I focused on unravelling for Michaela of the crystal bowls some of her family tree. She had given me all the details she knew of, her people being entirely Irish, for which this was rather a challenge for me. Michaela's parents, who were both Irish, had met in London, her father Michael O'Driscoll being a doctor and her mother Ethna Sweeney a pharmacist. Michaela herself was raised in London. It was Ethna's side of the family she was more curious to know about. They came from 'The Abbey', near to Ballyshannon in County Donegal. Ethna's father, David Sweeney, was a farmer who drove a horse and trap, and her mother, Bridget, had tuberculosis of the spine since her early 30's, for which she was bedridden. Somewhere in that ancestry were the English 'Blacks'. Tuberculosis of the spine would normally have spread there from the lungs and was called Potts Disease. This was a rare form, but certain notables were known to have had it, such as Saint Gemma of Luca, the poet Alexander Pope, and Louis XVI's (and Marie Antoinette's) son, Louis Joseph, the dauphin of France. It was his wet nurse, Genevieve Poitrine who was accused of hiving him tuberculosis. He had to wear metal corsets to support his deteriorating spine and died aged seven. I found Michaela's parents engagement and marriage announcements in the Irish newspapers, and the death of Ethna's brother from pleurisy at the age of 21. The 1911 census showed David Sweeney to be a farmer of Abbeylands, there was a dog license he applied for, for a male black collie in 1900, and his marriage in 1916, by which I found out that Bridget's maiden name was Mullen. In both the 1901 and 1911 census's, Bridget was living with nuns, serving them in their domestic needs. In 1911 it was specified that these nuns were the Sisters of Mercy. These nuns would educate and take in poor girls, look after the sick, and in the same manner as the Magdalene laundries would take in pregnant unmarried girls. In 1901, when Bridget was waiting on the nuns, aged 18, her younger brother, Michael Mullen, aged 16, was working for the same nuns as their messenger and gardener. It is for young Michaels return to the family home, by 1911, that I found their widowed mother, Bridget Mullen of Rockhill, and in then sourcing her 1901 details learnt that her husband was John Mullen, by which I then found their marriage in 1877, she being Bridget Walsh. This aligned with an old widow living with the family in 1901, Catherine Walsh, who as I had guessed correctly was her mother. The Catholic marriage details were a good find, both bride and groom being of Rockhill, John Mullin's parents being Michael Mullins and Ellen McKay, and Bridget's parents being James Walsh and Catherine Kennaugh. Well, all had seemed challenging upon setting out on this quest, and yet here I was passing on lots of information to Michaela, so that she likened this experience to being on Who Do You Think You Are, especially when I came up with a newspaper report about her grandad David Sweeney winning second prize in the local best cows competition, in the category of cows which have already been pregnant. The Walsh family of Rockhill looked to have been a rough fighting sort; a big feud developing in 1856 with the local Likely family, the Likely lads having threatened the Walsh' at their home, challenging them to a fight, two of the Walsh women being assaulted, one of them, Una Walsh being struck by an iron bar by Francis Likely. Ann Walsh, the other assaulted lady, took up stones and threatened to knock out Margaret Likely's brains with them. I carried on with Michaela's research the next day, thinking I was at a loss to find more, but then more I indeed found. There were only two Irish census's, so that avenue was not so promising. But one found instead Roman Catholic records, court details and dog license records, and this and that here and there. Yes, her people got into trouble, there being many records of drunkenness and fighting. This seemed to be often the way with the Irish, not just with travellers, but in general. As Michaela said her brother suspected there was alcoholism in the family. So the Walsh's were fighters, and as I saw it, it was so with the Sweeney's too. There was a long list of their battles with their neighbours at 'The Abbey' and with the locals in the town of Ballyshannon. I found the English 'Blacks', maybe not so English, as just over the border into Northern Ireland and being of protestant derivation, David Sweeney's parents being Frances Black and Patrick Sweeney. Patrick Sweeney was surely a drinker and a fighter. These were the kind of fights that would be surrounded by riotous crowds. David's parents, James and Bridget Sweeney, were likewise of that nature. Whole families would be warring, the women included. They were farmers, for long at the Abbey. Old Bridget had cows; as I saw, in 1847, her neighbour, Bernard Grimes, was making issue about her cows repeatedly trespassing on his crop of plants. On yet another day I looked at Michaela's genealogy, and noted that the original James Sweeney had married two Bridget's, and he had needed special dispensation for the second being related to the first. The Grimes's, who had fought with the Sweeney's, Michaela had met their current descendants still at the Abbey and said they appeared to be an inbred lot, as maybe anyway were her own Sweeney's, so she remarked.
