I SANG Noreen Bawn in a cemetery in the rural Cork countryside last Friday.
There, amongst the countless rows of memorials to dead generations, just four of us from the ranks of the living stood in the February sunshine on a poignant and historic occasion.
The song is associated with Donegal but in truth it can equally be linked to any place in Ireland - any little house or boreen from where emigrants set out. Some went with a sense of adventure, with hope in their heart for a new and better life. Thousands also departed these shores because of famine, hunger, and a sense of hopelessness.
Ah yes, emigration from this country was indeed ‘a broad church’, and in truth we will never fully understand the myriad reasons and stories of how and why so many went.
They travelled to far-flung places the world over. Most never returned. Many kept up contact with the ‘old country’, but for others it was a bitter parting. They knew only too well that ever coming back to Erin was simply never going to be a reality.
Maybe they knew that keeping contact with home - learning of the deaths of relatives and friends - would only add to their faraway grief. Their new home was just that, so they sought to get on with life as it panned out before them.
Time passed, life moved on, and thoughts of home faded. A generation or two or more passed, and then the grandchildren or maybe great grandchildren of those emigrants of long ago began their ancestral search.
Over the last 50 years, I’ve met hundreds of them. Some have good, strong family traditions and links often recorded long, long ago in family Bibles. Others come with a family anecdote that ‘our family were from Cork’.
I recall years ago standing near a broken rusty gate with an American currant bush nearby - this was the homestead in the 1850s of the ancestors of Leo Ryan. He had come across the sea with his family in hope rather than confidence of ‘finding his roots’. They were overjoyed when the ‘jigsaw pieces’ fitted in and we were able to pinpoint accurately where his forefathers had once lived.
Last Friday, in Gortroe cemetery, the four of us gathered around four headstones which recorded details of one family from 1743 until 2002. I was in the company of Steve Kinniry, his wife Marilyn and Joe Nolan - a native of the O Moore County but long-time Leeside resident.
For Steve, on his first ever visit to Ireland, this was a trip of discovery and bridging the generations of his clan.
The name Kiniry was often written Mac Kenniry - it might have been the Anglicised version of Mac an Cheannaire - ‘the Son of the Leader’.
On the hilltop cemetery where we stood on Friday, the variations of the name included Keniry, McKiniry, McKinniry, Keneiry and Keneiry!
One of those remembered in stone, William McKiniry, was born 155 years ago, in 1692. We have no idea who his father was but can be fairly certain he was born just a short few years after Oliver Cromwell’s savage ‘campaign’ in Ireland in the 1640s.
William died at the age of 51 in 1743 - that was just two years after hurling sides drawn from Cork and Tipperary met in what is often considered the very first ‘inter-county’ hurling match. Played in the townland of Glenagowl in the autumn of 1741, it is surmised that the ‘match’ may have well been part of a general sense of elation and celebration after a dark era.
The years 1739 and 1740 were woeful in this country, with severe frost and biting cold winds resulting in crop failure and famine conditions. For two years the deadly conditions prevailed, but by the autumn of 1741 things were improving and a reasonable harvest was saved that autumn.
The McKinirys must have been well established in this corner of north-east Cork by the mid 1700s. Six different headstones in Gortroe bear testimony to the lives and deaths of different members of the clan.
It was only last week I learned Steve Kinniry was in Ireland. In recent years back in the USA, he had done a DNA test with the slim hope that relations somewhere might turn up as a ‘match’. Steve ‘hit the jackpot’, with his first cousin Bob Webb matching up along with Kathy Keniry in East Cork and Joe Nolan in Cork.
They were all in contact, trying to unravel the branches and roots on their common family tree.
From his own research in the States, Steve knew his great grandfather William was born in Ireland (probably in this area) in 1853 and emigrated to the New World at the age of just 15.
He settled at South Windsor in Connecticut where he grew and processed tobacco. He was only 48 when he died in 1901, having been married twice. Three sons were born to his first wife and four daughters to his second wife. One of these boys was Joseph Kinniry - Joseph’s son George was Steve’s father.
He told me that his dad was a very quiet spoken man who seldom spoke of his youth or ancestry. Like many Americans who had lived through World War II and the Great Depression, George Kinniry kept his own counsel. In reality, it was only when he retired, in 2017, that Steve began ‘digging’ to build up a true picture of his Irish and American antecedents.
Making contact with Kathy and Joe was like winning the Lotto as both had been doing Keniry research with several years.
Last Friday in Gortroe, it truly was a case of ‘bringing it back home’ for Steve and his Italian-born wife. We spoke of the William born in the 1600s right up to the Healy brothers, Jim, Bill and Davy – all of whom I knew -their grandmother was a Keniry, and we just tried to imagine how many other relations were interred in the same ‘ground’.
Yes, Noreen Bawn is a song of emigration and farewells, but it truly tells the story of so many of our people from every single Irish county who ended up in countless foreign lands.
Over coffee later, Steve Kinniry told us of his family in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania – his life and times and his pride in his Irish heritage. He was just so gushing in praise of Kathy and Joe, his new-found Irish cousins - real flesh and blood for him and his kin.
He had come to Ireland last week hoping, maybe dreaming, of gathering some information on his family and as he headed back across the Atlantic, his dreams and ambitions had been surpassed.
Of course, more research needs to be done on the Keniry/Kinniry clan but the ice is well and truly broken now. A link across the seas and centuries has been forged and hopefully the story will grow and the family tree will flourish.
Before we parted, Steve gave Joe and myself some small but powerful symbols of our shared heritage. After the death, on hunger strike, of Cork Lord Mayor Terence MacSwiney in October, 1920, his story and sacrifice gained worldwide publicity. In Jenkintown, the ‘MacSwiney Club’ was founded to perpetuate his memory and for the promotion of his Irish Ireland ideals. It still flourishes over a century later and Steve is a member.
Last Friday, he bestowed a kind of ‘Honorary Membership’ to us of the ‘MacSwiney Club, Est 1920’.
So, a Corkman and a Laois native are linked forever with Steve Kinniry - a proud Irish American.
So now fair and tender maidens ponder well before you go
From your humble homes in Erin what’s beyond you do not know
For what is gold and what is silver when your health and strength are gone?
When you think of emigration won’t you think of Noreen Bawn
Read More
Precious time with my heroes - John Spillane and Joe Duffy More in this section
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Grant Arthur Gochin
Priyamvada Gopal
Poonam Muttreja
Zaher Sahloul
Patrick Gathara
Obaid Mir
visit website
