2011.040

Kiernan, Mel

Gift

Gift of Mel Kiernan.

1787 - 2011

Date(s) Created: 1986, 2011 Date(s): 1787-2011

Notes: Archives 2011.040.0001 THE FAMILY: A HISTORY OF MY FAMILY by MELVIN KIERNAN 2011; first edition 1986 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION THE KIERNAN SIDE Owen Kiernan (1787-?1866) 1 Margaret Connell McGlynn Cavanagh (1790-1867) 2 Ellen Flood Kiernan (1804-?1849) 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 lastsurvivors 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 grave also contained his previously-unknown sister and her family. And why does that sister's death certificate mention the Irish county of her birth, again information not asked for? More often, unfortunately, contact with the current surviving family of an early gravesite in the peripheral family only brings the response "Sorry, you already know more about my family than I do." But a chance conversation at a wake, with some retired secretaries I had known in passing for years, led to the discovery that they too were from Easkey and were cousins of cousins of mine, and supplied details about peripheral branches of the family, if not about my immediate ancestors. Many records have recently been computerized, and that collection is growing daily. When I first started on this research, almost all records available to the public were on microfilm, usually with only meager indexing. Today, the computer has left most of those microfilms in the dust, sometimes literally. The collection of the Latter Day Saints in Utah, once a valuable and close-to-unique source of records, has been largely replaced by other, computerized sources. Their own records are only slowly being entered into computer files. World-wide records are available on the Internet, though some come with a modest fee. But often these same Internet sources are available to the public in libraries, for example the New York Public Library. I have made extensive use of that source. The New York Public Library has access to all the United States Federal Censuses through 1930; the Irish censuses of 1901 and 1911 (Nineteenth century Irish census records were destroyed.); immigration records at all American ports from the 19th and 20th centuries; surviving New York and New Jersey state census returns from 1855 to 1925. The Library has records of depositors at the Emigrant Savings Bank of New York dating from a brief but useful period of the mid-nineteenth century. There are many other local sources of information. The New York City Archives has birth, marriage and death records for all five boroughs, starting from before the Civil War. Seton Hall University Archives has microfilms of all parish baptism and marriage records for northeastern New Jersey (open to the public, but call in advance for an appointment). A work-in-progress website has a free index of many birth, marriage and death records in Ireland for the period approximately 1860 to 1920. At the moment I seem to have exhausted all sources, tracking each down either to a new piece of information or to a dead end. But each time I have said I have exhausted all sources, something new appears. The next major source that will come available is the 1940 United States census, online in 2012. Meanwhile, this seems like a good time to reorganize the material I already have about my family. But what is family? When I began this study in earnest in the 1980s and first published the results in 1986, I defined The Family to be all my ancestors in United States, and all their descendants. Surprisingly I was able to compile that complete record. That claim is no longer true. Since that date I have discovered an earlier generation living in United States, but have been unable to trace those new- found branches beyond the second generation. I have lost contact with at least one branch of the previously-known family. In the intervening years an entire generation of The Family has died, and two new generations have been added. The younger members of The Family have moved across the country, scattering from New England to California, from Minnesota to Florida, and on to Alaska and Hawaii. Contacts and the sources of information they provided are stretched, sometimes unfortunately broken as the older generation (which now includes me) dies off. But I hope that my work has inspired other, younger members of The Family to preserve their records and to continue to add to them. Among the several branches of The Family, the Cavanaghs, later joined by the Finnertys, arrived in 1842, the Kiernans arrived in 1847, the Melvins in 1854, the Reillys about 1860, and the Careys in 1881 and 1882. So they were all here before the Statue of Liberty, and before Ellis Island. The immigration records from Castle Garden, the earlier immigration point in New York, are being computerized and have become a useful source of information. With one exception, the immigrant generations of The Family came to the area immediately around New York City. That one exception soon moved here. Civil genealogy records in New York City and New Jersey are fairly complete and easily accessible. Unlike in many other states, the birth, marriage and death records in New Jersey are available to the public. So are the records for New York City, although not for the rest of the state. Local parish and cemetery records are also conveniently available, although some prior information is needed to begin searches there. Unfortunately, before about 1870 there was no legal requirement to compile or keep civil records of births, marriages and deaths, and so many earlier records, public and private, are incomplete. As for other sources, the National Archives Centerfor the northeastern