History is never far below
the surface in Ireland and ordinary conversations will often reveal
extraordinary connections with notable people and important events of the past.
This is what happened when Wexford resident Dorothy Kenny (nee. Walsh) told me
recently about her ancestor Father John Murphy.
Dorothy and husband Seamus
are Wexford born and bred; they have raised their five children, Aoife, Doireann, Sinead, Conor and Sarah-Jo at
Monamolin near Gorey. Both played for Wexford based GAA teams, Dorothy told me:
“Both of us
played for Buffers Alley. Seamus played both hurling and football for 'The
Alley' and was Chairman for 10 years steering the club through a major building
development project. I played camogie for Senior Wexford and won an All-Ireland
in 1975.”
Like many from the ‘model
county’, both Seamus and Dorothy have family connections going back to the 1798
rebellion. Whilst this event took place over 200 years ago, it had a profound
effect on an otherwise peaceable and very rural county and every Wexford family
was affected, often in very traumatic and brutal ways. It is therefore not
surprising that there is still a strong tradition of oral history dating back
to 1798 in the county.
Dorothy told me that her
family were descended from the sister of Fr John Murphy who played a leadership
role in the 1798 rebellion. We therefore attempted a search to discover the
connections between Dorothy’s family and John Murphy. This is a slightly
unusual way of doing family history research, as one normally starts at the
current generation and slowly works backwards, discovering ancestors along the
way. However, in this situation we started at two different points in time and set
out to fill in the gaps in between.
John Murphy was a Roman
Catholic priest born at Tincurry, Wexford in 1753. He was executed by British
soldiers at Tullow, County Carlow on 2 July 1798. John was a tenant farmer’s
son from a big family, his brother Patrick was also killed in the 1798
Rebellion at Vinegar Hill. He also had a sister, Katherine, who married John
Patrick Walsh. The parents of John Murphy were Thomas Murphy and Johanna
Whitty.
John Murphy was educated in
a hedge school by a local parish priest and grew up speaking Irish and English.
He was described as a splendid horseman, excelling in athletics and handball. Following
his ordination, Fr John Murphy went away to study at a Dominican college in
southern Spain in the 1770s. Returning home five years later, Fr Murphy was
made curate in Kilcormuck, better known as Boolavogue, where he had a thatched
chapel.
Fr Murphy was initially
against rebellion and actively encouraged his parishioners to give up their
arms and sign an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. However, on 26 May
1798 he gathered with a group of local men to decide how to defend themselves
against the brutality of yeomanry patrols. That night Murphy’s group encountered
the burning down of a local family’s cabin and a confrontation took place which
ended with the killing of two of the yeomen. That night the Wexford Rebellion
started with Fr John Murphy leading it alongside other local United Irishmen
leaders.
Through the next month, Fr
John Murphy led a growing army of poor Wexford tenant farmers against the might
of the English army. Initially armed only with pikes and pitchforks, Murphy’s
ragged army of rebels defeated well-armed militia and yeoman with cavalry at
Oulart Hill, Enniscorthy, Wexford town and Gorey. From a few hundred men with
pikes, the rebel army grew quickly to a force of 10,000. But with
reinforcements from England, including German mercenaries, the rebels were
badly defeated at Arklow and at Vinegar Hill outside Enniscorthy. English
retaliation was brutal, wounded rebels were shot or worse and more than 30,000
Wexford people were killed in the five week uprising. Father Murphy and a man
named James Gallagher were captured in the Blackstairs Mountains and taken to
Tullow where they were summarily tried, found guilty of being rebels and
sentenced to death. Both were hanged in the market square in Tullow. The yeomen
cut off Fr Murphy’s head, put it on display on a spike and burned his body in a
barrel of pitch. Fr John Murphy is remembered in the Irish ballad Boolavogue.
Our search to discover
Dorothy’s line of ancestry back to Fr John Murphy began by identifying her
father Edmond Walsh’s family in the 1911 census living at house 12, Effenorge,
Tinnacross, Wexford. The family included Edmond’s parents Aidan and Mary Walsh
(Dorothy’s grandparents). The family were also recorded at Effernoge in the
1901 census. It is well known that Irish census records become more difficult
to find for the 19th century, but increasingly we find church
baptismal records for that period are available to view online. Using these
records we could identify the baptism of Dorothy’s grandfather Aidan at Ferns
in 1853 and the baptisms of his siblings. The beauty of a baptismal record is
that it also names the parents, therefore taking us back another generation.
Another useful source of
records is the Griffith’s Valuation of the 1850s which tells us that a farmer
named William Walsh was occupying 70 acres of land at Effernoge at that time.
Finally the Tithe Applotment books of 1824 show two separate tithe payers named
William Walsh residing at Effernoge. It would be fair to speculate that they
may be a father and son. The Tithe Applotment books move us much closer to the
generation of Fr John Murphy and the 1798 rebellion. William Walsh senior of
the Applotment books could feasibly be the same generation as Father Murphy or,
more likely, his mother may have been Katherine, the sister of John Murphy who
married John Patrick Walsh. Incidentally, Effernoge is close to both Boolavogue
and Tincurry and there was also a farmer named Michael Murphy recorded at
Effernoge in the Tithe books of 1824. Whilst we need more information to
confirm these connections, I can’t help feeling that we are there or
thereabouts in plotting the line between Dorothy and her 2 x great grandmother
Katherine Walsh (nee. Murphy).
Thank you Dorothy Kenny for
sharing this interesting family connection to the momentous events of 1798. If
any of our readers have further information to offer, we would be very
interested to hear from you.
