Thursday (the 18th) was quite a day. I’m writing now on Saturday. It was the day I’d made plans to go to the County Clare Library in Ennis to visit its Local Studies Centre. For some months, I’d been in touch with the librarian who oversees that Centre, Michael Talty. We exchanged emails back and forth as I explained to him my interest in seeing if any archival sources might have information about my Clare-rooted Linchy/Lynch/Lindsey family, whose DNA profile (among male descendants) shows that we belong to the Dalcassian families centered in Clare and related to Brian Boru. FTDNA reports to me that Brian and I share an ancestor about 650 CE.
I knew, of course, that it was unlikely I’d find any new record of my immigrant ancestor Dennis Linchy, who came to Virginia from Ireland as a young indentured servant in 1718. Records just don’t exist. Even so, I wanted to spend some time in Clare, since DNA shows definitively that I have long-back roots there. And you never know what hidden treasure you’ll happen on in any archival collection.
So off to Ennis we headed bright and early Thursday morning, with the same driver, Pat O’Connor, who brought us from Shannon airport to Limerick on Tuesday driving us. On Wednesday, I had had a spate of emails from Michael Talty and people to whom he wanted to connect me. One of these was a Gerard Lynch from a Lynch family in Clare who has quite a bit of information about his family’s history. I emailed and called him on Wednesday, and he kindly offered to meet me at the library. Another contact was Paddy Waldron, who heads the Clare DNA project at FTDNA. I emailed Paddy, and he kindly invited me to a meeting of Clare Roots Society that was to take place on Thursday evening.
When we got to the Clare library, Michael Talty greeted us and brought out a panoply of handwritten genealogical charts prepared some years ago by an O’Brien and a Breen (Breen, I learned from Michael Talty, is a variant spelling of O’Brien). These trace the O’Brien line in Clare, the family descending from Brian Boru, and might, Michael Talty told me, also have Ó Loingsigh (Linchy, Lynch) information. Michael had also pulled a number of other books for me to look at, including Hugh W.L. Weir’s Houses of Clare, which gives the history of many old houses across Clare and tells who owned them in the past, and Charles Drazin’s Mapping the Past, an account of a man traveling in Clare to research his roots, especially Lynch family ones.
Soon after I started to look at this wealth of material, Gerard Lynch arrived and spent about two hours talking to Steve and me. He was delightful, a fountain of knowledge — as is Michael Talty as well. Gerard’s Lynch family is clearly a different family from mine. It’s a Norman French Lynch family that arrived in Galway, where it was very prominent, in the Middle Ages, and then moved down (some branches) to Clare. My Linchy family is, as Michael Talty said, “old Gaelic,” a family whose DNA fits the profile of the Dalcassians who lived in Clare and banded with their relative Brian Boru to establish their dominance in this part of Ireland.
Gerard Lynch urged me to spend some time in Galway, and offered to take me there if I return to Ireland. I was there for part of a day and a night in 1990, and have only hazy recollections of the place, and a few scribbled notes in my travel diary.
After Gerard left about noon, I thanked Michael for his invaluable assistance, and Pat O’Connor then drove us a mile or two south of Ennis to the ruined Killone Abbey where I’d found, in the Clare Local Studies Centre’s online digitized materials, transcriptions and photos of two 18th-century tombstones for a Dennis Linchy and a Dennis Lynch who might have been, I thought, related to my Linchy family.
It turned out as I talked to Michael and Gerard, however, that these Dennises were, Michael indicated, part of Gerard’s Norman Lynch family tree. When we reached Killone Abbey, the car park, which was simply a muddy terminus of a laneway leading from the road to the abbey ruins, faced a big sign across a gate warning us, Beware the Bull! There were also signs stating that the ruins are private property.
I had read online that a young couple have bought and are renovating the ancient O’Brien estate house, Newhall, on whose grounds the Killone ruins and the abbey graveyard are found. The O’Briens founded Killone Abbey as an Augustinian nunnery in the early Middle Ages. Given the warning signs and the fact that I now had been told that the Dennis Linchy and Dennis Lynch buried at Killone belong to a Lynch family different from my own, I wasn’t keen to tramp through the mud, brave a bull, and trespass on private property to find two tombstones, so I told Pat O’Connor that we thanked him for bringing us there, but I’d simply download the photos of these tombstones from the Local Studies Centre’s website.
Pat then drove us back to Limerick for a long afternoon’s rest before we returned there for the 7:30 meeting of the Clare Roots society. Before we set out for Ennis again, having eaten a very large breakfast in Harry’s, the hotel restaurant (full Irish for Steve, who never touches a bite of breakfast at home), and having skipped lunch, we went back there and had bowls of seafood chowder to fortify us for the evening, and found it delicious.
As we drove to Ennis, where I had arranged to meet Paddy Waldron at the now-closed library, he called and said he had arrived there early. When I told him we were in the car approaching Ennis, he suggested that we meet him at the Clare Education Centre where the society meeting was to take place. Pat O’Connor said he knew where that was and took us there — Paddy Waldron had kindly offered to drive us back to Limerick when the meeting ended — and we met him. He was a droll tall man with long hair and a beard who evidently studied in England and I enjoyed talking to him.
Paddy W. understands well the value of DNA findings for genealogical research, and is skilled at using DNA as a tool. He tells me there are a number of matches, not really highly close ones, between two Lynch men and me and another member of my Lindsey family who had joined the Clare DNA project. I’ve long thought that the most promising route to find out where my Dennis Linchy may have been born and have grown up in Ireland would be DNA matches.
The meeting of Clare Roots Society was enjoyable, with quite a crowd gathering to hear a presentation by Noreen Maher, a Dublin genealogist with Tipperary-Kilkenny roots. She spoke about a number of cases on which she’s worked that call for critical thinking and sifting of information — the case of a great-aunt of hers who emigrated to America, married, and is said to have been murdered in Montana by her husband: the case of three missing uncles of someone who hired her to do research, uncles about whom only sketchy family stories existed, but solid information was lacking; and the case of her grandfather’s bad knee, about which she heard often as a child but had no information to explain the problem with his knee.
All in all, a very fruitful day on which I made some contacts that may prove valuable, because these are people on the spot, with tremendous knowledge of Clare history and families…. And with Noreen Maher’s Kilkenny roots, I may consider hiring her to help me find more information about my Tobin family, which stumps me because, as far as I can determine, my g-g-grandmother Bridget Tobin Ryan was born in Kilmacow parish before baptism records were kept there, so I have never found the names of her parents.
I got very little sense of Clare during our time there on Thursday. Ennis seems to be a pretty and fairly prosperous town, a place that draws lots of tourists because there’s a golf course nearby and because music is everywhere in Clare, in every pub and place. Michael Talty told me this tradition is rooted in the fact that Clare had many small kings far back in time, and each had his own court musician.
Then to bed and a long sleep, since we hadn’t slept well knowing we needed to be up early for Pat O’Connor to pick us up for the drive to Ennis….
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment