Chapters 27 and 28

Chasing The Dead: Amateur Adventures In Genealogy

“Memory — remembering an event — is artful. There is no way to get away from that, it would seem. The one who remembers makes more of that which happened, or less, as he decides he should.”
William Saroyan, Obituaries 1979

“I didn’t ever see such big men,” said Tish Monaghan in the tweedy light of her parlor. Perhaps this perception of our size was due to a trick of perspective from the narrow width and short ceilings in Tish’s home. At least, that’s what I told myself while sucking in my stomach and squeezing into her parlor. Leaving our last graveyard this day of Corlea, John Murnaghan had led our crew behind his truck through comely high-hedged byways to a curving short driveway splitting cleanly manicured gardens to end at a house where Bilbo Baggins could have taken his ease. Tish proudly said she was born in this very house in 1926, But her eyes and mind would turn out to be ever so much sharper than your usual 84 year old.

Our reason for this side trip was that Tish had a story of my great great Uncle John Elliott, the last Elliott male to own the flats in Mullananalt. Keeping track of who was whom in these long gone Elliotts was hard, but in glancing at my notes on the ride over the lineage checked out. That a person still living would have known of one of our now vanished tribe surprised us. This John Elliott (13 with that name appear in our ancestry scorecard) was married to a Bridget Duffy. That made sense since a deluge of Duffys had already greeted us in the graveyards. Born in 1845, John was the eldest son of the great great grandfather we sought in our records and graveyard searches, the older brother to our great grandfather, James, who came out as a teenager to live with his sisters in Rhode Island. That younger James Elliott seems so remote to me, someone who died in 1946 when my brother John was a child. Yet in this neat house now overflowing with people and lacking a chair or two for us all to sit down an alert assertive woman was telling me of how she came to know his thirteen years older brother. We had stepped into a warp of time.

“They had four children,” Tish said while folded in a big chair like a life-size Victorian doll. There are nods all around from the various relatives in attendance. Their names were said so quickly with accents so thick that we didn’t catch them all. But I knew that the woman closest to her was Tish’s daughter. And the stout fellow to the right was Chris, a son-in-law or nephew. Later, he would discuss the relative merits of Harley-Davidsons with Jim, one of those ‘visitor to native’ conversations that mosey through the usual vague associations to places in the States ― a vacation once in Florida, a kid in Brooklyn, an uncle in Long Island ―  until they set upon some comfortable commonality: in this case, motorcycles. That is our Big Jim’s charm. He can make quiet concord with anyone. His smiling face and close listening gains us some immediate credit wherever we go despite us being obvious Yanks and strangers.

But now we hushed to hear of a real connection. The stories and the names flit about like birds in the bush hopping from one branch to another, making it difficult to tell them apart. “He left his farm to his grandson who was the son of Margaret Elliott and Thomas Keelaghan, the local baker at the time”, Tish continued. I wonder why the older siblings did not inherit. My eldest brother’s preparation showed that this John Elliott had gone out to the United States and then returned, possibly to take over the farm after his father’s death. However, his eldest son — yet another James Elliott, (ten of those names on the scorecard), this one James Joseph  emigrates to Rhode Island. That branch of the family will end up in Staten Island even though James Joseph’s son, James Edward Elliott will go back to Monaghan for a period of time. (We lived a few miles from these descendants but never knew of them until ancestry.com and my brother’s sleuthing revealed the connection.)

Later sorting through records gives us more details about these cousins of our great grandfather but only the vital statistics, numbers and names, addresses and occupations, marriage and babies — and in our case baptisms, diseases and death with the latter’s inclusion as’ vital’ a tad ironic. Getting lost in this land of lines is the likely fate for an amateur genealogist. Parish records, medical and legal certificates: there’s not much available for extrapolation other than documents in which both the participants and the witnesses give only their mark because they are illiterate at least in English or house locations that tell of a clustering with relatives or a ‘move on up’.

We end up a line in a ledger on leaving this world

Documents when found happily prove existence, establish connections, but only as a diagram of a life, a schematic, not the thing itself. Yes, James Joseph, a son of that distant cousin whom Tish is describing to us can be pegged according to the ledger above as a bartender in Pawtucket Rhode Island who died from’ carcinoma of the liver’ at the age of 43. And these same records tell how old his parents were at his birth, when his father died, the year of his immigration that you can then explore further in economic and social histories of Rhode Island. But most of that life remains unknown. And here we might get a peek at the man from Tish’s mother’s tale.

