Sunday, February 27, 2011

Connections to Meagher and Murtha on the NBC Show

A week ago Friday my Aunt called in the evening from LaFayette Manor to tell my Mom that she was watching a show about Rosie O'Donnell, and that the name of Rosie's mother or grandmother (my Mom wasn't clear on this) was Murtha. My Aunt did not know which show or station she was watching, so my Mom began flipping through the cable channels. I googled, and eventually discovered that my Aunt was watching an episode from the second season of the NBC show Who Do You Think You Are. In Tucson the show would begin a half hour after the call. I never watched any episodes from the first season, imagining them to be one long commercial for ancestrydotcom. On the contrary, I enjoyed the Rosie O'Donnell episode. It emphasized travel to the original locations, even to the point of literally fingering the original records. Although my Aunt was interested in the Murtha connection, I was more excited about the last 15 minutes or so of the program, specifically that latter segment's connection to my ancestor Ellen Powers (mother-in-law of Thomas Meagher--see the previous post, Ellen Powers).

First, the Murtha connection: My cousin Jim Naureckas has information on his Jim's Genealogy Pages about our Murtha ancestors. They were from County Cavan, close to the northern border of Co. Meath. Our great-grandfather was not a Famine Immigrant; he left Ireland about 35 years after the Famine. My understanding from the show is that Rosie's ancestors were from the northern part of Co. Kildare, close to the southern border of Co. Meath. The Murtha/Murtagh surname is centered on Co. Meath. (You can explore the frequency of the Murtha/Murtagh surname in Ireland by doing a search at the Irish Family History Foundation site. Registration is not required to obtain merely a summary of the total number of relevant records of various types for each county.) So we are interested in the connection between Murtha families on the northern and on the southern fringes of Co. Meath. My guess is that the common ancestor would go back considerably more than 200 years, although we may never know for sure.

Rosie O'Donnell was fortunate to find a Famine-era record from her ancestors' Poor Law Union (PLU) showing that her ancestors had been approved for emigration. The expert on the show explained that this meant that her ancestors would have needed to stay in the local workhouse for a certain period. Thre were well over 100 Poor Law Unions established in Ireland, each containing a workhouse. Intially the PLU aid system was shunned by the poor. But when the Famine hit, the system was overwhelmed.1 Continuing with the show: Rosie went on to visit what is considered to be the best surviving workhouse complex in Ireland, similar to the one where her ancestors would have stayed. She visited the Birr Workhouse (aka Parsonstown, an earlier name for Birr), which happens to be the workhouse where the Powers family (see the previous Ellen Powers post) would have gone. Their parish, Kilcormac, is only about 8 miles northeast of Birr. Four-year-old Ellen Powers could easily have spent the winter of 1846-1847 in that very workhouse. More likely, the Powers family would have fended for themselves that winter, before being evicted by their landlord in the summer of 1847, then making their way south to Cobh. Still, even with that scenario, Ellen may have known less fortunate orphaned friends who spent their winters in that attic. Viewing the reaction of Rosie O'Donnell to the workhouse setting is especially moving, realizing that the Powers family must have at least passed by that very complex, also imagining the conditions inside.

1. Peter Gray, The Irish Famine, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1995, 191 pp., ISBN 0-500-30057-7

Ellen Powers

While visiting St. Pius cemetery in Mt. Pleasant I had always heard of Ellen, one of my great-great-grandmothers. Ellen's daughter was Annie, my great-grandmother. In the spring of 1903, Annie lost her first husband after an accident in the coal mine. Thomas Meagher was buried at the head of town (the city cemetery), with the specific location now forgotten. The Irish have a way of avoiding tragic memories. Two years after losing Thomas, the widow Annie Meagher lost her mother. By then (1905) a new Catholic cemetery had been established in Mt. Pleasant. Ellen was an early arrival at the new cemetery, the first to be buried in a block of eight gravesites. Annie, on the other hand, was later buried with her second husband in an opposite corner of the cemetery. As a result, the eight gravesites purchased by the widow Meagher are all now devoted to surnames other than Meagher. The eight gravesites skip Annie's generation; they represent the generation before and the three generations after.

Just beyond the entrance to St. Pius cemetery, the drive splits into a one-way loop. Ellen's gravesite is close to a curve in the driveway. Visitors often found her site a convenient spot to pull completely off the road, allowing other cars to pass effortlessly. Over the years my Dad concocted a variety of flags to draw attention to the corner of Ellen's gravesite, all of which proved no match for a metal bumper. We concluded that he would not rest in peace until Ellen had her own stone marker. That meant finding out more about Ellen.

A little research quickly revealed that Ellen's maiden name was Powers, that she belonged to a large family that had moved from New York to Frostburg MD in the 1850's, and that she and her entire family were Famine Immigrants, arriving in New York on 13 Sep 1847 aboard the Issac-Walton. By chance, a death record in Frostburg indicated that one of Ellen's brothers was a native of Kings County. That led to a request for information from Irish Midlands Ancestry. (The current, presumably much faster way to do this starts with an online search at the Irish Family History Foundation.) The report from Irish Midlands Ancestry revealed that Ellen and all of her siblings were baptized in the parish of Kilcormac, in the western part of County Offaly (formerly Kings County). Ellen was only 5 years old when her family left Ireland. Her oldest sister, Catherine, was 16 and her youngest sister, Anne, was only 1 year old. So, thanks to the baptismal records, we know that the Powers family was in or around Kilcormac from 1831 into 1846. Then we have the ship manifest placing them in New York in 1847. That leaves only a little over one year of uncertainty, extending from July 1846 (when Anne was baptized) to September 1847. It would have been a hectic and difficult year. The family would have made the decision to leave Ireland (or else have had it made for them by their landlord or some agency). They would have needed to gather the resources to pay for their trip (or the landlord or some other agency did that for them). They would have had to make their way over land to a port city (probably Cork). Records for the Famine years, even when they have managed to survive, can be especially cryptic. So we may never know the details of Ellen's last year in Ireland. But for one possible scenario, see the next post in this blog.