Our research trips to explore the history of the Gauld family occupied the last couple of days of our time in Scotland. In Aberdeen we were able to find the grave of Janita’s great grandparents, James and Elizabeth. Given that they were buried in a cemetery with 22,000 graves, it was a bit of a miracle that we could find the grave. All we had was a photograph of the grave from a website. The photo showed a large Celtic cross behind the grave we were searching for, so we drove around the cemetery looking for the cross. Celtic crosses are not all that common in Scottish cemeteries because they usually denote a Catholic burial. After about 10 minutes driving about, we spotted the right cross and just one row in front of it, the Gauld grave. We spent the remainder of the day in Aberdeen city tracking the movements of the family through various houses in different parts of the city.
James Gauld ran a successful construction business in the city and some of the houses that still exist were indicative of a fairly well off family. There were a couple though that were in less affluent areas, leaving us wondering if the family fortunes fluctuated with general economic conditions in Scotland.
Our accommodation for this part of the trip was an extremely well appointed little cottage about 10 km outside the small town of Alford in the Highlands. We had some fantastic weather and guided, or mis-guided by our GPS system, we explored some beautiful parts of the countryside.
To catch our flight to Ireland we drove back into Edinburgh and dropped off our hire car right beside the Moxy Hotel where we spent the night. The Moxy is a fairly new budget chain, part of the Marriot group. We normally don’t comment much on our hotel accommodation, but this place is very laid back, comfortable and reasonably priced. While we are at it, the Premier Inn where we overnighted in Dublin was good as well, with comfortable, no-frills rooms at about AUD100 a night. While on the mechanics of travel, we used RyanAir for the first time. A slick, highly mechanised check in procedure worked for most travellers, but even though we had our boarding passes on our phones, we had to do a manual bag drop because we were not EU citizens. The flight was packed and every bit of cabin luggage storage was crammed full. Our flight was only 55 minutes and so the tight seating space and almost non-existent service wasn’t a problem.
This morning we hit the new Irish motorways for our journey to Ennis. What a change from our first trip to Ireland almost 20 years ago. A network of well maintained motorways have replaced the often windy narrow “major” roads that we tackled in motorhomes all those years ago. Even the driveway sized local roads seem easier to drive. The fact that our hire car is a tiny Skoda about the size of a large rollerskate has probably helped on the smaller roads.
2 May, Ennis
More family explorations today. Sadly, Ireland has changed so much in the past 100 years, that all we could find of locations where the Jordan family lived in the middle of the 19th century, were the odd, more modern, church or a few farm buildings where thriving villages might have existed 150 years ago.
The Ireland we visited almost 20 years ago has changed, almost beyond recognition. Cute thatched cottages and small farmsteads have been replaced by new houses and never ending lines of B&Bs. On our first visit in 2000, Ireland was the Celtic Tiger. The economy was booming. Every town had a factory pumping out everything from socks to computer parts. That all came to an end in 2009 when a number of factors combined to bring all that prosperity to a sad end. Crippling national debt and a crazy speculative housing market all but destroyed Ireland. Once again, the well educated youth left the country in droves for the greener fields that had attracted their grandparents, the US, Canada and Australia and we noticed Irish accents everywhere at home. On one of our visits to our local supermarket, at this time, all the checkout operators were Irish.
So here we are in 2019. A modern motorway network allows us to zip around Ireland at 120 km/h. In 2000 there was one short motorway running into Dublin from the south. Any outward signs of the constraints on wages that have followed the 2009 disasters are nowhere to be seen. To us, we see no difference between living standards in Ireland and the rest of Europe. But, sadly, a lot of the old charm seems to have been lost along the way to recovery.
4 May, Airbnb, Ashford, County Wicklow
A 250 km trip today right across Ireland which would have taken a very full day just 10 years back took us less than four hours on flash motorways. Unbeknown to us, it is a long weekend in Ireland this weekend, for Labour Day, so traffic was mostly light, except for the route over the hills towards the East coast. There was a cycle race along much of our off-motorway route that kept us to a reasonable speed, but constantly on the watch for packs of cyclists who wanted to command the road. So heavy was the traffic that we had to abandon our planned visit to the monastery complex at Glendalough.
