The place
Cullentry is a townland of about 918 acres in the civil parish of Rathmolyon, in the flat country of south-west Meath between the River Boyne and its tributary the Blackwater, some thirty miles west of Dublin. The Weily farm, Heghlane, was 183 Irish acres of it, nearly 300 in the measure we use and the largest farm in the townland. Rathmolyon village, with the parish church where the house was christened and buried, lay to the east; the chapel our branch used was at Longwood, the village on the Blackwater to the west; the market and assize town was Trim, on the Boyne to the north.
The name Cullentry is Irish, An Chuileanntraigh, “the place of holly”. It appears in records from 1540 (Colyntragh), and the estate map's “Big Cullentry” echoes a deed of 1758 that already spoke of “Little” and “Bigg Cullentragh”.
The Parliamentary Gazetteer of the 1840s describes the parish of Rathmolyon as 9,782 acres whose surface “is low and flat; forms part of the great plain of Leinster; consists, in general, of light, gravelly land”. The barony around it was “low, flat, limestone land” with “at least 1,000 acres of exhausted bog”. In 1831 the parish had 2,674 people; in 1841, 2,953. The village of Rathmolyon had 33 houses and three fairs a year, and “Rathmolion House is the residence of R. Fowler, Esq.”, the landlord.
Longwood, where our branch went to Mass, was a village of 83 houses and 425 people in 1831, “situated on the river Blackwater” near the great western road from Dublin, with four fairs a year, a constabulary station and petty sessions every other Tuesday. The Royal Canal passed three-quarters of a mile from it. Trim, the county town, had about 3,300 people, a Saturday market, the assizes, the county gaol and a new workhouse.
Placenames Database of Ireland, Cullentry; Townlands.ie, Rathmolyon civil parish; Parliamentary Gazetteer of Ireland (1846), vols 2–3; Samuel Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837), Rathmolion, Longwood, Trim.
This is the heart of the old English Pale, the district around Dublin that had been settled from England since the Normans came in the 1100s and farmed by big tenants for absentee lords ever since. It is not the stony west of the famine photographs. It is good grazing and tillage land, and a family holding 183 acres of it was, by the standards of rural Ireland, well off.
The landlords: Bramhall, the Grahams, the Earls of Moira, then the Fowlers
The land had a long line of owners before our family's time on it: the FitzGeralds, Earls of Kildare, until the Crown took it in 1544; then the Breretons; the Aylmers from 1580; and from the 1630s to 1667 John Bramhall, a bishop from Pontefract in Yorkshire. From Bramhall's heirs it passed to the Grahams and then, by marriage, to the Rawdons, whose seat was at Moira in County Down. It was Rawdon land when John Weily was buried at Cullentry in 1749 and when Robert Weily's name was written on the estate map. By the time William Weily junior took his lease in 1835 it belonged to the Fowlers: Robert Fowler, Bishop of Ossory, signed the lease, his father the Archbishop of Dublin having bought the estate in 1795, and his son Robert Fowler of Rathmolyon House and later Rahinston was the landlord in Griffith's Valuation of 1854.
The Rawdons came to Rathmolyon by marriage in the 1600s. A lease of 1699 from “Dame Helena Rawdon, widow” let a farm on the estate for 31 years at £34 a year plus “4 fatt hens and two fatt turkeys every Christmas”. Her son John Rawdon (1720–1793) became Earl of Moira in 1762 and inherited part of the Rathmolyon estate; he was “the major landlord in Rathmolyon”. In 1795 his son Francis, the second Earl (later Marquess of Hastings and Governor-General of India), sold the Moyfenrath lands, “including principally the Rathmolyon lands”, to Robert Fowler for £62,000. In 1798 the new owner had the whole property surveyed: 4,416 acres. By 1812 it was yielding £4,000 a year in rent.
Robert Fowler the elder (1725–1801), an Englishman from Lincolnshire, was Bishop of Killaloe from 1771 and Archbishop of Dublin from 1779. His son Robert (1766–1841) was Bishop of Ossory from 1813 until his death on 31 December 1841; it is his name on the 1835 Cullentry lease. The Gazetteer says the village of Rathmolyon “has been much improved by its proprietor, the Bishop of Ossory”. His son, another Robert (born 1797), lived at Rathmolyon House, served as High Sheriff of Meath, bought the neighbouring Rahinston estate about 1852, and in 1857 built the tower and spire on the parish church as a memorial to his father. In 1876 he owned 8,026 acres in Meath.
Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of 1837 records something that touches our townland directly. The parish school was supported by the Bishop of Ossory, the Earl of Darnley, the rector and Robert Fowler, “who also supports a school at Cullenter, the school-house of which he built, and allows the master an acre of land”. The landlord built and paid for a school in the Weilys' own townland. He also part-funded the dispensary.
Noel French, “Rathmolyon” and “Houses R–Z”, Meath History Hub; Dictionary of Irish Biography, Fowler, Robert; Lewis (1837), Rathmolion; Parliamentary Gazetteer (1846); National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, St Michael's, Rathmolyon; Return of Owners of Land 1876. The chain of owners before 1795 is set out, with its sources in the Registry of Deeds and the county histories, in the family research files (verdicts/anglo_norman_hypothesis_test_20260906.md).
Our ancestor, whichever of the two Williams he turns out to be, was a Cullentry boy in the 1840s or the 1850s, when the landlord's school-house stood in the townland with its master on his acre of land. William Wiley II could read and write in 1900. If he learned it in Ireland, or his father did before him, it was most likely there, on a bench a few fields from the door, under a Protestant landlord's roof. We do not know that either of them went. We know the school was there.
A Protestant house, and a Catholic branch
The Weilys of Heghlane were a Church of Ireland family: every one of them in the Protestant lists of 1802 and in the census of 1901. Our branch is the Catholic one, made when William Weily married Bridget Belagh about 1838 and Margaret Flynn about 1841 at the Rathmolyon chapel, whose register before 1878 is lost, and his widow raised their children Catholic.
The record of the house's religion is plain. In August 1802 the lists of Protestant parishioners drawn up for the diocese of Meath name four Wiley households at Rathmolyon, John's, William's, Michael's and George's, each with wife and children, and a single Michael; at Rathcore they name John Weily at Ballinaskea and Robert Weily. Two years earlier “Michael Weily, gent, of Highlane” had witnessed a marriage settlement alongside the vicar of Rathcore. The house's dead lie in the Church of Ireland graveyards at Rathmolyon and Rathcore, from John Weily in 1749 to George Weily in 1991. And in the census of 1901 every person in Ireland who wrote the name Weily, the two households at Cullentry and the one at Ballinaskea among them, returned themselves as Church of Ireland. Certain.
Our William, born about 1796, was in all likelihood one of the boys in those 1802 households: John's and George's each had a William. He married twice in the Catholic church, Bridget Belagh about 1838 and Margaret Flynn about 1841, weddings that no surviving book records, because Rathmolyon's chapel register is lost before 1878. His children were christened twice over. Mary, born on 21 March 1842, was baptised at Longwood chapel four days later, to “William Weilly and Margaret Flynn”, and again at the parish church at Rathmolyon in July. Grace (1843), Michael (1845), Robert (1848) and William (1849) were each christened at the parish church as William Weily's children, of Cullinter: the father's church, while he lived. He was buried from it on 19 January 1850. After that his widow Margaret raised the children in her own church. Grace and Michael married at the chapel; Robert was “step son” in John Flynn's Roman Catholic household at Ballin in 1901 and died in the Trim workhouse in 1915; and the Wileys of Springfield and St Louis were Catholics from the day they are first written down.
Very likely that the five children christened at the parish church and the children of the chapel are the same five. The index of the parish register gives the mother's name on those five entries as Eleanor, not Margaret; we read that as an index or a clerk's slip, and the register pages themselves, on microfilm at the National Archives of Ireland, have not yet been read. They are the first thing to look at.
So the house at Heghlane was of the same church as its landlords, the Rawdons and three generations of Fowlers, two of them bishops of the Church of Ireland; that is part of why it held a big farm on long leases for two centuries. Our branch, from about 1838, was not, and the law of the day had a good deal to say about a marriage like William's.
Under the Penal Laws of the early 1700s a Catholic could not take a lease of land for more than 31 years, and a Catholic estate had to be split equally among all the sons. The 1778 Relief Act allowed Catholics to take long leases; the Act of 1782 let them buy land outright. By the 1770s only about 5 per cent of Irish land was in Catholic hands. Mixed marriages were penalised until 1792: a priest who married a Catholic to a Protestant risked a £20 fine and a year in prison, and a Protestant woman who married a Catholic forfeited her inheritance. Several thousand Catholics of property “converted” on paper to keep their land, and their names are in the Convert Rolls.