United States, previously located in Bayonne NJ, is now in Manhattan. They have the census records for the entire country, on microfilm as well as computer, and naturalization records for the New York and New Jersey area. When family research moves to Ireland, sources are a much greater problem. Persecution of Catholics in Ireland prior to Emancipation in 1829 discouraged the compiling and retention of baptismal and marriage records before that date. Four Courts, the building in Dublin housing a thousand years of public records, along with all its contents, was destroyed in the Civil War of 1922 in a fire set by defeated republican forces fighting against the Free State. Many original documents had been moved earlier to that site for safe keeping. Government censuses were taken every ten years, but the last of the census records from prior to 1901 were lost in the 1922 fire; the others had previously been pulped for scrap paper. As a result, there survive only two general compilations of names of residents of Ireland for the 19th century, each of them at best a list of heads of households with no other identifying information. Each is essentially a real estate tax record of landlords and their tenants, the Tithe Applotment Book of 1832-1833 and Griffith's Valuation of 1855-1856. Both are available on microfilm in the New York Public Library. Griffith's has recently come available on the Internet. Luckily each of these surveys was compiled a generation before the time of our ancestors emigration, so the names of their parents should, and did, appear in these listings. Griffith's is indexed, also on microfilm and the Internet. The details listed in the Applotment Book vary by county. Individual tenants are listed for Sligo and Longford, not for Mayo. There does not appear to be an index. And yet another data source was found in NYPL, an index to the birth, marriage and death records of England for the 19th century. As a result I was able to confirm a story that had been told about the Melvin family, that they emigrated to England during the Irish Famine, and then the sons came to United States. In fact, the father and two of his children die within two months, shortly after fleeing the Famine in 1847; a three-year-old boy dies of typhus fever, an effect of starvation; a fifteen-year-old girl dies in the Manchester Workhouse. These are not abstract statistics. These are John and Annie Melvin, the young brother and sister of my great-grandfather. These deaths put names and faces on the Irish Famine, and unite us personally with Darfur, Niger, and numberless other places of famine around the globe today. One rule about research is that each new item of data found will ask more questions than it answers. Why did Owen and Michael Kiernan, father and son, switch their name to McKiernan after arriving here, and why did Michael's widow switch back to Kiernan? What was Michael McKiernan, usually a resident of New York City, doing in Beaufort SC in September 1864, in the not-quite-middle of the Civil War, when there's no record that he was in the Union Army? Why do the Melvins and the Hunts not show up on passenger immigration lists? What if any connection was there between grandfather and grandmother Carey, who seem to have had earlier relatives in common although they came from opposite ends of Co Mayo? Family research is not really finished until you have the tree reconstructed all the way back to Adam and Eve. Before achieving that, there's always the possibility of finding one more piece of information, and then another, and another. There is always the chance that something more will show up, that one more visit to an archive, or checking a more imaginative misspelling of a name, will lead to further information. Who would think at first glance that an index listing of Max Kernon really referred to Michael Kiernan? A typical example is the immigration record of the Finan brothers. James was too common a name to pursue, and Robert and Farrell produced no results. But their entry was eventually found, with Finan misspelled, Farrell misspelled, and with a previously-unknown brother Thomas. Another observation to keep in mind is that indices should not always be trusted. Some indices have been compiled by human beings who may not be familiar with family names of various ethnic origins, and so they misrecord a handwritten name that might be obviously recognized by another recorder. Computer-generated indices pose a additional problem. Some are compiled at each search request from the data base which itself was compiled from the original handwritten record. I have at times gotten the response that a name cannot be found, only to be told at another time that the same name, in the same data base, has been found. In the past twenty-five years, all the last members of The Family from generations earlier than my own have died. These were, with few exceptions, the last members of The Family who personally knew the immigrant generation. Whatever they knew and failed to write down because everybody knows it, whatever stories they failed to tell to the next generation, all that history is now lost forever. Today's older generation, and that includes myself, must record the stories they know, and must encourage, urge, demand that the rest of you readers do the same. I would be glad to hear of any details that my readers may be able to add, any corrections or suggestions, or any anecdotes about family members. Some examples may show the importance of recording odd bits of apparent trivia. An off-hand comment by Sarah Holbritter was the sole reference that led to seeking and eventually finding the Melvin family in Manchester, England. The remembrance by my