Jim and I keep turning to each other in amazement that we are hearing stories connected to a man dead almost a hundred years while clogged into this living room. But Tish diverts to a story about another son of my Great Great Uncle, and she is able to do so with an immediacy that makes me think Francis McManus writing that “Ireland’s a door where the living collogue with the dead.” And none of the natives also listening betray neither boredom with the details of lives not even tied to them except by a common county nor impatience at yet another set of Yanks seeking this material. Stories and their telling are still a part of the joy of daily existence. They act as if we are doing them a favor to entice Tish to cover the next son down in that particular Elliott line, the one she says was known as the “dummy Elliott“.

His given name was Patrick and Tish’s designation is confirmed by his listing as deaf and dumb in the 1911 census. She tells us that he died “over here“. Her story renders Patrick formidable even though disabled. He could read, was tall, and had a beard. He was well known in the village and went to the local school. Tish believes that Patrick played a part in that 19^th Century fire that destroyed the first Elliott House. “It was a higher house, two stories  — there was a fire at it”.  The teacher in Kilkit then was Tom Keelaghan’s second wife, Alice. Yet another shrub in our thicket of relations up here by blood or by marriage. By this time, we are guessing that Patrick because of his disability is still living up on Elliott Flats even though since his sister Margaret has died that his brother-in -law Tom the baker taken a new wife. Tish confides that the local understanding that Alice had given too harsh exam to the students in the one room schoolhouse there and consequently Patrick “went out and burnt all the papers because he thought the school teacher had marked too harshly. He didn’t want the kids to be punished.”  This educational vigilantism triggered a conflagration that consumed much of the original house on Elliott Flats. Jimmy whispers that Patrick sounds like an Elliott: worthy impulses. extreme remedies, unintended consequences.

Since this was a genealogical exploration and not Law & Order: Mullananalt, my brother John turned the conversation away from the arsonist drama merging Ryan’s Daughter with Jane Eyre to establishing that the second wife, the hard marking Alice, was a Hamilton. There are these moments when it is less important what happened than the noting of the family to which the person belonged Because that information may fill in blanks or extend the tree. The attitude bears a similarity to a forensics team at a crime scene where the specialists are more interested in the labeling of the hacked body parts found and placing them in neat plastic bags than stories of the mayhem that might have produced the effects.

Was this fire the end of the farm? Probably not. There was another fire in the 1930s ‘no easy A’ Alice had told Tish’s mother that when the house was rebuilt from that time it lacked the second floor. But the elimination of a house’s second story only provides the possibility of many other ‘stories’ to answer why they scaled back. Perhaps there just weren’t as many people who wanted to live up on Mullananalt. The tenant records confirm a shrinking population there. We don’t know when Patrick dies. But we know that James Keelaghan, the lucky grandson who inherits the farm from John Elliott, our great great uncle, will live until 1978,. It is another tale of Tish’s that brings us back to that brother of our great grandfather attending a wake along with one of his sons in this very house in Carrickavelty, Latton, Castleblayney, Monaghan. 

“My mother always said that there was an Elliott who was at the wake, the wake of my sister who had died of pneumonia,” she disclosed, “and my mother said that the man was a nice man who kept pointing to heaven. He meant that my sister was better off.” Tish’s daughter clarified that this man would have been James Joseph Elliott, first cousin of my grandfather, come home from America. He is The line in the Ledger above with his death and other details in plain type. He is there with his father, the last John Elliott of Mullananalt, and he will not outlive that parent. JJ came back to Ireland from Rhode Island with a liver ailment; he would get back to the States, but not see the age of forty-four. Tish’s mom said that when the men laughed, he laughed too but also held his side in pain.