One of those laws bore on our branch directly. Under an Irish Act of 1746 a marriage celebrated by a Catholic priest between a Protestant and a Catholic was void in law, and it stayed void until an Act of 1870, passed after the Yelverton case had shown the harm the old rule did. A Protestant man who married a Catholic woman before the priest, as William Weily did about 1838 and again about 1841, had a marriage the Church recognised and the courts did not. A christening in the parish church, on the other hand, was an entry in a register the law knew. That is one reason a Protestant father with Catholic children might have wanted both books to hold their names.
The Catholic Relief Act of April 1829 admitted Catholics to Parliament. The same day, the county vote was taken away from the forty-shilling freeholders and given only to men holding £10 a year, cutting the Irish electorate from about 216,000 to 37,000. A leaseholder of 183 acres kept his vote; most of the small men around him lost theirs.
In 1834 the parish of Rathmolyon counted 228 Protestants and 2,528 Catholics; the tiny parish of Killyon, the other half of the Longwood Catholic parish, had 4 Protestants and 841 Catholics. The Catholic diocese of Meath in 1837 had 156 chapels served by 124 priests. Its bishop from 1779 to 1827, Patrick Plunket, “traversed the whole diocese yearly, visiting every parish”, and it was he who carved out a new parish of Longwood after 1793.
Ulster Historical Foundation, “Religion” and “Land”, Background to the Statutes of the Irish Parliament; 19 Geo. II c. 13 (Ireland), 1746, and the Matrimonial Causes and Marriage Law (Ireland) Amendment Act 1870, text at the Irish Statute Book; University of Minnesota Law Library, Irish Penal Laws: statutes on intermarriage; The Yelverton case; Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829; Parliamentary Gazetteer (1846); Lewis (1837), Meath (Diocese of); Catholic Encyclopedia (1911), Meath; Noel French, “Longwood”.
Wiley is a Scots name, and in Ireland it is overwhelmingly an Ulster Protestant one, which for years made a Catholic Wiley family in the Meath Pale look like an oddity. It is not one. The Catholic Wileys of Meath are one Protestant farming house's branch by marriage, and the house's forenames in the 1800s, Robert, Samuel, George, Jervis and Joseph beside William and John, are a Protestant settler family's. Where that house came from before 1749 is one of the open questions on the Still Unknown page. Likely it came south from the Rawdons' own country in Antrim and Down before 1700; the named candidates are there.
The Registrar-General's 1890 study of Irish surnames lists Wylie among the names “confined principally to the Province of Ulster”. Of 51 Wylie, Wiley and Wyley births registered in 1890, 49 were in Ulster, chiefly County Antrim. Surname dictionaries derive the name from a Scots pet-form of William and record a John Wylie among the Plantation lessees of 1618.
Robert E. Matheson, Special Report on Surnames in Ireland (1909); Forebears, Wylie, citing Black (1946) and MacLysaght (1964).
Leases for lives
On 1 January 1835 William Weily junior, born about 1788, took the farm “for 2 lives or 21 years” at £178 1s 1d a year. He died on 31 May 1836, seventeen months later, and on 28 April 1841 his widow Ellen took it again “for 2 lives or 15 years” at £172 9s 8d. Two smaller parts of Cullentry went to John Wielly and John Wiely in 1835 “for 2 lives”. In 1854 John Wiley was sub-letting parts of his land to three other families, and Joseph Wiley to three more. Our own branch held no lease at all: in 1854 its eighty acres, in two halves, one in a William Wiley's name and one in Margaret Wiley's, were held at will.
An Irish lease “for lives” ran for as long as the named people lived. “Often the leasee would nominate young family members and sometimes their ages were recorded.” A lease “for lives or years” ran for whichever was longer: the last named life, or the fixed term. So the lease of 1835 was safe until at least 1 January 1856, and would have run on past that date only if one of its two named lives were still alive. The lessee himself died in 1836; whose lives the lease named is still unread. The lease document itself is on order from the National Library.
Sub-letting was the ordinary way a large tenant used his land. “A rich man who does not wish to trouble himself with details will let a large extent of ground to a single man, whose intention is not to work, but to underlet perhaps to 20 persons.” Below the leaseholders were tenants “at will”, and below them the cottiers and landless labourers.
How big was 183 acres? On the eve of the Famine about a quarter of Irish holdings were five acres or less, another quarter five to ten, and “farms of fifty acres or more … accounted for less than 10 percent”. A farm of 150 to 180 acres was in the top few per cent. Rathmolyon townland itself was “let in small farms from 21s. to 26s. per acre” in 1836; £178 on 183 acres works out at about 19s 6d an acre, a full commercial rent, not a favour. A farm labourer in the 1830s earned about 8 pence a day in summer and 5 pence with his meals in winter; a cottier's cabin and potato ground rented for £3 or £4 a year. £178 a year was, very roughly, the yearly wages of fifteen to twenty labourers.