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Genealogy, so time consuming, much to look at, and often nothing to find. and then hurray, a little treasure of information presents itself. In my case it was discovering that my Irish Greenwich based Bartholomew Sugrue was godfather to another families child. Bartholomew the Godfather. Godparents are never, as yet, included in transcriptions, for which this was really quite a find. Getting to such a find involves a whole lot of detective work which could lead nowhere. Here, it was from looking at the lives of those who had been godparents to Bartholomew's own children and looking up their own family records. The Graney family, also from Ireland and settled in Greenwich, had been godparents in 1860 to Bartholomew's daughter, Catherine, registered in the baptisms of the Roman Catholic records of Our Lady Star Of The Sea, at Greenwich, when she was just over a year in age. And then, such joy for me, like really, to find that the very next year, in 1861, our Bartholomew was in turn a godparent to the Graney's son, William Joseph Graney. Of this Graney family, friends to the Sugrues, the head of the household, John Graney, worked with Bartholomew in the building trade, and his wife, Mary Graney, née Kane, I saw that by 1881 she was a widow, just about surviving as a hawker on the streets, and interestingly her place of origin was listed, maybe being another clue to the Sugrue families own origins, all being from County Kerry, her hometown being Castleisland at the beginning of the Vale of Tralee, a town surrounded by hills and boglands, atop a vast cave system known as Crag Cave, within which were the underground waters of the Green Lake. Ah, I have tried and tried, and yet have never found a baptism in Ireland for Bartholomew Sugrue, for which I wonder if his family were travellers, not bothering with the system and its obligations; like it's so that Bartholomew never bothered legally registering his children births when living in Greenwich, even though by law one had to do so. And then again, some of the Irish settlers appear to have used alternative names, such as Garrett London, who was a godfather for Bartholomew's son Daniel in 1857 and yet called himself Garrett Barry in the 1851 census. And at the time of the marriage of Bartholomew's grown up son, Thomas (my ancestor), instead of giving his fathers name as Bartholomew Sugrue, Thomas said he was James Seagrove, although we can surmise that by then Thomas wished to disassociate from his fathers scandals. This family continues to fascinate me, and the next day I happily found out more about the Sugrues. I'd not realised it before, but Bartholomew's close friend, Patrick Reardon, who had been best man at his wedding to his first wife Ellen Sullivan, was actually his brother in law, Ellen being none other than Bartholomew's sister, Ellen Sugrue. This and more I was finding out by grace of the Roman Catholic records of our Lady Star of the Sea on FindMyPast, which I had paid a lot to join for a year, but which was yielding anyway these delightful finds for me. Bartholomew's sister, Ellen, was a few years older than him, and this sibling connection explains how it is that these two families were so entwined. It was in looking at a baptism of Patrick and Ellens daughter Mary Ann Reardon, that I saw a side note saying sub-conditional, which at first I though meant handicapped in some way, but actually it referred to a child that may or may not have been previously baptised. Well, it was on that baptism, that I saw Ellen Reardon's surname prior to marriage revealed: she was a Sugrue. I next found that Bartholomew Sugrues first wife, Ellen Sullivan, was a godmother to Patrick and Ellen Reardon's first child, Helen (Ellen) in 1846. It was three months after that baptism that she and Bartholomew married, and then, as I know, having had one child together, Ann, Ellen became very ill in the summer of 1849 with cholera and died. And as for another of Patrick and Ellen Reardon's children, Catherine, Bartholomew's second wife, Catherine Sheehan, was the baby girls godmother in 1855. I happened now to find the Roman Catholic version of Bartholomew Sugrue's marriage to his first wife, Ellen Sullivan, which had more detail than the official certificate, on account of it giving the names and locations of the couples parents. Ellen Sullivans parents were John and Ellen Sullivan of County Kerry. Bartholomew's parents were Thomas Sugrue (I'd already known he had Thomas as a father) and Joanna, which I had not known, they being of County Kerry. So for all of this I could add two new people to my tree, Joanna as Bartholomew's mother and Ellen as his sister. Sad it was to see that his sister, Ellen, died in 1865 aged 45. Interestingly, in one of the census's Ellen gave her place of birth as Church Hill in County Kerry, at last the best clue yet as to where Bartholomew himself may have been born. The Roman Catholic residents of that village, at the time when they would have been there, attended an old and dilapidated chapel, in nearby Chapeltown.. This was due to the original medieval Roman Catholic Church of their own village, on its splendid old hill, with its fine views of the sea, having been long been supplanted by a protestant church. Back in the 1700's, this whole area had been a place of smuggling and the village itself was a protected archeological site. Eventually Church Hill would have a Roman Catholic Church again , but not till after the Sugrue's would had left for England, the church to be St Marys, Star of the Sea (like the church in Greenwich). Tralee, from where was the lovely folk song I used to sing on the piano, was the nearest sizeable town, 10 klms away. Patrick Reardon himself was from Waterville in County Kerry, and we see now another of the family friends, Mary Kane was from Castleisland. And it's fine enough to piece together information once these folk were in England, but Irish records are still as vague and untraceable as ever.