This whole scene stretches before us for a moment: the crowded wake of a child in this house with food and drink laid in and neighbors consoling with conversation, our man with a finger stretching upwards reminding a grieving mother that this life was not the end, that eternal life beckoned. And around them grown-up conversations that cannot help but turn to laughter as an antidote to the sorrow in the house. That’s the same way talk flowed in every Irish wake I ever attended even the saddest ones, which are always the wakes of children. And our distant cousin in this vision, James Joseph, laughs so hard and then touching his pain feels his own coming death. The magic of wakes was that somehow in that room family and friends cobbled together a miniature of everything we face: life, death, passion, boredom, seriousness, humor, enmity, affection, strangers who are kind, family who are kin.

This story energized my brother John because it confirmed the presence of James Joseph in his accounts of coming and going that again proved crucial to nailing down evidence of existence. It knits together another family, For John tells us that this information validates the contention of another amateur genealogist, a woman encountered on ancestry.com chasing her own gaggle of Elliotts. He senses the excitement that branch will feel when he is able to relate this story; such bartering of information is how family maps enlarge. But now approaching teatime, we are loathe to impose upon the hospitality of Tish Somerville Monaghan; our bulk crowds out the light in her living room. A few volleys rise from our hosts as they seem worried that perhaps they have not provided enough substance. “There were Elliotts down the road to Monaghan but they may be different,” offers Tish’s daughter. Someone then starts back on the Keelaghans wondering if the wife of the inheritor of the farm from John Elliott, Bridget Hamilton Keelaghan, was related to Alice Hamilton. Tish and John Murnaghan think so but probably only by marriage. Someone wonders, “Were they the ones that took over that Keelaghan bakery shop in Ballybay?” John Murnaghan’s wife had a grandmother who was one of those Keelaghans. If not for the dipping light and our pinching appetites, we might stay at this dalliance for a few more hours in this cozy living room and find out that we were all related to each other.

As we leave, there is one more important pronouncement, which lets us know just how well known are the details of our local exploration. Out of nowhere, Tish confirmed that there was ONE Elliott family that was Catholic, but only one because as we must know “that Elliott was a Protestant name.” My brothers and I smile at each other. They’re trying to break it to us gently if we find a relative in a Presbyterian graveyard. We each wave and duck under the sagging doorjamb into the garden that is filled with much more than fuchsias.

Monaghan Town and Rooskey: More Evidence of Existence

Chapter 28

“Hig gegaderadan ða mycle fyrde mid ðam yriscan mannan & mid Walkynne“

“In the year 1055: They gathered a great army with the Irish men and with the Welsh race.”
from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (with translation by Michael Swanton), according to the OED the earliest mention of the Irish in the English language

Exhausted from all that treading among the dead, we turned in early and slept late. Eleanor, our innkeeper, held breakfast for us until we had worked out all the kinks of our combined 250 years. And her meal once again put us right. Then alert to our new purposes, we filed into our positions in the black Bimmer. We plan a drive to Rooskey, which is just past Monaghan town, to check the marriage and death records. Traveling in Ireland is marvelous if we’re not going to any particular town, but the problem in our endeavor was that we needed to visit a very particular town. Determining to which version of the town name we should aim was difficult. Each place in Monaghan (including the county name itself) seems to have at least 3 variant spellings of its name. That’s a legacy of a Gaelic nation becoming an English colony. When Ireland finally became ‘a nation once again’, the original spellings of places then resurfaced alongside Anglicizations and even earlier competing versions from a time before anyone bothered with road signs or even spelling at all. In this case, is it Rooskey, Rosky or Rousky? We opt for the former, but the GPS then gives us five or six of those — depending on the spelling again — and we finally decide on one that seems near Monaghan town.

Exhausted from all that treading among the dead, we turned in early and slept late. Eleanor, our innkeeper, held breakfast for us until we had worked out all the kinks of our combined 250 years. And her meal once again put us right. Then alert to our new purposes, we filed into our positions in the black Bimmer. We plan a drive to Rooskey, which is just past Monaghan town, to check the marriage and death records. Traveling in Ireland is marvelous if we’re not going to any particular town, but the problem in our endeavor was that we needed to visit a very particular town. Determining to which version of the town name we should aim was difficult. Each place in Monaghan (including the county name itself) seems to have at least 3 variant spellings of its name. That’s a legacy of a Gaelic nation becoming an English colony. When Ireland finally became ‘a nation once again’, the original spellings of places then resurfaced alongside Anglicizations and even earlier competing versions from a time before anyone bothered with road signs or even spelling at all. In this case, is it Rooskey, Rosky or Rousky? We opt for the former, but the GPS then gives us five or six of those ¾depending on the spelling again ¾ and we finally decide on one that seems near Monaghan town.