Helen Moss, “Lease of lives”, Irish Family History Centre; Ulster Historical Foundation, “Land”; W. A. Maguire, “Rural Life: 1690 to 1845”, Encyclopedia of Irish History and Culture (2004); Poor Inquiry 1836, labourers and cottiers; Noel French, “Rathmolyon”. The per-acre and wage arithmetic is ours.
New Year's Day, 1835. William Weily junior, a man of 46 with a son of 20 and a house full of younger children, his old kinsman William Senior still living on the farm past eighty, puts his name to a lease that will outlive him. He has seventeen months to live, and nobody in the room knows it. The document names two lives, and we would give a great deal to know whose: his son John's, very likely, and perhaps one of the little ones, chosen to stretch the term. In an estate office in Rathmolyon, or at Rathmolyon House, with the bishop's agent and a clerk and a seal. Twenty-one years seemed a long time.
Tithes
In 1825 the tithe applotter for the parish of Rathmoylan walked the farms and wrote down who held what and what they owed. At Heghlane he listed Michael Weily, William Weily Senior (twice) and William Weily Junior: Michael Weily, “gent, of Highlane”; William Senior, born in 1752; and William Junior, born about 1788, the heir who would take the lease of 1835. Our William, then 29, has no holding of his own in the book. This is the record that fixed the farm's name for us; it is also a tax record, and the tax was the one Catholic Ireland hated most. The Weilys, of the established church themselves, paid it like everyone else.
The tithe was a tenth of the produce of the land, owed by every occupier regardless of religion to the clergy of the established Church of Ireland. In Rathmolyon the tithes came to £438 9s 2d a year, of which £230 15s 4½d went not to a clergyman at all but to a lay “impropriator”, the Earl of Darnley, and the rest to the vicar. The Tithe Composition Act of 1823 turned payment in kind into a cash charge, and the Tithe Applotment Books of 1823 to 1837 were compiled to work out each holding's share, from the average price of wheat and oats. Only farmland over an acre was counted, so labourers and townspeople do not appear.
Resentment boiled over after Emancipation. The Tithe War began at Graiguenamanagh in March 1831; twelve people were shot at Newtownbarry that June, twelve constables were killed at Carrickshock in December, and up to twenty farmers died at Rathcormac in 1834. The Tithe Rentcharge Act of 1838 cut the charge by a quarter and made the landlord, not the tenant, pay it, though he recovered it in the rent. Tithes were finally abolished with the Church of Ireland's disestablishment in 1869.
National Archives of Ireland, Tithe Applotment Books 1823–37; GenGuide; Lewis (1837), Rathmolion; Tithe War.
The Ribbonmen, 1821
Four years before the tithe book, the family was touched by the agrarian violence of the time. In December 1821 a William Wyley of Rathmolyon was murdered by Ribbonmen, and his brother Michael Wiley, who had given evidence for the Crown, was afterwards sent to America with his family. The papers are in the National Archives of Ireland. Which William this was, and how he stood to the house at Heghlane, they will say when they are read; no burial for him is in the Rathmolyon register's index.
The Chief Secretary's Office papers for 1821 hold the letters of Major Daniel O'Donoghue, the police magistrate, of 15 and 16 December 1821 on the murder of William Wyley, and a letter from Nugent of Castlerickard of 12 December reporting that “a man named Wiley” had been killed because his brother had given evidence against a Mr Dunn for the murder of William Cruise at Clonard in January that year. James Carey had been hanged at Naas for the Cruise murder on 31 March 1821, and John Dunn arrested by the end of July; the Wyley killing in December was the Ribbonmen's answer to the witness. The brother was Michael Wiley, of the Established Church, a cooper and wheelwright at the Royal Canal's Boyne aqueduct. In June 1827, writing from Upper Kevin Street in Dublin, he petitioned the government for protection, and about 1828 he was sent to America with his family. Nothing has yet been found of him there.
National Archives of Ireland, CSO/RP/SC/1821/1155 (O'Donoghue's letters; Nugent's letter of 12 December 1821; Michael Wiley's petition of June 1827), as calendared; the papers themselves have not yet been read. Noel French, “Longwood”, Meath History Hub, carries the January 1821 letter on the Cruise murder. Family research files, verdicts/weily_backwards_sweep_20260906.md.
