Ripley Roots Stories / June 1995

	Ripley Roots

June, 1995
by theresa m. ripley

The Sullivan Crest

What follows was initially written to Kathleen Sullivan Tedrick and her sisters on June 19 in Limerick, Ireland, on our trusty laptop and then revised after our return from Ireland.

Greetings from O'Sullivan land!

What a last couple of days I have had. I have thought of you all often and Jack can tell you I have talked of you more. I will write you a longer version when I return but I wanted to give you a flavor on the day when I actually met some O'Sullivans from the old country, and perhaps, even the old homestead.

Our trek started yesterday when I had the materials in hand generated by the family research center in Limerick. I knew I wanted to find five places. They were:

o Mahoonagh, the parish village where Patrick Sullivan and Honora Creedon were married February 14, 1857
o Killeedy, the parish village where Patrick and Honora Sullivan baptized three children in 1857, 1860, and 1862
o Cloonsherick, the townland area where Honora Creedon Sullivan was born on April 27, 1833
o Monagay, the parish village where Patrick Sullivan was baptized on October 29, 1834
o Glenshaska, the townland area where Patrick Sullivan (and his brother Jerry) were born according to the baptismal records from Monagay

In my scenario I figured Patrick Sullivan was born in Glenshaska, although I did not understand the definition of a townland, and went to the church in Monagay. He met Honora Creedon (how I don't know) who was born in Cloonsherick, another townland, and she went to church in Mahoonagh where they married. As a couple, they moved to Killeedy before coming to America. I knew these places were all very small and were all within 15 miles of one another.

With the most detailed map we could find of Limerick County, we tried first to find Mahoonagh where Patrick Sullivan and Honora Creedon were married. We later learned Mahoonagh is also called Castlemahon, which made finding a very small place even more confusing. Mahoonagh is about 40 minutes south of Limerick. After some faulty starts on several small roads, we stopped at a nice looking house on a Sunday afternoon and a Mrs. O'Connell had us right in. She deferred to her husband, a thing I would say often happens. Within a half an hour we had explicit instructions for all of our five stops and been urged several times by Mr. O'Connell to stay for tea and Irish whiskey, and not particularly in that order. We countered with the importance of our task and he told us we were in Ireland now, "what doesn't get done today, will get done tomorrow." He shared tons of opinions about Ireland and how Americans expected to come over and find them in cottages with a pig in the corner. He also shared a number of opinions about current Irish life, such as schools declining as soon as corporal punishment went out the door. He has very well behaved sons, though, and one wonders how he has done it. These teenage sons not only turned off the TV (which was on a sports event), but went out of the room. Then one came back with pen and paper his father might need to give us instructions without being told to do so. I was impressed.

As Mr. O'Connell was sharing opinions with us nonstop, his wife was out in another room looking up past Mahoonagh parish records and came across the name of Creedon several times and brought that in for us to view. We left feeling we had not only directions but a sense of the current community where Honora Creedon Sullivan had been raised. I also feel we could have stayed not only through tea, but supper as well.

Mr. O'Connell told us the actual church building where Honora and Patrick were married no longer existed but described where the old ground of the church was. We found that place and it is the location of the current school. A church graveyard of former pastors still existed on the school grounds. About a 1/4 mile down the road was the new church which was built much later. Mahoonagh consisted of a small store and a few other buildings. It was about double the size of the mighty town of Ocoya!

The next trek was to find the parish where our Patrick and Honora Sullivan baptized the three children born in Ireland before coming to America in 1863. As was the custom of the day, they married in the parish of the bride (Mahoonagh), but moved to the groom's parish, called Killeedy. Killeedy is about five miles from Mahoonagh. Again we found a new church built in 1942 with the burials of a number of past pastors in the front yard. About 200 yards from the church was a burial ground which was on the same site as a very old Abbey. The burial grounds were covered with O'Sullivans stones and I took a picture of the old, crumbling, grass-and moss-covered Abbey with a stark, black O'Sullivan gravemarker in front. I can only speculate what Honora and Patrick did in Killeedy. We might assume many O'Sullivans lived in the area and Patrick found his way from his birth parish of Monagay and townland of Glenshaska to Killeedy before setting off for America.