The village is pleasant and open in its appearance. The department holding the records is in a sprawling brick complex of courts and buildings splayed around several linked parks. Approaching its “hipped slate roofs with black clay ridge tiles … smooth-rendered chimneystacks with concrete cappings, …Walls of squared coursed rubble limestone … (and) Segmental-headed windows” Seriousness seemed the intent of the architect. Such enforcing edifices in this tiny town exuded an institutional air that suggests we could well get lost or worse on any quest within that labyrinth.  Later I discovered that the brick blockhouses had once comprised what the British overlords called at its inception in 1867 the Cavan and Monaghan Lunatic Asylum that later became known as St. Davnet’s Hospital, an enormous warehouse no matter the name for the mentally ill and those unlucky enough to be mischaracterized so as the Irish were sometimes wont to do. The eponymous saint naming the facility , also known as St. Dymphna, the patron Saint of the mentally ill, was yet another ill-treated woman who resisted and fled improper advances (her father’s) only to die horribly (beheaded). The complex’s auspicious past was unknown to me on the day we visited but learning later the story of this Saint did inspire my play The Jester’s Wife. The trip to Ireland with my brothers was the gift that kept on giving

After a few wrong turns into a line for the dole and then a screening for senior citizen dementia, I find the records office in another building. John begins the negotiations with Patricia who defends the battlements of this outpost of Irish bureaucracy. She starts warily but eventually warms to the task of aiding us. It helps that there is no line for birth registrations or the like today; indeed, this entire wing of the building is empty in all its clinic rooms and offices save two staff persons we spy who are busy at that universal occupation of trying to look busy. Patricia in contrast is assiduous. Papers pass back and forth; registers are taken down, computer screens are checked. And then she hands John his first prize: the 1867 marriage certificate for John Elliott and Bridget Duffy, it indicated that the groom was the son of James Elliott of Mullananalt. That certificate’s importance to our main search lies in its indication that James Elliott (our GGG) was “Deceased.” With that fact, we retrieve successfully his death certificate and verify both that James Elliott’s age and the fact that his daughter Elizabeth was living with him. Much of this is handwritten but proof nonetheless of where certain bodies were at a particular moment when lives joined or ended. . Our success continued with the 1865 marriage certificate for Mary Elliott to John Smyth, a find that solidly confirmed research from Rhode Island records. After going ‘oh for nine’ on the graveyards yesterday, we hit for the cycle today. High fives are exchanged to the quiet amusement of our Patricia. I wonder how many times she has seen this scene. My brother John exults at this score: the verification is certain now that the wedding of these two ancestors four rungs up the ladder from us occurred in Anaghkerr— or Anicker or Lough Egish or however you want to spell it. John with a grinning intensity explained that until now he couldn’t be sure whether these two were from the succeeding generation. Like an archaeologist who has scraped away the dirt from another century of pottery shards, he beams.

Yesterday, Brendan made a persuasive case for the mystical dimension of genealogical expeditions. Today John quietly advocates for the scientific side. This approach of painstakingly assembling and arranging pieces of evidence is like all the science I have ever seen, it was not an undertaking for the impatient.  John’s approach to tracking the family never lunged for some quick denouement; he knew he was never going to be done. There would always be another possibility, another link that might add a layer of understanding or resolve a contradiction. My comparison to science is not meant to puff up genealogy: we’re not saving lives here as we chase the dead. It’s a hobby that unlike fixing an antique car, struggling with another layer of an oil painting, or perfecting the recipe for Key Lime pie focuses on dead relatives. But as with those pursuits, the attention to detail, the trial and error, action and reflection do increase a rarefied store of knowledge, which is part of what makes them enjoyable. And that pie is really good to eat when you get it just right. That’s why my fellow mad scientists and I bedecked in shorts and caps rather than lab coats today in this belfry of bureaucracy exulted in our little win for the cause of knowledge. And then we went back to work.

