THE FAMILY A HISTORY OF MY FAMILY by MELVIN KIERNAN 2011 first edition 1986 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION THE KIERNAN SIDE Owen Kiernan (1787-71866) .......................................................................... 1 Margaret Connell McGlynn Cavanagh (1790-1867) ........................................ 2 Ellen Flood Kiernan (1804-71849) ................................................................ 4 Michael John Kiernan (1832-1872) ................................................................ 5 Bernard Melvin (1836-1910) ......................................................................... 7 Margaret Finnerty Melvin (1842-1911) .......................................................... 10 Mary Reilly Kiernan Callaghan (1843-1897) ................................................... 11 Eugene Henry Kiernan (1866-1914) ............................................................... 17 Katherine Margaret Melvin Kiernan (1867-1932) ........................................... 18 Bernard Melvin Kiernan (1901-1965) ............................................................. 21 Burns - Taylor - Holbritter Family ................................................................... 22 Callaghan Family ............................................................................................. 26 Finan Family .................................................................................................... 35 Finnerty - Cavanagh - Brady Family ................................................................. 41 Kiernan Family ................................................................................................. 49 Edward Kiernan Family ..................................................................................... 52 Daniel Kiernan Family .................................................................................... 55 Melvin Family ................................................................................................. 61 Mullen - Smith Family .................................................................................... 67 Myers - Clutterbuck Family ............................................................................. 69 Reilly Family ................................................................................................... 70 THE CAREY SIDE Thomas Carey (1856-1914) .............................................................................. 13 Mary Ann Hyland Carey (1857-1926) .............................................................. 15 Catherine Carey Kiernan (1900-1985) ............................................................. 20 Carey Family ................................................................................................... 28 Patrick Carey Family ....................................................................................... 30 Curry Family ................................................................................................... 32 Hunt Family ................................................................................................... 45 McLaughlin Family ........................................................................................ 58 APPENDIX Irish Equivalents of Family Names Family Name Origins in Ireland Register of Marriages, Births, and Deaths In ainm an Athar agus an Mhic agus an Spioraid Naoimh. Go dtuga Dia saol sona siochanta doibh abhus agus gloir na bhflaitheas doibh thall. Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon them. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. INTRODUCTION A friend, traveling companion and distant cousin Deirdre McKiernan once told me that Ireland is like a disease. There is no cure. Once you catch it, you are infected for life. I can easily recall the occasion when I became Irish. In the early 1970s my cousin Jay sent me a pirated tape of Derek Bell's recording of Irish harp music, Carolans Receipt. I immediately contracted the disease, and it has been with me ever since. Of course my ancestry is completely Irish on both sides, but there was little notice of this in my early life. That remote ancestors had come from somewhere in Ireland was a fact of history, but little more, and with few details. My father was the only one with any Irish interest. He had some old Victrola records by John McCormack, which were later augmented by Bing Crosby and Dennis Day. But most of this is Tin Pan Alley American. Music on a metal-strung harp is different and contagious. The disease quickly spread to a subscription to Ireland of the Welcomes, to a pile of LPs, later replaced by CDs, of the early Chieftains and Clancy Brothers, and to a complete collection of Irish postage stamps. It wasn't until 1995 that I had the opportunity to visit Ireland, the first of ten pilgrimages home. During those visits I have been to all 32 counties, traveled from Mizen Head to Malin Head and almost everywhere in between. There are some memories that cannot be captured on film - a day at a valley in Connemara when, as William Butler Yeats said, I heard high up in the air / a piper piping away - an early morning walk in Killarney, just a block away from the tourist center of town, where I was met with the smell of turf fires from houses as breakfast was being prepared - a busker on Grafton Street playing an Irish harp outside Bewley's where I was having tea and a scone - the call of a skylark from heaven or near it circling over an excavated farm community at the Ceide Fields dating back almost to the Ice Age, pouring [his] full heart / in profuse strains of unpremeditated art. I have visited the three towns known to have been homes of my ancestors, the Kiernans of Granard, Co Longford, the Melvins of Easkey, Co Sligo, and my mother's parents from Knock, Co Mayo. Knock unfortunately has become a kitschy tourist-trap surrounding a gaudy religious shrine. The other two sites have remained small villages, but with successive visits showing the slow decline of rural Ireland. So if you want to share my disease, visit Ireland soon, before it becomes completely, homogeneously Europeanized if not Americanized, before, again quoting Yeats, Romantic Ireland's dead and gone. It is difficult for us today to imaging the feelings of our immigrant ancestors as they faced the Atlantic crossing. In an age before five-hour flights, direct-dial telephone connections and e-mail, the prospect of a ten-week sail (and literally sail, before steamships were common), the prospect of never again seeing or hearing from family left behind (Could they read or write?), of not knowing whether they were alive or dead, is far from our experience. The stories of an American wake, the ceili on the night preceding the departure of some family member to America, perhaps never to be heard from again, are common in the folklore. Some of our own ancestors left family behind, but others were the last survivors of a family wracked by the Great Hunger, An Gorta Mor. But nevertheless they entered this brave new world and, for the most part, prospered. We are never truly parted from the old, never completely enclosed in the new. Deirdre's sister Ethne McKiernan captured this feeling in a poem as she stood on the Clare hillside where her mother was born, from which she left for America. Mama Mor, I stand here now where you once stood, the unchanged land beneath my feet, certain that my bones were formed from that same air that made your bones first stir. But the old heritage breeds a different pain in me: a stranger to both countries, I cannot make my roots take hold; can only stand and hear the sea return the poems that you'd willed it as a child, while the wind raises ghosts behind me. I do not have the advantage of her first-hand knowledge of the immigrant generation. For memories beyond the new friends I have met on visits to Ireland, I have CDs of genuine, spontaneous seisiuin, bricks of turf to burn when I need to enhance the mood, stones gathered from beaches, from the Burren, from Giants Causeway, as well as from the old home towns, all these to rely on. But more importantly there are bits of information, data that, once lost, cannot be restored. Luckily some fifty years ago I had gathered a few scraps of information about ancestors, names of grandparents and great-grandparents, names of dimly-remembered cousins. I had saved but put aside those notes until the 1980s when I began genealogical research in earnest. Luckily, I say, because that earlier information was, and in some cases still is, the only basis from which the later searches could begin and because the persons who supplied that early information were by then dead. But is it all luck? After coming across several pieces of information that ordinarily would not have been recorded or preserved, I am more firmly convinced than ever that my sainted ancestors want to be better known to their descendants still living. Why, for example, was the county of origin in Ireland recorded for his mother on my grandfather's marriage license, when that bit of information wasn't asked for? So I like to think that from time to time those ancestors give gentle nudges. Why don't you look again at .... Think of another way to misspell the name .... They may be gone, but they are still with us. Is this part of the disease? Who's to say? Sometimes indeed the dead are better sources of information than are the living. When after a long search I found the date and place of burial of my great-grandfather Michael Kiernan, I learned that the