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nine Irish Roots James and Gus O’Shaughnessy andtheirsiblingswerethegrandchildren of John Shaughnessy and Ann Gallagher, who lived and died in Ireland. James Shaughnessy, who crossed first the Atlantic and then half a continentandsettledinMissouri,hadbeenborntoJohnandAnnbetween 1838and1842.1 HisfamilyhadatsomepointdispensedwiththeGaelicprefix “O” (meaning “of”) before its name, but by the beginning of the twentieth century he and his children had restored it. DuringaperiodofgreatfamineinIrelandinthemid-nineteenthcentury, large numbers of Irish people immigrated to America, especially from the impoverished and overpopulated west of Ireland. James Shaughnessy was among them.2 According to a brief obituary of him published in a local Missouri newspaper in 1918, his parents had died before he left Ireland.3 If so, he was certainly not the only young Irish boy who crossed the ocean as an orphan during those terrible years. His son James, the journalist and advertising executive, returned to the landofhisancestorsatleastthreetimes,touringpartofitonfootandgiving advicetoIrishadvertisingagents.Anotherofhissons,Thomas,copiedparts of the Book of Kells when he came to Dublin. Newhall and Kiltartan, County Galway James Shaughnessy and his brothers, who also immigrated to the United States, named their new homestead in Missouri “Newhall,” thus recalling a very small rural area (or “townland”) in the Irish barony of Kiltartan, CountyGalwaythatwasalsoknownasNewhall.Therehadbeenfivehouses in Newhall in Ireland in 1841, with a total of twenty-five people living in them. By 1861, after years of famine, the remaining thirteen inhabitants occupied only three dwellings.4 This partofGalway,includingKiltartanandCoole,hadlongbeenhome 162 An Irish-American Odyssey to part of the extended O’Shaughnessy clan. Family members were the hereditarycustodiansofSt .Colman’sgirdleandcrozier,whichweremedieval religious relics. Thus it is probably no coincidence that James O’Shaughnessy , son of the emigrant James, christened his own son Colman. As it happens, an elderly man named Colman Shaughnessy today lives less than a mile from the old Shaughnessy homestead in Newhall, County Galway. Hebelievesthathisgreat-great-grandfatherandthefatherofJamesShaughnessy who immigrated to Missouri “came out of the same house” and were brothers or near cousins, although no records exist to confirm this.5 With or without the prefix, people in this part of Galway pronounce the name “shock-nessy” and not “shaun-essy” as some do elsewhere. In the course of centuries of conflict between Catholic Ireland and Protestant England, ownership of the lands of the O’Shaughnessy lordship had been transferred to persons who were Protestant and loyal to the king in London. Catholics who lost their lands clung to their religion. There was at Newhallalargedryholeaboutfifteenmeterslongandeightmeterswidethat Newhall, County Galway, today and the road taken by James Shaughnessy when emigrating. Irish Roots 163 becameknowninGaelicas“PollanAifrinn”(“TheMassHole”),anamethat suggeststhatpriestsdiscreetlycelebratedmassforlocalpeoplethereduring thepenalpersecutionofCatholicsinIreland.6 Religionwasverymuchpartof one’spersonalidentityinthearea,andthethreebrothersfromNewhallwho settled in Missouri brought with them their loyalty to the Catholic Church. BythenineteenthcenturymanyoftheO’ShaughnessysorShaughnessys of Kiltartan and elsewhere had become simply tenants of their former lands. In 1803 one Richard Staunton was landlord of Newhall. Living in a thatched house, he was in 1820 visited by members of the secret agrarian society known as “Ribbonmen” who relieved him of two long guns and a case of pistols but did not harm him. By 1826 these and other lands at Gort were owned by the Gregory family and remained in its possession into the twentieth century. The Gregorys’ home was at Coole Park near Kiltartan crossroads, about three miles by road from Newhall and Ballylee.7 One “John Shaughnessy” is registered as living in Coole Village in the TitheApplotmentBooksof1826.Amanofthatnamealsogaveinformation about Newhall to John O’Donovan when the latter compiled his greatly admired Ordnance Survey Name Books in the 1830s. It is not known if these references to John Shaughnessy were to one and the same person, or if either or both are to the husband of Ann Gallagher and father of that James Shaughnessy who settled in Missouri. The paucity of records for the period and the turmoil of the times make it difficult to trace reliably the ancestry of particular families. Fahy has described the impact of the Great Famine on Gort, and that impact was considerable.8 Thackery, Robert Gregory, and Famine In 1842, the English novelist William Makepeace Thackery visited Ireland. Already unhappy due to personal circumstances that included a difficult relationship with his Irish mother-in-law, he was not cheered by encountering widespread evidence of starvation throughout the south and west of Ireland. As he traveled up to Gort and on by Kiltartan toward Galway City he was cast down. He wrote, Then we passed the plantations of Lord Gort’s Castle of Loughcooter, and presently came to the town which bears his name, or vice versa. It...

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