The 22nd (I’m writing now in the 24th) was the day we’d set aside for a visit to the National Library, which is very close to The Mont, where we’re staying. I had made plans long in advance of the trip to go through the rent rolls and some of the other papers from the Bessborough estate of the Ponsonby family in County Kilkenny, from whom Ryan ancestors, in the earliest generation I can trace — John Ryan and wife Margaret Oates, both born, it seems, about 1785/1790 — rented land and for whom they perhaps did work. Using the library’s online website, I had ordered sixteen folders, eight for each of us, the maximum one can order in one day, to be pulled and waiting for me in the Manuscripts Reading Room at 9:30 A.M.
I had also filled in all the paperwork (online) for a reader’s ticket, which you have to have before you can go the reading room and look at manuscripts. Then the wrinkle occurred: I noticed (again, using the website) that the office to obtain the reader’s ticket, the actual, physical thing, didn’t open until 10:30 A.M.
So there was an hour’s delay in our getting to the reading room. We arrived early at the NLI and were told by the person staffing the entrance desk that the reader’s ticket office wouldn’t open until 10:30. He suggested we might want to go for a cup of coffee and then return at the right time. Instead, we sat on benches outside the ticket room. The building and its interior are really elegant, a round design with columns on the outside and a large, well-lit rotunda with a tile floor inside. It was in that rotunda that we were sitting. I took a number of good photos.
When the office where we could obtain the reader’s ticket finally opened — a few minutes ahead of schedule: the young woman handling that operation couldn’t have been nicer, more jovial — we went in and she instructed us to sit down, one by one. The reason for the sitting became apparent when she snapped our photos, then printed out multiple copies and selected one of the small squares to paste into the reader’s ticket which she then laminated and handed to us.
Then it was off to the Manuscript Reading Room, which turned out to be in a different building. Like so much in Ireland, it was not well-signed and we like never to have found it. When we finally got to it, stowed our bags and jackets in lockers, and went into the reading room, our folders were waiting for us, and we spent a good bit of the day going through the sixteen folders one by one.
They contained rent accounts written in clear, elegant handwriting dating from 1826 to 1840. We both took copious notes, abstracting all the Ryan and Oates and Tobin entries. Each year is arranged more or less alphabetically by place names — e.g., Banaher, Piltown, Piltown Logreich, etc. As Steve noted, there’s a clear stability from year to year with the same names showing up in the same place year after year.
In other words, these documents capture who lived where on land owned by the Bessborough people from 1827 to 1840, and helps you find family groupings — e.g., John and Edmund Ryan at Whitechurch, John and Patrick Ryan at Piltown Banagher, John and James Ryan at Kilmanahin. When we returned the next day, the 23rd, to look at several more folders I had requested on the 22nd to have pulled for the 23rd, I found in a collection of accounts kept for emigrants, with the Bessborough estate paying for their emigration, a note or receipt stating that in spring of 1834, Edmund Ryan was paid for his lands so that he could emigrate, and written on the back, the statement that John Ryan had surrendered his lands.
The value of those documents is, of course, that I can use them to eliminate my John Ryan from the one living at Whitechurch with a close relative, a father or brother?, named Edmund who emigrated in or after spring of 1834. This is helpful when there were several John Ryans in the rent rolls, and when I need to figure out which is my John.
I’ve been inclined for a long time for various reasons to think that my John is the one listed with Patrick at Piltown. I know that my John lived at Piltown (at Logriach) from the baptism records of his children in the parish church (Templeorum Catholic parish). John’s first son Valentine, born in 1805, appears to have died prior to 1811 when John named another son, my ancestor, Valentine. After the first Valentine, John’s next son was Patrick, born in 1807 in Piltown. Patrick would have been John’s oldest living son, then, in the 1820s when a Patrick Ryan begins showing up with John Ryan in various records in Piltown, including the Bessborough rent rolls.
The Tithe Applotment for 1828 shows John Ryan in the civil parish of Fiddown, in the listing of Banagher, Logriach, and Piltown, renting land from the Earl of Bessborough. One household removed from John on the Tithe Applotment is a Patrick Ryan also renting land from the Earl of Bessborough. The Bessborough rent rolls, I found when I went through them, show a John and Patrick Ryan listed one after the other renting land at Piltown Banagher from the Bessborough estate in 1829.
It seems to me that this may well be my John with his “oldest” son Patrick, renting adjacent land at Piltown from the Bessborough estate. Banagher townland covers much of Piltown and is just west of Kildalton and the townland of Belline and Rogerstown. What was called Logriach, or Logreich in the rent rolls and Logreeach in William Carrigan's The History and Antiquities of the Diocese of Ossory, is located in Banagher townland.
So: poring over old papers, line by line, for the morning of the 22nd. The Manuscripts Reading Room was very pleasant, though a bit cold, with ultramodern reading stations set up for you to plug in your computer, cushions with something like Styrofoam peanuts inside for you to place your documents on as you read them, lots of light, abundant peace and quiet.
By about 1:15, we were flagging, so we walked to the nearby Kilkenny Design Centre and had a chicken Caesar wrap for lunch (we shared it), and a bowl of cream of vegetable soup (also shared). The place was hopping, hectic, and finding a table was not easy. The people working to serve food were also none too courteous and hurried us along. Steve had wanted to get a cup of seafood chowder but was informed that the cup of soup only came with a sandwich and he’d have to take a bowl. Since he didn’t want a large bowl of chowder, he took nothing. A loud, rushed, crowded eatery with rather rude wait persons….
We finished our work mid-afternoon and went back to the hotel to rest awhile. For whatever reason, my feet began to kill me on the walk over to the National Library and then back, so I welcomed the rest. The weather remained gloriously sunny as it has been all the time we’ve been here, save for a tiny bit of rain on Sunday afternoon, I think it was.
Supper: we discovered that just about everything shuts down, restaurant-wise, in Dublin on Monday evenings, but Lincoln’s Inn, where we ate on the 20th, was open, so we walked there. It’s very close to The Mont. This meal was nicer than the one we had on the 20th, perhaps because we’d sat on the bar side on the 20th and on the 22nd, chose the lounge, which seemed less frenetic. The young woman who seated us told us the table we wanted was reserved for 6:30. We assured her we’d be long finished by then.
Steve ordered a vegetable lasagna plate, and I ordered an appetizer (starter, of course, on Irish menus) of prawns pil pil with salad. With his order, he had a glass of Guiness and I took a glass of Smithwick’s ale. The food was okay, not fabulous but adequate. Steve’s lasagna came with fried potatoes (! potatoes and pasta together!). My small serving of shrimp with pil pil seasoning came in a rather bland, and certainly not piquant, red pil pil sauce, with a bit of salad on the side.
And that was that. That meal eaten, we walked back to the hotel and retired for the day. Oh, as we sat eating we could hear whistles blowing and people marching and shouting in the street. We couldn’t see what was going on, but noticed that the people staffing the bar and serving food in the lounge stopped to watch, with evident sympathy. We asked the woman who had waited on us what the demonstration was about, and she said it was a free Palestine demonstration.
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