My daughter Eleanor's half sister, Eashani, has actually done her autosomal dna on 23 & Me; being fully Gujurati on her mums side, and on her fathers side English and French (he having ancestors from the Channel islands). My kinesiologist replacement (for a while), Olivier, asked me if I had family links to Iceland, as I have that 'look', and actually with my Shetland Island dna I do indeed have genetic connections to those Vikings who were early on in Iceland, as I have seen, particularly in my mothers archeogenetic dna matches. This sunny clime in the south of France is maybe too much for me, he suggested, and its so that my face was particularly dry and erupting. But, anyway, as my dna has revealed, I am part Mediterranean, a Myheritage update emphasising that this little part of me is southern Italian, both Italian and Greek. On Facebook I joined the Ivereagh Peninsula genealogy group and how welcoming those other members were. My Irish was of County Kerry and I didn't even know if my Bartholomew Sugrue was of the Iveragh Peninsula or not, as this family was still to much of a mystery, but most Sugrue's were indeed from there, and one of Bartholomew's fellow County Kerry men in Greenwich days, Patrick Reardon, who was best man at his wedding to Ellen Sullivan, was indeed from the Iveragh Peninsula, from Waterville.
From just one ancestral picture I generated avatars of my Irish great grandmother Mary Dolan, and it was so that most were repetitive, but still some I liked manifested. Somehow, at least in some pictures, the AI picked Mary out to be a black woman, looking rather Afro-American.
I decided it was my great grandma Florence Maxted's turn for the avatar and time travel experience, luckily having a few photos of her to work from, and now gaining so many delights. So happy I am for this. Florence was half Irish through her mother Mary née Dolan. I see from a photo of her mother that they have the same eyes, which my father also had; Irish eyes. Florence's fathers family came from Pluckley, the most haunted village in England. My Irish people, I so wish I knew something of their world. I did find reference to a Thomas Sugrue in the old newspapers, Thomas being the name of Bartholomew's father, who with one of his sons, also called Thomas, was part of a mass of rioting villagers, up in arms against an unwanted new priest who was replacing the villagers much beloved priest. The villagers therefore forcefully threw the new priest out from their chapel, which although locked up, he had broken into to perform mass there for the first time. That was back in the spring of 1845, the year before Bartholomew was first to be seen in Greenwich, marrying there an older woman Ellen Sullivan. John Sullivan was one of the other rioters, the name of Ellen's father, so one does wonder could these be the actual fathers involved in this rioting. The other men who were majorly involved were three MacCarthy brothers, Denis Barton, Joseph Kennington and John Murphy. John McCarthy, one of the brothers, happens to have later been the name of one of Barthomew's lodgers, as revealed in the census of 1861. The hated new priest, Thomas Carmody, was from Ballinamona and the rural chapel, which was at Tonereigh, alias Toneragh, was one built and maintained by the villagers themselves, who wished still for their long serving priest David O'Connor, whom the Bishop had deemed no longer capable of doing his duty. The villagers would not allow the new priest to enter, keeping the chapel doors and windows nailed up, but on that particular Sunday morning the priests men came and broke open the doors with sledges and hammers. Once the priest had got up to the altar and was beginning his mass, Michael MacCarthy, followed by others, leapt over the rails, and struck his fist on the altar and announced "Where is the person who will say mass" while cursing with the 'most violent and blasphemous language'. A woman had to then interfere to stop this fellow from beating the priest with his stick. Thomas Sugrue was further back in the church with a crook in his hand, with which he tried to strike the back of one of the priests men, although missing him, and he was blocking the door to prevent the priests clerk from coming in. The priest, in fear for his life, ran away, there being more than a hundred people assembled against him. The only people accepting of the priest, who had come to the mass, numbered around 7 or 8 persons. Once the priest had fled the men nailed the chapel up again. One of the women present, Ellen Callaghan, it was her father who the new priest resided with and the hatchet to break down the doors was her fathers. The villagers were in court declared to be a lawless mob. The new priest declared that if they would now regret their 'senseless and foolish conduct' he would forgive them. And that they