Week 9 – 2020: Disaster #52Ancestors

Most of us know about the Irish Potato Famine and how it devastated the Irish people. Short course: from 1845 to 1852, disease and starvation caused the death of about 1 million people and caused another 2.5 million to flee the country.[1] My husband and I have many ancestors who came to the United States from Ireland during these years and immediately after. Sadly, their individual stories were never recorded. Indeed, for some of them, all I know is that they were Catholic and came from some place in Ireland. However, for Daniel and Johana (Roche) Quinlan, my husband’s third great-grandparents, we have enough information to piece together what happened to their family as a result of the Great Hunger.

Daniel and Johana likely married in County Cork sometime before 1827.[2] In 1828, Daniel and Johana were living in the townland of Downing (“An Dúinín”), north-east County Cork.[3] Knowing their townland was a key piece of information in my search for them.[4]

A word on land divisions in Ireland: the smallest “official” geographical division in Ireland is the townland and there are more than 64,000 townlands in Ireland.[5] Townlands group together to form the next geographical division, the civil parish (not to be confused with church parishes).[6] Downing and several other townlands formed the parish of Kilcrumper.[7] Knowing the parish opens the door to many more resources to help locate ancestors.

Pre-famine Kilcrumper had 1,408 residents and was primarily a farming community.[8] Of the 217 families living in Kilcrumper, 86% of them were “chiefly employed in Agriculture.”[9] I have located what is called a “Tithe Composition Applotment” record for Dowing in 1828 and it shows Daniel occupied a thirty-one acre farm.[10] These Applotment records were generated because occupiers of land had to pay the Church of Ireland a money tithe representing one-tenth of the produce generated on the farm.[11] We are lucky to have these records, even if the farmer-occupiers (especially Catholics) objected to paying the tithe.[12]

It is hard to determine the value of Daniel’s farm relative to today’s standards, but it appears to be on the “high-end” compared to the farms nearby. The land in Kilcrumper was reported to be of good quality and mostly under cultivation.[13] While this Applotment record is not a census, it is reasonable to assume that Johana was living on the farm at that time with their first daughter, Ann (b. 1827). Johanna and Daniel had four more children over the next eleven years: Michael (b. 1830), Daniel (b. 1833), John (b. 1835), and Catherine (b. 1838).

The appearance of the potato blight (which lead to the famine) began slowly; first, in some parts of Europe.[14] Initially, the blight in Ireland was highly localized, but by 1846, the entire Irish potato crop was infected.[15] To grasp why this caused a disaster, it’s important to know that for the nine months following harvest, the average Irishman ate 10-12 pounds of potatoes per day.[16] As the potato crop continued to fail over the next 4-5 years, the government in London botched the relief efforts which caused massive starvation and disease.

What happened to the Quinlan family during the famine years? I don’t have many records relating to the family during those years, but by the end of the famine, Johanna was a widow and her nineteen- and fifteen-year-old sons had left for America.[17] Instead of a 31-acre farm, the remaining family members were living on one-acre plot in a 6-foot tall 31 x 17 thatched roof house with stone or mud walls.[18] Living with Johana was her daughter Ann (24), son John (16), sister-in-law, Ann Molone (77), and a nine-year-old granddaughter, Mary Hendly.[19] I assume Ann Malone’s husband had either died or emigrated. John (my husband’s 2nd great-grandfather) left Ireland shortly thereafter and ultimately settled in Kansas.

What happened to the Quinlans wasn’t unusual. By 1851, the population of Cork had decreased by 28% due to death or immigration.[20] I haven’t been able to determine what happened to the Quinlan women left behind, but someday I will track them down.

[1] John Dorney, “The Great Irish Famine 1845-1851 – A Brief Overview,” The Irish Story (https://www.theirishstory.com/2016/10/18/the-great-irish-famine-1845-1851-a-brief-overview/#.Xlwxdi2ZPUY : accessed 1 March 2020)

[2] Marriage records for their Catholic parish do not begin until May 1828.

[3] Applottment for Vicarial Tithes of the Parish of Kilcrumper, Townland of Downing (1828), Daniel Quinlon; digital image, The National Archives of Ireland (http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarchives.ie/reels/tab//004587459/004587459_00214.pdf : accessed 27 January 2016).

[4] Even though a census of Ireland was taken every ten years from 1821 to 1911, a fire at the Public Record Office in 1922 and intentional destruction by the Irish government means that most of the pre-1900 censuses are not available. If you are lucky, you might find your ancestors in some of the fragments of the census records that remain. Grenham, “Chapter 2 – Census Records,” Tracing Your Irish Ancestors (Dublin: Gill Books, 2019), 18.

[5] John Grenham, “Chapter 4 – Property and Valuation Records,” Tracing Your Irish Ancestors, 57.

[6] Ibid.

[7] General Alphabetical Index to the Townlands and Towns, Parishes and Baronies of Ireland: Based on the Census of Ireland for the Year 1851 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing CO, 1984), 386.

[8] Samuel Lewis, “Kilcrumper,” A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, 2nd ed., vol. 2, (London: S. Lewis and Co., 1837), 42; image, Internet Archive(http://www.archive.org : accessed 10 September 2019).

[9] Accounts and Papers of the House of Commons, Vol. 15, Population of Ireland (England: 1833), 146. 148; Google (http://www.play.google.com/books : accessed 4 March 2020).

[10] Applotment for Kilcrumper, Townland of Downing (1828).

[11] John Grenham, “Tithe Applotment Books,” Irish Ancestors (https://johngrenham.com : accessed 4 March 2020).

[12] Chris Paton, “Tithe records,” Discover Irish Land Records (Australia: Unlock the Past, 2015), 50.

[13] Lewis, “Kilcrumper.”

[14] Christine Kinealy, “Chapter 2, A Blight of Unusual Character: 1845-46,” This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-1852 (Boulder, Colorado: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1995), 31.

[15] Kinealy, “Chapter 3, We Cannot Feed the People: 1846-47,” 71-72.

[16] Kinealy, “Chapter 2,” 32.

[17] Josephine Masterson, County Cork, Ireland, a Collection of 1851 Census Records (Baltimore, Genealogical Publishing Co, 2000), 30; digital image, Ancestry, “County Cork Ireland, a Collection of 1851 Census Records” (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 4 March 2020). Manifest, SS Regulus, 13 June 1849, p. 3, lines 13 and 14, Mike and Daniel Quinlan, ages 19 and 15; digital image, Ancestry, “Massachusetts, Passenger and Crew Lists, 1820-1963” (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 4 March 2020).

[18] “Ireland, Valuation Office Books, 1831-1857,” database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org : accessed 3 March 2020), Cork>Kilcrumper>Downing North> image 4 of 4; from “Griffith’s Valuation 1847-1864,” database and images, findmypast (http://findmypast.com : 2014); citing various libraries, offices, and a private collection. Frances McGee, “Appendix G: Classification of buildings,” The Archives of the Valuation of Ireland, 1830-1865 (Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts Press, 2018), 214.

[19] Masterson, County Cork, 30.

[20] Abstracts of the Census of Ireland Taken in the Years 1841 and 1851 (Dublin: G.&J. Greirson, 1851); digital image, Archive.org (https://archive.org/details/op1247171-1001/page/n1/mode/2up : accessed 4 March 2020). Cork lost another 100,000 people by 1861. Wikipedia, “Irish population analysis,” rev. 14:06, 16 February 2020.

From a collection called “Remarkable Old Photos of Ireland” posted by “Col,” on Irish Archaeology website (http://irisharchaeology.ie : accessed 5 March 2020).