aunt Mary Kiernan that her grandfather had visits from his niece who lived in Braddock PA was the only link to the extensive family of Mathew Melvin, and her remark that her father graduated from Stevens Institute, while she concealed other data about him, was the sole clue that eventually led to finding his date of death and his gravesite. My father never knew his father, and believed that he had died ten years or more before the true date. The notes left by my grandmother, which provide the link with the Finnerty branch of the family, were prompted by my father's question How are we related to them? when he was arranging the funeral of Robert Brady. All knowledge of the Edward Kiernan branch of the family was supplied by Helen DeSapio. Helen's mother Lillian Callaghan Crosett was an aunt, his father's half-sister, whom my father never knew about until shortly before her death, and only then met because Helen had been a classmate in high school of my mother's niece Mary Girlie Byrnes. His mother had broken all connection with the Kiernan side of the family over an imagined snub by Helen's mother. (Lillian had arranged for the funeral of her brother Eugene, then separated from my grandmother.) Typical Irish family! Here's another interesting story told to me by my mother years ago. The story is that my uncle Will Carey had the opportunity for a law scholarship to Harvard, but his mother wouldn't let him accept a position at a non-Catholic school. There may be some truth to this story. Through the first decades of the 20th century, law was not a college-degree subject in America. An applicant would clerk for three years with an attorney, and then apply for certification by the local professional society. (Entry to public-school teaching was not much different.) Is the story true? Probably. My aunt Mae Carey described her mother as cantankerous, or worse. Are the details accurate? Well, as the Irish say about folklore, All the stories are true, and some of them actually happened. Now let's preserve another family story. At Easter 1928 my father went with his mother and sister to Canada on a pilgrimage from Our Lady of Grace Church, with fellow parishioners, including Catherine Carey, to visit the Shrine of Saint Joseph then being built in Montreal. At the shrine Brother Andre, the founder of the shrine and now a canonized saint, singled him out and told him he would marry one of the women in the group. Lucky for me he did! A question has come up: Did any of the immigrant generation speak Irish? It is unlikely that Irish was the first language for those born in 1830s or later, since compulsory schooling in English was introduced for Ireland in 1834. But for the earlier generation Irish may have originally been their first language, possibly their only fluent language. I remember that my aunt Mae Carey vaguely recalled her prayers in Irish, perhaps learned from her mother, and my father occasionally used isolated words and expressions from Irish, perhaps picked up as a child from his grandfather. It's details like this that history is really about. Part of a family history is recording the origin of various family mementos. I have a copy of the title page from grandfather Eugene Kiernan's thesis at Stevens, which includes his signature. I also have a copy of great-grandfather Michael McKiernan's citizenship papers, which includes his signature. They both had fine script. Michael's citizenship papers also contain the signature of the witness, his father Owen McKiernan, who misspelled his own name. I have a pocket watch dating from at least the 1850's, inscribed with the letter K. But there is no recollection whether it belonged to Michael Kiernan or to Mathew Cavanagh or to whom. I have a small crudely hand-carved crucifix, dated 1819. It is similar to museum examples of crucifixes carved by pilgrims as part of their visit to Lough Dergh, a penitential site in Co Donegal associated with Saint Patrick. Whom did it belong to? I have several books that belonged to my great-grandparents Melvin, including a history of Ireland dating from the 1880s, and a prayer book from the 1860s, in case anyone wants to go back to the Lenten rules of the good old days. There is a mathematics text book inscribed with the initials of Eugene Kiernan, and a music text book with the name of Katherine Kiernan. I have a decorated stoneware bowl that Mary Kiernan said belonged to her grandmother. I saw an identical bowl a few years ago in the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh, Co Tyrone, which the museum says dates from about 1900 and came from England. I also have a campaign button for the Socialist Party, if anyone wants to claim that. All these and many other items have stories attached to them, stories that were never recorded and so now are lost forever. Disappointingly, no stories were preserved about life and families in Ireland. On the Kiernan side, all immigrant ancestors left Ireland shortly before or in the wake of the Irish Famine, An Gorta Mor, 1845-1849. Little was written about that period, either in Ireland or America, prior to the recent sesquicentennial commemoration. The survivors regarded it as a bitter and embarrassing time, choosing to forget the measures they endured to survive. One dim recollection may have been my Aunt Mary's refusal to eat turnips, perhaps inherited from her grandparents. Turnips had been regarded as food for the pigs, and were eaten by people only in desperation after the failure of the potato crop. On the Carey side, emigration occurred a generation later, although the early 1880s in Ireland was again a period of economic depression and crop failure as well as of political unrest. (I hope our Careys are