Letter to the Dead – the Roots of Genealogy

There are so many of you to get to know better. I’ve heard your voices speaking in so many different ways. Now it’s time to echo your voices.

You and I owe so much to the ancient residents of our twin-circled hilltop fort at Ballyglass. Before Christ’s days and continuing long after they hid their stores and themselves in their souterrain tunnel, protecting themselves from danger and starvation.

They would never know that the 1830s arrival of our Kennys in Ballyglass would be a salvation too, their protection from An Gorta Mor, the great hunger. While neighbouring townlands lost a third or more of their population to starvation, resultant cholera, or desperate emigration, Ballyglass fed its own. No wonder our Kennys praised God so much and so long.  

Here is my echo and response to you. To you, the Ballyglass Kenny immigrants to Iowa, writing back to their homeland. Their lines somehow evaded mice fat on letters from afar, yearning lines complaining of little reply, lines that await response to their faraway heartbreak and success.

Its my response to the spoken tale passed down to me in my turn by Uncle Matthew, of four Kenny brothers in the time of hunger in the 1840s. They spent a whole day harvesting a field, to be left without a single bag of unblighted potatoes. There and then ‘the spade-breakers’ broke their spades, vowing never to dig another potato in Ireland.

And what of your women? Mary Anne Clinton, wife of John and heir to Hillswood, granted to her by her aunt McLoughlin who drafted the marriage contract. The same spirit dispensed land to Mary Anne’s daughters but encouraged her sons to cultivate self-sufficiency. Tempted to misogyny? She casts a long shadow, think twice.

And Mary Flynn, Denis’s wife, you the lay Franciscan whose single mind bred for first-born a Capuchin monk, for last-born the twin sisters of the Little Company of Mary, and two other daughters who were religious sisters too. All five remained true to their calling until their dying day, as did the brothers whose marriages were stamped with the same duty of dedication.

These lines are my response also to my lost grandmothers, whom I never met, bringing in my mother’s side from Fahy and Rayhill. Gone to God thirty years before my birth, Annie, dead with her ninth child after sixteen years of marriage. And on dad’s side Mary Kate, widowed at with five young children, measuring distances in rosaries as she walked solitary to the village, covering her head with a shawl at the sight of any male who might think to take her Johnnie’s place.

A response too to tragic Ellie Dwyer, married young to Pat Kenny whose greater love was for fast horses. Widowed and childless, she married again and after 7 years, had 6 children, dying after the birth of child 7, who died just before her. Why did the nearby four Kenny girl take the veil for the life of religious service? Well, Ellie was their nearest neighbour. Would you want her life?

I write haunted by the remains of places too:

* Kilconnell Abbey roofed and active for a mere pre-renaissance century, then just a tower for four more. A proud and gracious relic comforting brokenness in the locality.

* Mona brathair, the bog where the lost treasures of the Abbey were said to be hid by the friars. My Farrell cousins remember telling that tale to tourists in the 50s and scrambling for the coins the departing visitors threw from their departing coach. Condescension in both directions!

* Nearby on the Ballyboggan road, England’s trace, the ‘Church of Ireland’s few remaining gravestones hidden in a roadside grove, pastoral now to a four-footed flock. Something to muse over for the boy from Battersea, London who calls Kilconnell ‘home’.

* The Ballyglass home fields, each with their own names. Where I walked with my Dad and the two young sons of Sean, the latest of our Kenny landholders there.

* Its millennia old double fort and souterrain, the mysterious cave whose sealed tunnel leads… wherever your imagination takes you.

* Past homesteads now but Peggy’s gable end and Paddy mor’s – the remains of former Kenny houses, related to me, but how?

These and so many more long gone before. People and places shielded from the commonplace by the fascination that entrapped me each summer back in the 80s when I interrogated the uncles Eddies and Matthew about local family history, from both sides off the family tree.

You, my friends, family and fields, you are my fascination, you and the trail you have left behind. you and the gaps and gables that remain. You the stories looking for a voice to pass them on.

What hope though for my voice to tell your tale? Are you to be part of this new earth, or is your world of the past now sliding into a new heaven?

I am confident that your tales will be told, your spell will still be weaving, long after I go too, joining those whom now I can only glimpse.