As the first day of searching for the O'Sullivans ended, I felt quite successful in finding their marriage parish and the parish they lived in for three years after their marriage and before coming to America. We made an aborted attempt to find Cloonsherick, but at the time we did not understand townlands were not signposted. A Creedon still resides in Cloonsherick today and Mr. O'Connell had given us instructions how to find him.

On June 19 we set out with the intention of going back yet one more generation and finding the townland and parish where Patrick Sullivan was born and where his parents Jerry O'Sullivan and Mary Calvert lived. First we tried to find the parish where Patrick and his brother Jerry were baptized in the 1830's. Its name is Monagay. It is only five miles from Mahoonagh and Killeedy, but five miles would have been a long way in that day and over this sometimes hilly terrain. We stopped in the nearby market town of Newcastle West (population approximately 20,000) to get instructions. In the Sullivans day this was the nearest "large" town. A local bank teller told us she currently lived in Monagay parish. She was not born there, she stated, but "had married into the place." I thought that an interesting phrase, like the land became a part of you as soon as you married into it.
We ventured the three or so miles to Monagay from Newcastle West. Monagay consisted of a school, the church, a couple of buildings, and the graveyard. It was a Monday. As we approached the treelined gravel road up to the church, there were four cars there. It was about 9:30 and Jack and I wondered who might be there and then speculated it was a mass. We were right. We went into the back of the church and could hear the booming voice of the priest as he said mass to five women and one elderly man in attendance. Jack and I wound our way up the small choir loft stairs and listened from the loft as he ended the gospel and led his small flock through the rest of the mass. The priest exited and then those remaining started the rosary. We wandered outside in the mist and discovered this church was built in 1842. Minutes later the priest was tooling down the gravel road. We stopped him and he said come back later in the day to his house to view the baptismal records. Smiling from ear to ear I said yes. We then went back into the church and looked more carefully. In one corner we noted a marker for a former priest named John Donovan who in all likelihood would have been the priest who baptized Patrick Sullivan and his brother Jerry back in the 1830's.

We went back to Newcastle West and to the local library and gathered a few materials about each of the parish villages we had visited. We again tried to get instructions to the townland, Glenshaska, where the O'Sullivans had lived in the 1830s. We learned the day before from Mr. O'Connell that there was still an O'Sullivan living on the land today. The townland area was known through the parish records of the baptism for Patrick recorded at Monagay parish in 1834. We knew, through these records, the townland area was called Glenshaska and it was the baptismal records that placed the O'Sullivans on the land. Townlands, I learned the next day from the family researcher in Limerick, are basic rural subdivisions and vary in size. Some contain one or two farms, others more. Glenshaska, I gather, contained a number of farms. The problem was....where was Glenshaska since it was not indicated on any map. Local residents in Newcastle West tried to give us instructions of going out of town 7 miles and then stopping at the Devon Inn for lunch and asking further instructions. That sounded like a plan.

We had lunch and got instructions from a young woman in her 20's. She told me to go "over the bad bridge and turn left." She made it quite clear that if we went to the top of the hill we had gone the wrong way. I asked how I would know it was Glenshaska. She said there was no sign, shrugged her shoulders, and said, "you just knew." It was only suppose to be three miles or so from the Devon Inn but the roads were getting smaller and smaller and the rain was beginning to come down steady.

After going up to the top of the hill, we knew we had gone the wrong way. We backtracked and started again. The rain was coming down more steady. On this very secondary, narrow road, I spied a very old woman coming out her farm house door. We stopped and I went up to the door and asked how to find the O'Sullivan farm. She seemed very confused and unsure of her ability to give instructions. Finally, she gained some confidence, held my hand, and said, "take the next gap and it is the first house on the left." Back into the car and a few hundred more yards and we took the "first gap" to the left and found a very small old house and old outer buildings. There were two dogs in a pen and I told Jack perhaps he should come up to the door with me. The keys were in the door lock and I knocked. A man dressed in work clothes and high rubber boats came to the door. I asked if he was Mr. O'Sullivan and he said "just Con."