The chapel at Longwood
Two books hold our branch. The Longwood chapel book has Ellen, christened in January 1839 to William Wiley and Bridget Belagh “of Highlane”; Mary, christened in March 1842 to William Weilly and Margaret Flynn; Grace standing sponsor in 1853; the widow Margaret's marriage to John Flynn in 1854; Michael's marriage to Anne Daly in 1870; and Grace's two marriages, in 1876 and 1881. The Rathmolyon parish-church book has Mary again, in July 1842, then Grace, Michael, Robert and William christened between 1843 and 1850 as William Weily's children of Cullinter, and their father's burial in January 1850. Two books, one family. Cullentry lies at the western edge of Rathmolyon parish, and the “Bridle Road from Longwood” on the estate map runs straight from the chapel village through the Bryan farm to the Weilys' gate. Rathmolyon had its own chapel, five furlongs south-west of the village, but its Catholic registers before 1878 are lost, and William's two chapel weddings, of about 1838 and 1841, went with them.
Rathmolyon's Catholic chapel book does not survive before 1878. The parish's Church of Ireland registers do (baptisms from 1733, marriages and burials from 1734), on microfilm at the National Archives of Ireland and in the RootsIreland index, and they hold our family.
Longwood's chapel appears on Larkin's map of 1812 as an L-shaped building; “Tradition states that this was a thatched structure and suffered much damage during the great storm of December 1822. It was re-constructed and a slate roof added.” In 1837 Lewis called it “a large plain edifice”, and the Gazetteer put its Sunday attendance at about 700 (Rathmolyon's chapel drew 1,000 to 1,400). The present Church of the Assumption at Longwood was built in 1841 by Father John Hackett, a Salamanca-educated priest known as “The Old Spaniard”, who was parish priest from 1842 to 1854; his predecessor, Thomas Flood, served from 1833 to 1842. The parish's surviving registers begin in 1829.
So Ellen's baptism in January 1839 was in Father Flood's time and in the older slated chapel, and Mary's in March 1842 and the widow Margaret's wedding in May 1854 were in Father Hackett's new church, the one that still stands. Michael was married there in 1870, and Grace twice, in 1876 and 1881.
Noel French, “Longwood”, Meath History Hub; National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, Church of the Assumption, Longwood; Lewis (1837), Longwood; Parliamentary Gazetteer (1846), Clonard. The link between priest and entry is our inference from the dates.
March 1842. A four-day-old girl carried west along the bridle road to a church whose plaster is barely dry, William Weilly beside his wife Margaret, and Margaret's sister or cousin Elizabeth Flynn to stand as godmother. Father Hackett writes “B: Mary: P: William Weilly & Margaret Flynn: Sp: Elizabeth Flynn” and closes the book. In July the same child is carried east to the parish church at Rathmolyon and christened again, in her father's church. And, if the standing reading is right, a boy of about seven named William is in the same house, our ancestor, and nobody thinks to write him down.
The hungry years
The Famine came in the autumn of 1845, when Grace Weily was two and her brother Michael six months old. Their father William was alive through it, on the branch's eighty acres with a young family: Robert was born in April 1848 and William in December 1849, five weeks before their father died. Ellen, his kinsman's widow, held the big farm through those years; John Weily of Maryville, William junior's son, was coming into his own and would take a lease of his own in 1861. Nobody named Weily died in the Longwood register between 1833 and 1855, though the parish church buried little Mary in April 1843 and her father in January 1850.
Meath suffered, but less than the west. “In Meath 5% of the land area was used for potatoes in comparison to 21% in Cork.” The county's population fell from 183,116 in 1841 to 140,750 in 1851, a loss of 23 per cent; about 20,000 people died in the county between 1846 and 1851. The family's own barony, Moyfenrath Lower, was the least affected in Meath: its population fell only 9.65 per cent in the famine decade, against 37 and 39 per cent in the northern baronies. The Longwood side of the river, Moyfenrath Upper, fell 18 per cent.
The Trim workhouse, built for 500, opened on 11 October 1841 and served the whole union including Rathmolyon, Rathcore and Killyon. It held an average of 246 people in 1846, 461 in 1847, 676 in 1849; it first exceeded its capacity in December 1846, rented an extra house, sent fever cases to the Trim fever hospital, and in the winter of 1846–47 the guardians gave relief outside the workhouse walls in defiance of the law. Numbers did not fall until late 1852.
