Mapping Norwood: An Irish-American Memoir

Chapter 4: Mapping Monaghan

111 4 Mapping Monaghan Scattered over the hills, tribal And placenames, uncultivated pearls. No rock or ruin, dún or dolmen But showed memory defying cruelty Through an image-encrusted name. —John Montague, “A Lost Tradition” All students of Irish genealogy know that journeying back into the nineteenth century is not easy. In June 1922 the Irish Civil War began with the bombing by provisional Irish government forces of Dublin’s Four Courts building, a beautiful Georgian landmark on the River Liffey which had been occupied by members of the un-disbanded Irish Republican Army. These IRA men were opponents of the treaty that had ended the Irish Revolution in December 1921 but provided for the partition of the island into the Irish Free State and the Northern Ireland statelet: six Ulster counties still under British rule. An unforeseen result of this violent event was the destruction of most original Irish census schedules. Quite literally, the historical record of millions of individuals who had lived, worked, and died in Ireland was obliterated in a flash. The bits and pieces that survived the firestorm in the Public Records Office reveal that since the early nineteenth century, this record had been kept with awesome detail, which included religion, ages, occupations, marital status of children, cause of death of decedents, and literacy in English. The terrible loss to history of the burning of the Four Courts left extant only two wholesale surveys of the population of Ireland in the nineteenth century. These are the Tithe Applotment Books, tallied between 1823 and 1838, and Griffith’s Valuation, made between 1848 and 1864. Both were created as aids to the levying of taxes, or “tithes,” which were paid by the predominantly Catholic tenants to support the Church of Ireland (Protestant) ministers in their home areas. Not long ago, I found that most of the information we had about our 112 Mapping Monaghan Fanning immigrant ancestor was wrong. We thought he had come to the United States as a small child, in about 1830, from the northern Ireland city of Belfast. The revised version came from his naturalization records, which I hadn’t known existed until they popped up in the papers of a second or third cousin. These revealed that Phillip Fanning, born on August 14, 1828, in the mid-Ulster county of Monaghan, travelled to New York City from Liverpool as a young adult of twenty-two on March 14, 1851. He came as one of 413 passengers on the Queen of the West, a clipper built not long before for the immigrant trade and well enough appointed to indicate sufficient available money for a relatively comfortable passage. Just over two years later, on May 26, 1853, Phillip Fanning, listing his occupation as “laborer,” was married in Roxbury, Massachusetts, by the Reverend P. O’Beirne to Margaret of many last names—variously recorded over the years as Bohan, Bowen, Bourne, Boughan, and Brigham—also a native of Ireland. She had arrived in New York, also at the age of twenty-two but accompanied by her mother, on the Columbus on February 17, 1851. These newlyweds went against the tide of many fellow immigrants by leaving the city for the rural community of Needham, Massachusetts, where Phillip set up as a farmer. They had seven surviving children over the next fifteen years. Their first child, born in Needham in 1854, was my great-grandfather , “Walking John” Fanning. Phillip Fanning’s parents were John Fanning and Elizabeth Ann Bradford, both of whom lived their entire lives in Ireland. (Phillip was later to follow established Ulster onomastic practice in naming two of his children, John and Elizabeth, for their grandparents.) The Griffith’s Valuation of County Monaghan was done in 1860, and at that point, ten years after the Great Famine, there were only three Fannings listed in the whole county, if the usually accurate “Householders’ Index” is to be credited. All were in the civil parish of Monaghan, which radiates from Monaghan town, north central in the county. This was certainly the place to start, especially as two of the three were named John. In 1860, the first John Fanning was renting plot 33 of the “Park street Intersects” in the town of Monaghan itself. Although the house, yard, and small garden included no measureable acreage, the holding was valued at a not inconsiderable £26. The other Monaghan listing for a John Fanning was a small plot of just over five acres in the townland of...