should permit him to perform his duties for the next six months and if at the end of that time they still did not approve he would give up the parish. I do so try to envisage the rural Irish ways my people would have known prior to the famine. It was in the year that the people rioted against the priest that the famine began, which would continue for seven years. Traditionally the rural men of Ireland would twice yearly voyage to England and there work in the fields, like as I have seen with the hop picking, and Bartholomew may well have done likewise, and for sure some women of the families would have accompanied them too. In this way they would save some money from their English wages to bring back to Ireland. The women, along with their children, had their own habit of seasonal roaming and begging. I don't imagine this to have been borne of destitution as it was later, but that they would have profited from gathering blackberries, crab apples, seaweeds, whatsoever of natures wild harvest, this being a way that was still semi-nomadic, born of an old hunter-gatherer culture. But all becomes more dire when the untamed lands get snatched up by landowners who seek to profit by this, by which the old ways are thwarted. When nature provides less, then begging from those of better means becomes relevant, and ultimately a means of survival in times of need. The loss of cultural ways breaks the vibrant spirit, hence the turning to alcohol and dysfunctionalism. Bartholomew didn't remain in Ireland to try and survive through that famine, being early on seen in Greenwich. Even in his hardest times to come, in and out of the workhouse, he never sought to return to his homeland. Maybe, as with the rioters, he had got into trouble there. I imagine that while in England doing seasonal work he was attracted to the employment opportunties in the booming building trade, while also falling in love. The Irish had been settling in Greenwich in small numbers long before such times, as for instance, as I've seen reference in one old newspaper, in 1841, in regard to an Irish woman, Mrs Moriarty, who was a brothel madam in Greenwich, keeper of a 'house of ill fame' on Roan Street. As I have seen, Roan Street looks so tame, quiet and inconsequential now. Quite wild in those days though.
What fun, on a cold day, to make a tiktok of my ethnic ancestresses, as revealed to me by DNA, finding beautiful pictures of different ancient cultures. As I did say, it is by DNA that I have found out so much about my ancestresses. Three quarters of my DNA is Celtic, for my family being Welsh, Irish and Scottish, and Viking I have a lot too, for having family from the Shetland Islands. Archeogenetics has revealed descent from the ancient Balari tribe of Sardinia and the Vascones tribe of the Basque. I have around 4% Greek DNA, 3% Spanish, 2% Italian, 3% central Asian and 1% Finnish. My matriarchal origins have come from the Caucasus mountains. How beautiful those pictures I gathered together. So this was a joy for me.
I made another long journey from central London out to the Kew Archives. Not that I made such grand discoveries as last time. Seeking my ancestral Maxteds in a big book of Nine Elms railway employees yielded nothing. But I did find a few things which had so far eluded me. And that was just by accessing Find My Past, information I'd not been able to find on the Ancestry website. I had already sussed out, by deduction, that my ancestor Robert Bunney (Senior) had married an Ann Aylward, but had never found a marriage record confirming this till now (my deduction had been due to Alyward being used down generations as a middle name for various children). It was at the church of Mary Magdalene (of course lol) that they had married one another on 26th February 1764 in Bermondsey. And I found my Welsh ancestor John Harrisons school admissions for the hamlet of Pwlldu, , in both 1876 and 1877, recording that the familys adress was at 'Lower Bank' and that his father worked as (yes I knew) an ostler. What I was really pleased with was at last finding Thomas Sugrues baptism, which was in Greenwich in 1854 at the Roman Catholic church of Our Lady of the Sea. Thomas's birthday was here recorded (a good find) as being on 24th Febfuary (making him an Aries), the baptism having been on 26th March. His godparents were Michael and Maria MacDonnell. I found Roman Catholic baptisms for Thomas's siblings too, for Joanna, Catherine, Jacobus, Edmund and the twins Daniel and Bartholomew. Interestingly I discovered also that the childrens father, Bartholomew Sugrue, had also had a child with his first wife, Ellen, who had died of Asiatic cholera. I'd never seen anything to prove before that they'd had a baby together, but there she was, a daughter, Anna, born in 1847, her godparents being Corey Malvina and Margaret Gallachan.