not related to the James Carey who was the informer in the Phoenix Park murder of the government Chief Secretary in May 1882.) While the Carey-Hunt-Hyland family came from the Co Mayo area around Knock, no devotion or mention of the reported appearances of the Blessed Virgin at Knock in the summer of 1879 seem to have been present in the family. I have a book, but from the Melvin side of the family, that describes the appearance and the testimony taken at the time. But the popular devotion of the present day seems to date only from the 1930s, when the parish priest at Knock sought a way to attract visitors to his remote area. Several years ago, a friend of mine, Fr Tom Sheridan SJ, mentioned for the first time in the twenty plus years I'd known him, that he has Kiernan relatives, indeed from Granard, the town where our Michael Kiernan was baptized. Tom's aunt Peggy was married to Larry Kiernan, the brother of Kitty Kiernan (aka Julia Roberts) who was the fiancee of Michael Collins, one of the leaders in the establishment of an independent Ireland in the period 1916-1922, who was assassinated in 1922. Tom's Kiernan family has compiled a genealogy, but only back to the parents of Kitty and Larry. If there is a connection with our family, it would be at least two generations earlier. I have been to Ireland ten times, each time with a tour group led by Deirdre McKiernan, daughter of the late Irish scholar Dr Eoin McKiernan. She and several family members, both mine and hers, have remarked on a strong family resemblance between Eoin and myself. (His picture appeared for many years with the column he wrote on the last page of each issue of Irish America. Decide for yourselves.) Deirdre has traced her fathers family to Co Longford and Co Cavan, within ten miles of Granard, so maybe we are related. A few years ago there was a letter in a genealogy column asking for information about a Bernard Shannon who lived in Brooklyn in the 1880s. The letter said that Bernard Shannon's mother was a Kiernan. I wrote to the letter writer, Thomas Barry, since Bernard Shannon is the name of a baptismal sponsor for one of the grandchildren of Mary Kiernan Mullen. Although Barry's Bernard Shannon was living on the same street and in the same parish as the Mullens, we were unable to establish any connection between his Kiernans and ours. As the immediate branches of The Family become separated, the question arises of the even more distant family branches, those not descendent from my most remote immigrant ancestors. With effort, some of these can be traced into the 1930 census. But where are they today? Surely there are many descendants of Mathew Melvin, the western Pennsylvania cousins, although the Melvin surname seems to have died out. There is also the large family of Hunt cousins from Boston, although they are daughters of daughters, so the Hunt name has disappeared; the Carey and McLaughlin cousins here in Hudson County; the Finan cousins in Manhattan and Long Island; and the Mullen cousins from Brooklyn, later untraceable as Smiths in Manhattan. What became of Michael Kiernan's sister Bridget? I recently chased the name through twenty-five years of records, only to find that it was not recording our Bridget Kiernan. And what became of Bernard Melvin's brother Michael, who may have stayed in England or may have emigrated anywhere in the Irish Diaspora? Judging from names of witnesses at marriages and baptisms, there were other Kiernan, Flood and McTigue cousins in United States, probably in the New York City area, at least in the early generations. Who were they and where are these families now? Are we related to the Philip Kiernan from Co Longford, a resident of Jersey City, who lost two sons on the Titanic? There were cousins of the Melvins living until recently in Easkey in Ireland, but attempts to get responses from them, either directly or with the help of their parish priest, were unsuccessful. And there are many Kiernans living in Granard. How many of them are close relatives? For the time being at least, I leave these questions for those readers more adept at Internet snooping. I realize that my brother and I, and his daughters and granddaughters, are the only ones related to all the people reported in this history. But many members of The Family who read this report are related to half of them, or perhaps a quarter of them, and, in turn, have other ancestors who are not mentioned here at all. I hope that this partial information about your family will induce some of you to search out the details of the other branches of your own roots, or at least to write down the facts which you yourself know of your family background. Remember that every blank space in this research represents some forgotten detail that once everybody knows and so nobody recorded for later generations. If you don't do something about it, someday you too may be a blank space! The broader picture, who we are, where we come from and where we might go, is well described in the Authors Note in the novel Shannon, by Frank Delany: Much of our power comes from our past. We have always drawn upon the ancient world. ... More narrowly, we also draw upon our own particular ancestries. Why the tradition of family portraits? How often do we tease apart the branches of the family tree and grow more fascinated? It seems not to matter much if that old family thread of ours is frail or poorly traceable or even if it fades into obscurity. We need the spirit of our past more than we need the facts; we need the pride more than we need the proof. And the more mobile we become, and the farther we travel from our point of origin, the more we seem... 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