5 May, Ashford
Another beautiful day. Well it didn’t rain and there was some warm sunshine which equates to near perfect in Ireland. As a result, every man and his/her Land Rover were out on the roads, dodging the thousands of crazy cyclists of all ages peddling up impossibly steep hills on the usual, narrow, hedge-hemmed roads. It seems this Bank Holiday weekend has enticed every one of the 4.6 million citizens of the Emerald Isle to take to the road in one way or another.
We had a date with family connections, this time living ones, at Powerscourt, an old country manor now transformed into a grand garden, golf course and restaurant. On our way home we had another attempt to visit Glendalough. Even worse this time. No parking and streets crammed with near stationary traffic. Just a glimmer of sunshine brings the Irish out in strength. We did however manage to visit the Old Wicklow Gaol which had a strong Australian connection. County Wicklow sent more convicts to Australia in the early years of transportation than any other Irish County. The gaol has been preserved since it closed in 1924 as a museum/tourist attraction. It does a great job of showing what prison conditions at the time were like.
6 May, Ashford
O’Neill family history day today. Armed with information researched over some years by Mary de Jabrun and others, we headed south to County Carlow, about 50 kms from Ashford, to visit villages where the O’Neills had lived and worked. Four generations is as far back as reliable records go.
Patrick and Ellen (nee Swaine) O’Neill were married in St Bridget’s Catholic Church in the village of Clonegal, 25 September 1841. Little is known of Patrick and Ellen except that they were most likely both born in one of the villages around Clonegal, possibly Monaughrim. Paul’s great-grandfather, John, was baptised in the same church, but he was born in Shillelagh, in County Wicklow.
We were able to find the parish church in Clonegal, but were a little surprised at how modern it looked. A parishioner was able to help us out with a bit of a history of the church’s renovations, which satisfied us that what we had found was in fact the same church that Patrick and Ellen were married in, even though it had been significantly modernised over the years. We found a number of O’Neill tombstones in the church graveyard, some of which were linked to Monaughrim where our well-informed parishioner told us several O’Neill and Swaine families had lived for generations. There was also an O’Neill memorial bench at the door of the church, indicating that the family may well have been strongly supportive of the parish in more recent times.
By chance, while wandering around the village, we came across the entry to Huntington Castle, built in 1625. Never willing to walk away from a chance to visit yet another castle .... we coughed up the rather exorbitant entry fee and strolled among avenues of yew trees, planted over 500 years ago, imagining great-great-grandfather Patrick, who worked as a gardener on large estates in the area and may well have trod the same paths, tending the gardens that were in spring bloom for our visit.
Just outside the village of Shillelagh, is the Coolattin Golf Club, a spectacular course we might add, though as reformed golfers, we probably wouldn’t know. The course is on what remains of the holdings of the FitzWilliam family, an Anglo-Irish clan that once held around one third of the land in the whole of County Wicklow. It is also highly likely that Patrick and Ellen worked on this estate. There is later evidence of the couple working as gardener and domestic on other estates, so this assumption is reasonable.
After dodging the odd golf ball and with the blessing of the course pro, we were able to walk around the original manor house which has been unoccupied for several decades. The gardens that Patrick could have tended are now growing wild and doing rather well given they have not been trimmed for 30 plus years. Pigeons now fly freely around in the once gracious rooms and while the exterior looks solid, a local walking her dog, that is, a real authority, told us that the floors are rotten and the roof needs replacing.
In Shillelagh itself, little has changed since our last visit 18 years ago. Some of the shops have closed up, but the row of workers’ houses built by the FitzWilliam family in 1840 to house estate workers looks as good as the day it was built. One of the occupants was able to direct us to the Catholic Church where we thought we might find some more graves to explore. No graves, but the church was interesting. It was rather Spanish Mission in design and very un-Irish. Later research informed us that it was originally built as a Workhouse for the poor of the district and consecrated as a Catholic church in the 1860s.
Our last stop was Glenealy. John O’Neill and Margaret (Peggy) Cullen, were married here at St Joseph’s in 1882. Again the church has been internally renovated, but the external features are much as they would have been in the late 19th Century. Several family researchers have postulated that Patrick and Ellen O’Neill may have been buried in the cemetery at Glenealy, and there have been a couple of searches done in the past, to no avail. Our experience in searching for family gravestones in Scotland and here in Ireland over the past few weeks has led us to the conclusion that it is highly unlikely that our great-great grandparents were buried in the current cemetery. The earliest graves we found were from the very late 19th century around 1895. The challenge of finding the final resting place of Patrick and Ellen O’Neill remains for future generations.
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