Ballykilcline Rising: From Famine Ireland to Immigrant America

Afterword

169 Afterword { Just as Ballykilcline Rising headed to press, the independent Vermont researcher William Powers and the author found new data about some of the Colligans in Rutland, whose story is told in a family letter in Chapter 3, which identified them certainly as Ballykilcline evictees. The family is that of Patrick and Annie Colligan and their six children. While Patrick and sons Bernard and William do not appear in the known Vermont record , Annie Reynolds Colligan, her daughter, Eliza, and son, Michael, as has been noted, lived in Rutland’s Poor Home in 1850. Daughters Mary and Anne worked in local homes then, the census showed. They were “hidden” evictees in Rutland, though, because only three of eight family members (all with common first names) were together in one place; the head-of-household, Patrick, was missing; information about them—for example , in the Poor Home list—was minimal; and two daughters married early and became camouflaged under their marriage names. In 1851, daughter Mary Colligan married Samuel Butler, the man engaged in the lawsuits with John Hanley a decade later that are described in Chapter 3. The Butlers eventually had four children, and by the mid-1860s they lived in nearby Pittsford. Their granddaughter was Ruth Sigourney Butler, who wrote the family letters in the 1960s. Daughter Anne married William Capron by about 1855, and the couple joined his mother and brother on the Capron farm in Rutland. By 1868, they had two sons and two daughters. In 1881, their farm was 240 acres in size. Anne Colligan Capron was the only member of her family whose information available at the time of the study—her name and age and the names of her parents—warranted counting her as a Ballykilcline evictee. Eliza Colligan never married. The death records of the three sisters name their parents as Patrick and Anne Reynolds Colligan; Anne’s also states that she was born in “Killglass” in County Roscommon. The son Michael seemed to drop out of sight after 1850. Significantly, the new information adds more than a dozen Ballykilcline evictees (first and second generation) to the number found in and around Rutland and places on the record a family that knew some of its 170 Afterword own story and passed it on, though the passage of time, the fickleness of memory, and losses due to aging may have clouded or altered some details—the name of the man whose family arrived in Rutland in 1847 was Patrick, not Bernard. Ruth Butler apparently mixed up some people in the family story. The story as she remembered it, however, also holds kernels of truth, though she likely did not know about the Ballykilcline rent strike, evictions, and Crown-paid passages to America. Ruth Butler was eleven years old when her grandmother died in 1913. Her letters about her family may be the only known written documents in which a descendant describes the lives of Ballykilcline residents in Ireland from what may be personal knowledge learned directly from an evictee. The Ballykilcline story is a tapestry of many threads still in the weaving. ...