Actually, first we rewarded ourselves with lunch. We located another safe sandwich shop; we had taken to looking for one as soon as we entered any town. In conversation, Brendan argues that our family metaphor in Monaghan and beyond is energy. Aghnamullen parish of which Mullananalt is a part has a high ground that that feeds a series of lakes in the townland of Creeve. John Murnaghan had shown us on the day that we arrived at Elliott Flats a roadside view that stretched out across a now overgrown body of water. He thought that lake might have some meaning for us. Eleven mills ran on a waterfall that descended over two miles from the two feeding lakes. One lake would fill the other which fed the mill-race, which powered the eleven mills to turn flax to linen. Brendan now drunk on orange soda and symbolism argued that just as one lake filled the other which fed the mill race which powered the eleven mills to turn flax to linen so did one generation fill the next and send the power until greater fates were spun.

“Our family fate was driven by mills and fuel, abundant and scarce,” said Brendan, and it seemed plausible to me. Our people might have followed the mills in the 19th century until the free-market forces drew those industries to Belfast, which was why our great grandfather’s generation took themselves to other mills in Rhode Island. And then our grandfather became a mechanic, our father an electrical engineer. In this view of our family history, our lives flowed like the water to a mill-race¾ swift and powerful yet shaped by a channel not of our own devising.

Brendan had seen an entry online that confirmed the existence of the mills: “There are flax-mills at Crieve (sic) and Laragh, the latter, in which machinery for spinning has been recently erected…” states the Topographical Dictionary of Ireland in 1837. Perhaps Peadar was right. The setting suited the mills’ establishment; streams flowed down the mountains all around and out through the endless springs. The mills suited the local population where Catholics poor in land could gain employment. Engaging with early Irish (or perhaps more accurately Anglo-Irish) capitalism, my ancestors, especially the females, would have had an opportunity to initiate rather than react in their lives.

Brendan’s characterizes family as not just a collection of aimlessly skipping electrons, but a force carried in the slipstream of larger things. We are carrying ourselves too. We were not just latent but kinetic; Brendan asserts that we are changed by but also changing the dynamic in which we moved. I like this emblem of a waterfall of Elliotts. Talking over our older brothers at the crowded table, together we concoct another dimension of energy that might explain further the migration of our ancestors from Monaghan: the spirit. In reading a rare and sadly out-of-print Parish Atlas of the Diocese of Clogher, loaned to me by John Murnaghan, I had learned that a series of mill girls’ strikes in this part of what was then South Ulster began in 1873. Their object was to compel the owners to grant workers Sundays and church holidays off in order to attend Mass. The strikers never succeeded; depending upon the historical source the strikes ended in a draw or finally when the last of the mills closed. Brendan’s point delivered as he waved a turkey sandwich for emphasis is that faith is a form of energy too that can make us hold fast or propel us. In his theory that I was now quick to join, these energies of our ancestors could not be contained and drove them to emigration.

But John, the hardened gumshoe, says that unfortunately these ideas while intriguing lack factual support. He has the earliest census form for the Elliotts and none of the relatives we seek here were listed as mill workers. Wouldn’t those women have been needed around such a large farm? Our images of strong Irish women striking for their religion vanish almost as fast as our lunches did. John doesn’t have a specific hypothesis as to why most of the family left given the circumstances. However, he points out that the arithmetic alone did not favor staying: one farm, many kids. The farm may not have driven them to the mills but it might have persuaded them to head for America. Without evidence from any surviving letters, we might suppose that some general unease affected our G.G., the teenager who will sail in steerage to America. We do know that the potato crop of 1872 ¾the year he left for the States ¾was the worst since the black harvests of the Famine years. However, there are many reasons to escape Monaghan; for example, fires for warmth and cooking were scarce at that time due to the lack of bogs for peat fuel. Maybe energy does come into the equation after all: our man just wanted to get warm.

Jimmy notes that had we kept our metaphor of the family as energy transformed we risked someone pointing out that what replaced the Elliotts of Mullananalt up on the flats was a massive wind farm. That juxtaposition was just too darn inviting a joke for friend and foe. John reminded us that there were too many tasks for the amount of afternoon left to do as a group and suggested divvying them up. I grabbed the opportunity at the split up to be the one for the library. Our Elliotts might not have made it into any of those books, but this Elliott wanted to get into a comfortable chair.