Con is a bachelor, probably in his late 50's. He reminds me of one of the Wooding bachelors if you remember them living near us. He was shy, unsure of his speaking, and later his writing when I asked for his address. But as we tried to decipher the story it was clear his parents and grandparents and probably great grandparents had lived on this place. His mother had died within the year. When I asked to see a picture of his dad, he got me the mass card from his funeral and said it was the only picture he had of him. We took a picture of the oldest piece of furniture which he said had always been in the house. It was very hard to understand his speech but Jack caught more of it. As Jack understood it, he had 60+ acres, but he sold off all but 17 acres of it just two weeks ago. He would remain living in the house. He sold the property to a man who has become a "millionaire" out of free material. We think he meant garbage or junk. As Con was speaking about this, the "junk man" materialized from the kitchen and then left. Perhaps he was trying to get the last 17 acres, I don't know. As it was clear I was interested in family stories, Con said a first cousin lived up the road and could say more. He tried to tell us his cousin was a veterinarian but could not think of the English word for veterinarian and said something like, "he heals animals." Perhaps he could easily thought of the Gaelic word.

One story that struck me was Con saying his father was from a family of 14. Twelve had emigrated to the U.S. and the other one had died. That is why Con's father had the land. Con has two siblings but neither are attached to the land. We left Con and I was ready to stop the hunt feeling quite successful in finding an O'Sullivan in Glenshaska. Jack said, "Let's try to find the vet." Off we went down the increasingly narrow road. We again lost our way and a old man was out in the road trying to see what we were doing. It was clear we were not local. This older gentlemen was nearly impossible to understand and he was going back and forth between English and Gaelic. When I asked specifically how to find John O'Sullivan he clearly said, "go down to the bottom of the hill, turn right, and it is the VERY nice house on your right." The VERY was really emphasized.

We got to John's place and it WAS very nice. It is part way up the hill with the views of green rolling pastures divided by green hedges. Quite idyllic. He, his wife, and three children were in the middle of lunch when we called. They quickly ate their meal and then got out all family records and we had a delightful hour plus with them. John O'Sullivan had about a 12 inch pile of material regarding his family. He interspersed genealogy information with bits of homespun philosophy he got out of his very fat wallet. Evidently, whenever he finds something inspiring, he clips it and puts it in this wallet. For us, he was trying to find something written when his father had died over two decades ago. The papers were very worn and smooth in his wallet, but he successfully found the right piece and proudly read it to us. We talked of family history and Irish history. When we discussed the 1846 famine, John told us potato blight reports are still aired on the radio. He gave us a clear description of the spore-born disease that comes in on the ocean winds and settles on the crops and how they deal with it today.

As we were sharing stories, John's wife, Joan, and her daughter were making sandwiches, sweet tray, and tea and brought it in the drawing room and served. It is possible we come from the same O'Sullivan families. Ironically, they had one gap in their records which indicated a relative of theirs was Jerry O'Sullivan. It is probably, or at least quite likely, Patrick's father, or his first cousin. This is further verified by the great similarity in Christian names between our two families. Their Christian names again and again were Jerry, Con, Daniel, John...the same names Patrick used for his male children. I had a little of feeling of Alex Haley in Roots as we looked at these names together and realized the similarities and possibly the missing Jerry was the link for both of us. As we left John described perplexity that we had dropped the O' from Sullivan. I tried to describe that's just what happened in the new land, but even I was sorry we dropped the O' by the end of the visit.

Two days later, after seeing a bit more of Ireland, we had a sunny day. I told Jack we owned it to the O'Sullivans to see the land on a "good" day so we once again drove out to Glenshaska. The views were spectacular and we took several pictures of Patrick O'Sullivan's great granddaughter on his birth land.