1921 Census Day, new records released, as revealed at midnight. In a few locations in England one can view this freely, but I am in France. Therefore I would have to pay. At first I was not going to look, as it wasn't that I expected to find any vital information there. Rather I messaged my London based daughter, Eleanor, to let me know if she visits Kew Gardens, as this was one of the locations of free access (in and around the Kew Archives). But as a keen genealogist I couldn't then resist to at least have a little look, firstly just at my Welsh family (simply by transcript), then I saw that for just a little extra money one can download the originals and in my excitement ended up doing this for everyone. So the Welsh Harrisons of Varteg were the first I looked at. I already knew their ages, places of birth and occupations. What I did learn was which colliery they worked at. It was on the Varteg Hill that my great grandfather, John Harrison, worked as a colliery examiner for John Vipond & Co. My pop, his son George, was at that time a 12 year old boy. Ok, secondly I looked at my Maxted's of Eastleigh, to the family of my great great grandfather, William Maxted, who was a boilermaker on the railways. His Irish wife, Maria, who had always been a mystery, having previously said she was from Westmeath, now claimed in this 1921 census to have been born in Cork. So, yes, armed with his new information I looked once more to finding something of her origins, but still found nothing. What I did find from this census, which I had not known before, was that one of the daughters, Norah, herself had at this time an illegitimate baby in the family home, a little girl named Norah Maria Kathleen, the names of both her mother and grandmother. As for William and Maria Maxted's daughter, Florence, she had married a ships cook, Percy Spencer, and was living with him at 2 Bridge Cottages, Dovercourt, with my little 'nanny' Eileen, aged three years. Florence's younger brother, Henry, was also living with them and working as a local postman. My Shetland Inkster's I couldn't look ar as no Scottish records had been as yet released. I now looked at my Seagrove's of Greenwich. I already knew that my great great grandfather, Thomas Seagrove, was a salvage hand (retired) for the Port of London. And I looked at the Bane's . My great great grandfather, Richard Bane, was newly a widower, aged 81, living with his daughter Alma's family in Walthamstow, Alma's husband, George Reynolds, being a school teacher. All of this I knew. What was new information was Alma's birth in Barbados having been fine tuned to the location of St Anne's, where there had been a British garrison. So this was where my Bane's had lived while they were in Barbados. My 'granny' Isabelle Bane can be seen aged three living with her family at 13 Lee Road in Dovercourt. I'd not so easily found them at first, due to her father, D'Auvergne Bane, using his middle name only of Robert. I already knew that he'd worked as a checker at Parkeston Quay. In the census it specified that he worked for the Great Eastern Railway. That was it for my family in the 1921 census, nothing excessively riveting. But little by little colours are added to the family story.
Ancient dna comparison was blowing my mind and I was both totally focused on and excited about this. I'd been on my terrace looking at some genealogy tiktoks, when I came across one which was so very interesting. An English girl, Bobbie, was showing how to upload ethnic dna to an archeo-genetic site 'myancestry.com' which compared ones dna to dna extracted from ancient bodies.
Oh wow; of course I had to get into this. And I messaged about it to Ella May, who did likewise. She was more speedy about getting her transfer done than I was. And some patience was requuired till all was processed. What emerged was so exciting for me. And as the information was only freely available for a couple of days I had to totally immerse myself in discovering all that was of relevance. By this I arrived at who were my closest ancient peoples, dominant of whom were the Celts; the other close groups being Saxons, Franks, Danish Vikings and Vandals. Vandals - Ho! They were barbarian Central European peoples.
And apart from those there was a link to the Balari tribe of Sardinia.
And to the Vascones of the Basque lands.
Of ancient remains which I specifically genetically matched, they were varied, and one particularly excellent match was to the Cheddar Man of Cheddar Gorge, Britians oldest discovered skeleton, dna having been extracted from one of his teeth. He had lived about 10,000 years ago, had dark skin, black hair and green eyes, wavy hair, was lactose intolerant and was of a hunter gatherer type (acccording to the analysis of his dna).
And I was matched to ancient bodies found at Stonehenge, it now being understood, from looking at the conditions of these remains and from how far some came, that Stonehenge was an ancient pilgrimage place where pilgrims would come for healing, much like Lourdes is today.
And I had matched to Roman Gladiators, to Vikings wounded in battle, to the Beaker culture, to Bronze Age peoples in Britain and France, to Merovingian nobles, to someone around at the time of the French revolution, to Viking men and their Irish women who had settled Iceland, and to the royals of Europe, there even being a genetic connection to Louis XVI.
As far as my nearest modern genetics were concerned, this was mostly Irish, although on one map of links I could see Welsh was closely there too.
I just had to make a tiktok of this fascinating new subject.:
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AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Categories
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