What the Famine did to Meath was less to kill than to clear. Even before 1845 “great grazing farms had been created in the southern baronies” and cottiers were being displaced as tillage gave way to cattle; “the famine accelerated these trends”. Nationally the police recorded almost 250,000 people evicted between 1849 and 1854. In 1851 a third of Meath's people still lived in one-roomed, windowless mud cabins. And the slow fall went on for a generation: Moyfenrath Lower lost 44 per cent of its people between 1841 and 1871.
Noel French, “The Great Famine”, Meath History Hub (census tables 1841–71; Trim Board of Guardians minutes); Peter Higginbotham, The Workhouse: Trim; Navan & District Historical Society, “Fat Cattle and Mud Cabins” (on Peter Connell's research); Ciarán Ó Murchadha, “Famine Clearances”; David Fitzpatrick, “Rural Life: 1850 to 1921”.
A farming family on good grazing land, the house on its big leased farm and our branch on its eighty acres, did not starve in 1847. Their labourers and cottiers, the people in the small plots the map calls Cunningham, Caffrey and McLoughlin, may have. The road from Cullentry to Trim workhouse is about ten miles, and in the winter of 1846 people walked it. The Weilys would have known who went, and who came back. It is the kind of thing a family remembers for two generations and then stops telling, and by the time Margaret Schoppe filled in her father's death certificate in St Louis in 1913 it was gone. The same workhouse took Robert Wiley in at the end, in 1915.
Why 1857, two ways
Why 1857? The big farm's leases fell in 1856, but that was the Protestant house's story, and the house kept its land: John Weilly took a new lease in 1861 and his family was at Cullintra House until 1976. Our branch had no lease. Its father, William Weily, died in January 1850; his widow Margaret married John Flynn of Ballin in May 1854; the eighty acres the branch farmed were held at will, divided between the widow and a grown son. A family in that position in the 1850s left, and in 1857 one of them did.
Who left is the question. On the standing reading, Likely, it was William I, the dead man's grown son by an earlier marriage, with his wife, a second Margaret Flynn, and their infant son William II, born that year or the one before. On the other reading, Possible, it was the seven-year-old William christened in January 1850, sent to America with kin or to kin, while his mother stayed at Ballin as John Flynn's wife. The two readings, and the records that would decide between them, are set out on The Family.
Likely that 1857 is the true year of the crossing: it rests on one census line of 1900, and no passenger list has yet been found.
Leaving was the normal thing to do. More than 4,000 people a year left Meath in 1851, 1852 and 1853; “emigration was greater in the five years following the famine than during the famine itself”. Farmers who could “raise a crop, sell it, withhold the rent and buy tickets” did so. Between 1845 and 1855 at least 2.1 million people left Ireland.
The way out had just become easier. The Midland Great Western Railway opened from Dublin to Enfield, the next station to Rathmolyon, in May 1847, and to Hill of Down in December of that year; the canal's passenger boats stopped running the moment the trains started. Most Irish emigrants of the 1850s “first crossed to Liverpool and from there made their way to New York, Philadelphia and Boston”; in 1851 there were often fifteen ships a day sailing from Liverpool for America. Steerage from Liverpool to New York cost between £3 10s and £5 a head in 1850; the law required the ship to issue each adult a weekly ration of bread, oatmeal, rice and three quarts of water a day, and passengers cooked for themselves on deck. Under sail the crossing averaged about 40 days in 1853; the new steamers were cutting it to a fortnight by the end of the decade. In New York, from August 1855, emigrants landed at the Castle Garden depot, where railway tickets west could be bought “without danger of being defrauded”. The story continues on the next page.
Noel French, “The Great Famine” (citing David Fitzpatrick, “Emigration 1801–70”); Noel French, “Royal Canal in Meath”; National Museum of Ireland, “Irish Emigration to America: The Journey”; Illustrated London News, 6 July 1850, “Emigration from Liverpool”; Timothy Hatton, “Emigrant Voyages across the Atlantic, 1853 to 1913” (2023); National Park Service, Castle Garden.
A morning in 1857. The cart to Enfield, three or four miles; the train to Dublin in a couple of hours, which the grandparents could not have imagined; the night boat to Liverpool on an open deck; a week in a lodging house among strangers looking for a ship with room in steerage; then five or six weeks of oatmeal and salt water. Whether the traveller was a young father with a wife and a baby who had never seen the sea, or a boy of seven with his hand in a Flynn cousin's, the road was the same one. Grace, Michael and Robert stayed, and Margaret, Mrs Flynn now, and they walked back along the bridle road to Ballin.