, Co. Clare, where “in 18 months between 1847 and 1848, the population was reduced from 82,000 to 60,000.” One newspaper the next year described the situation in this way: “Of those who survive, masses are plainly marked for the grave. Of the thirty-two thousand people on the relief lists of Kilrush union I shall be astonished if one half live to see another summer .”

But as Duffy points out, Monaghan was ravaged “in terms of population loss, relief expenditure, rates, estimated emigration, And reports of destitution and death from starvation.” Those living there didn’t have a great situation before the famine. Duffy specifically cites conditions in the Aghnamullen parish where the Elliotts were from quoting the Anglican Dean of that diocese regarding the shelter people used in 1836: “The poorest class of house in Aughnamullen (sp) was beyond description… Of a very low, open,  ill built kind, some built of sods, some of the stones without mortar… Ill thatched, damp, and smoky.”

An essay written as part of the government project to try to capture oral histories of the famine in Ballybay, Monaghan

Beyond the bare subsistence farming and toiling in the linen mills there wasn’t much work, which meant that when the famine hit most people did not have additional resources to either buy food or move. Duffy states that “By 1845, however, a great many of the cottiers (those peasants living in a cottage) were two thirds of the year unemployed, according to the Devon Commission. … In 1841, the linen industry was in serious decline. By 1851 it was virtually eliminated from the rural economy, … In the 1841 census, for instance, there were 24,687 women engaged in the industry, mostly in spinning, and 3,400 men, all mainly concentrated in the parishes of central and west Monaghan. By 1851, the corresponding figures were 2,331 and 1,283 respectively.”

The more of these accounts that we read, the more we marveled that Elliotts were still there into the early 20th century. Correspondence of the Famine times between tenants and landlords or more likely the managers running things given the owners’ frequent absence includes petitions not just for forgiveness of rent, but for blankets and food. It’s no surprise that Monaghan lost almost 30% of its population between 1841 and 1851, which again makes us wonder how the Elliotts stayed.

Or did they move to this region after Famine times? An often ignored effect of the great famine was what some refer to as land clearing, Which was also people clearing and not an accident . Colm Toibin  observes that : As early as 1848, Charles Trevelyan, our villain who didn’t think that Irish women could cook , “could refer to ‘the great Irish famine of 1847’ and then go on: ‘Unless we are much deceived, posterity will trace up to that famine the commencement of a salutary revolution in the habits of a nation long singularly unfortunate, and will acknowledge that on this, as on many other occasions, Supreme Wisdom has educed permanent good out of transient evil.’”

From the English point of view, less Irish people was a good thing. (Draw your own parallels to contemporary events of killing off people in order to take over their land.) And the famine was very efficient in that regard, one parish priest reported that in 1847 there were six or seven people dying a day due to the conditions of starvation and illness in his part of Monaghan. Toibin notes that the economist Amartya Sen has stated that “in no other famine in the world was the proportion of people killed as large as in the Irish famines in the 1840s.”

The writings of prominent officials at that time confirm not just the attitude but the intention to get rid of the population. For example, again from Toibin, “‘Nothing,’ the Earl of Clanricarde wrote to Russell in December 1846, ‘can effectually and immediately save the country without an extensive emigration. And I have not met in Town, or in Country, a reflecting man who does not entertain more or less the same opinion.’  W.S. Trench, Lord Lansdowne’s agent, wrote: ‘Nothing but the successive failures of the potato could have produced the emigration which will, I trust, give us room to become civilised.” Fair play to Mr. Trench: his sense of what is civilized conforms with how the English originally and continually have interpreted that word according to the Oxford English Dictionary: “To bring (a person, place, group of people, etc.) to a stage of social development considered to be more advanced, esp. by bringing to conformity with the social norms of a developed society; to enlighten, refine, and educate; to make more cultured and sophisticated.” When an Englishman uses the word ‘civilized’ in the context of anything Irish, the prudent response is with a shillelagh to soft parts of their anatomy. Or maybe use one of those axes that the monk Gerald of Wales said we all carried.

As we followed John Murnaghan to our next stop, Brendan responded to my famine speech by wondering about the records discovered that showed Elliotts having so many acres on Mullananalt. One of the realities of Irish agricultural life was that the structure of these very large estates was complex. There was a family owner who might be absentee and really living in England. But even before the days of the potato famine, there were also what Peter Duffy described as “overlapping layers of tenants and undertenants … renting out plots — or elders of rundale collectives were granting bits of property…” Rundales were jointly occupied acreage where various owners might control strips that were not contiguous. That practice was gone by 1861 when we see the name of our great great grandfather, James Elliott, on record. The numbers inked there suggest he is not a small farmer. In fact, he appears to have at least one subtenant. He stands out among the names in the records. He is not poor. Surely, someone at that level should have a gravestone in one of these churchyards.

For that reason, Jimmy was trying to wrap his head around what our ancestor might have owned. In an earlier period, Duffy describes middlemen as a type that “might possess a few horses, use the latest technology (like iron plows), and have workmen during the harvest time.” John as he turns onto the R162 roadway cautions against comparisons to that earlier era. Although a record exists of a John Elliot (with one ‘T’) that might match a parent of our man, we have no sure idea if Elliotts are even in Monaghan in the 1840s let alone tenants or sub-letters. The arrangement we saw might’ve suggested that our great great grandfather was only the front man — the elder — of an alliance of families related by marriage.

But how does our family end up as we heard yesterday with a single large house up on Elliott Flats? Was it the land reform that altered the rules for landlords in such a way to make plausible a single family on a remote patch accumulating a large holding first as renter and later as owner? The land act of 1881 obviously followed the initial occupancy in 1849; one of my brothers notes that our family may have enjoyed government assistance to purchase the land at the later time as the UK rulers aided the shift from tenancy to ownership. (Still humbled by my morning mistake, I refrain here from picking up an easy political point about government help.) ”Post-famine laws sought to avoid the small holdings that were cited at that time as a contributing condition to that disaster. Famine deaths and associated massive immigration combined, Mike Cronin notes in his History of Ireland, to create “such a massive disappearance of people from the land, (that) the size of agricultural holdings … steadily increased as more land became available. With the advent of larger plots of land, the agricultural horizons of the average family grew.” John points out that just surviving that time in this place might increase the odds of gaining a large plot. We start to see a plausible path that the Elliotts might have traveled to residence of that big farm on a flat plain. Happy with this insight, we pulled up to the next church in hope that we would find a much smaller plot of land, a grave of one of the Mullananalt mob. I lurch forward not at the suddenness of the stop but at the words on the sign, “Church of Ireland.” Protestants!!!!