My great grandmother Mary Shannon came to Australia in 1863 from County Cork as part of the great diaspora that left Ireland to escape the poverty that followed the potato famine of the previous decade. The greatest tragedy of the potato blight is that the disastrous consequences were avoidable. When landlords realised that tenant farmers would not be able to pay their rent due to the crop failure, rather than assist the farm tenants they chose to ship their grain overseas to recoup the cost of lost rent. The British government compounded the matter by refusing to recognise the gravity of the situation. Indeed British Prime Minister, Robert Peel, downplayed the magnitude with the dismissive reference to "the Irish tendency to exaggerate".
Mary Shannon 1885
Mary emigrated when she was 17 with her elder sister Ellen, who was 20, from Liverpool. I know this by virtue of a family history compiled by a cousin of Mum's (Mary Shannon McCracken), Harley White, and some 'on the ground' research by another cousin, John Greenwood, who visited Ireland back in the '70s. The hand typed history and hand drawn family tree, accompanied by a few grainy photos, has been a most useful reference for my research. And despite some hours at the commuter and with Ancestry.com on line I hadn't been able to advance my knowledge much.
Many Irsih immigrants left for Australia from England. The first screw driven, metal hulled steamship, the Great Britain, which we saw in Bristol, made thirty two voyages to Melbourne and Sydney.
Things must have been miserable in Ireland for them to take this desperate step, and they probably were, as only a few years before in 1846 and 47 the country had been ravished by the Great Famine which was particularly harsh in Southwest Cork, where hundreds of thousands died from starvation or the accompanying diseases. They must have felt the opportunities in Australia were far greater, and they followed literally millions of other Irish who emigrated in the years of the famine, and those following, to the Americas and to the Antipodes.
When Mary emigrated her father, Richard, anxious about his daughters' welfare in the colonies, wrote to an acquaintance from the same part of Cork, Jonhn Sweetnam, asking him to look out for her. Within 18 months, despite a 14 year age difference, they had married, eventually settling down on a farm in Western Victoria, near Rupanyup. Ancestry.com has good records from Australia, e.g. a copy of Mary and John's marriage certificate, but there are few records extant from Ireland at the time. The Irish census records before 1900 were destroyed in a fire in the records office, and things like births, deaths and marriages were recorded in the parish records. Finding anything more about either family back in Ireland is therefore difficult. One of the resources I had was the family tree from Harley's biography, see below.
One useful resource is the Skibbereen Heritage Centre. In addition to a chilling account of the effects of the Great Famine in Skibbereen and the surrounding countryside, vividly presented at the centre, their website has some useful references. For example, one of the photos in Harley's biography was of the ruins of the Aughadown Church. Both, John and Mary, being the decendants of English migrants to Ireland were members of the Church of Ireland (the local branch of the Church of England). And the Aughadown church on the banks of the river Ilen in Aughadown was probably their local church. The centre has a survey of the graves at this site. Jo and I found the church, down a typically narrow Irish local road, and surveyed the graveyard. There are many stones with the names from our family history, Shannon, Sweetnam, Trinder and Swanton. But many are barely readable and I couldn't match any to the likely dates of our family members.
Ruins of the Church of Ireland church at Aughadown
Records from the parishes of the Church of Ireland do stil exist but none from Aughadown have survived. Another resource that has, however, are the tithe records. Members of the church paid a tithe to maintain the church and also fund the local school. I learned this from Margaret a genealogist at the Skibbereen centre whom I was lucky enough to have some time with during our visit. The tithe was paid according to the amount of land each member of the church owned, or more commonly rented from the local landowner. So the owners or tenants of each plot in each parish are recorded. A brief search through these records reveals many of the names that appear in our family history but I will need to spend some more time researching these for possible antecedents.
Harley's history does identify the farm on Roaring Water Bay where Mary grew up, Ardnagroghery, a demesne of the nearby farm of Whitehall. The building regions although now appears to be used as a shed on the farm, which now has a new home built on it.
The Shannon farm at Ardnagroghery, Aughadown, County Cork
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