From a memoir written by his granddaughter circa 1900, I knew already that Campbell had been a British soldier sometime after theNapoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century. Records from the National Archives in Kew revealed that at Maghera in 1818, at the age of eighteen, Campbell, a laborer, enlisted for lifetime service in the Royal Irish Regiment. In 1821 he was discharged in Cork, wounded and ‘unfit for further service’, after which he married in Carlow and eventually returned to Co. Londonderry. His army pension was sixpence a day for life, or about 9 pounds sterling (£9) a year, roughly the annual rental value of a middling farm in the area.

The OS Memoirsfor Banagher parish, adjacent to Campbell’s townland of Ballymonie in Bovevagh parish, reveal what might have driven him to cast his lot ,among soldiers whom the Duke of Wellington, despite the British victory over Napoleon, called ‘the scum of the earth’.

The Memoirs chronicle that in 1816 ‘it rained so incessantly that no turf could be dried or preserved, and the crops were lodged and ,remained unshorn’ (p. 26). The harvest failed and famine ensued, followed by fever:

During the last dear [meaning ‘expensive’] summer, known in the parish as the ‘broth summer,’ 1816, many died from starvation in this parish, particularly in the townlands of Templemoyle and Drumslieve. The Reverend Alexander Ross, rector of that parish, and John Stevenson Esquire of Knockan distinguished themselves by their charity and attention to the poor in erecting a house in the townland of Drumcovit, where broth was regularly distributed among the poor, many of whom died in the act of taking it home to their suffering families. Others were overcome by taking part of it on the way and fainted. There were some who suffered their families to die rather than let their poverty be known. A very bad fever followed this dearth, by which many were carried off (p. 98).

Thomas Campbell may have been one of those who lined up at the broth house in Drumcovit townland just a mile or so from his home, and the generosity of Squire Stevenson may have saved his life. As an agricultural laborer, Campbell would have been particularly affected by the disaster. The crop failure meant that he earned no wages, and without wages he could buy no food or other necessities, even if they were to be had. In the post-famine year, laborers’ work of any sort would have been difficult to come by, enough so that Campbell fell for the siren song of the army recruiter for the 18th Regiment of Foot, the Royal Irish.

After his discharge from the army, Campbell eloped with an innkeeper’s daughter from Carlow when her parents refused the couple permission to marry. They married in Holy Cross Church in Killeshin, Co. Carlow on 19 July 1822 and returned to his home in Ballymonie sometime afterwards. Campbell appears in the 1831 census of that townland as the head of a Roman Catholic household containing 3 males and 4 females. Baptismal and other sources name the family: himself and his wife Mary Donnelly; two sons, Thomas and Patrick; and three daughters, Mary Ann, Elizabeth, and Julia. Two other daughters, Catherine and Ellen, were born after the census.

Thomas Campbell’s granddaughter recorded that he operated a ‘carman’s inn’ (a precursor to the modern truck stop) in Ballymonie, which served men and horses in long-distance goods traffic with food and lodging. She also noted that he enjoyed enough prosperity to have grain warehouses that benefited himself and his community. The OS Memoirs for Bovevagh, Banagher, and Dungiven all comment on a local issue that helps to explain Campbell’s prosperity and something of his entrepreneurial spirit. The issue was this: the road from Belfast to Derry as it exited Dungiven had looped southwards through the hamlet of Feeny before turning north again to Claudy and on to Derry.

The more direct route (modern A6) was too boggy for the vehicles of the eighteenth century. However, by the 1830s, the political will to push through a modern road directly from Dungiven to Claudy prevailed, cutting off several miles of detour. By the time the OS arrived in the area, several miles of road out of Dungiven had been completed, but the monied interests in Feeny were blocking its completion through the Faure Glen townland of Ballymonie (now Foreglen), as they did not want to be by-passed and isolated from the main flow of goods and traffic. What this tells us about Thomas Campbell is that he saw a good thing coming – the Belfast-Derry road running through Ballymonie – and he capitalized on it by opening the inn, most likely funded by his army pension.

To judge from the number of references to him in the OS Memoirs, Campbell had a fair amount of interaction with the various survey writers. As a veteran of the British army, he doubtless felt comfortable talking with the Survey officers and civilian assistants. We don’t know when exactly his inn was established, but if it was before 1834, perhaps the memoirists stopped in for a dram as they worked through this section of Bovevagh, Dungiven, and Banagher parishes.

In the draft memoir for Bovevagh parish, C.W. Ligar recorded one such interchange with Campbell. When I first came across the passage, I was quite moved at ‘overhearing’ his quoted voice in conversation with the Survey, something rarely possible for early nineteenth-century farmers:

Thomas Campbell of Ballymoney discovered about 1827, 5 feet beneath the surface of a small bog, a curiously shaped ancient hatchet or axe. He described it to have been about 8 inches across the edge and that the handle embraced it ‘similar to an adze or cooper’s tool’; also that there was on the back, in front of the handle, ‘a hook and a prong’; the edge was very thin and sharp. The weight was about 6 lb and it was of iron. It was worked up by a smith into a modern shaped hatchet. The iron was found to be of a very superior quality. The same Thomas Campbell has in his holding the ruins of a fort called Lishnagorp or ‘the fort of the dead bodies.’ This he has lately demolished and he found in the interior several human bones and pieces of boards. It was formed at the rim by large stones. The hatchet or axe just described was found within a few perches of this fort (pp 13–14).

Campbell was probably digging turf (peat) for his winter heating when he came across the curiously shaped ancient axe. We learn from the Fair Sheets of Thomas Fagan that “the shape of this axe was so rare and curious that all the description that Campbell can give of it is that it was 8 inches across the edge, and on the back in front of the handle there was a ‘C hook and prong’ ” (p. 35).

While both the Ordnance Survey and his descendants may regret that he re-forged this ancient axe into a modern hatchet, a young farmer with a growing family could ill afford to let six pounds of free iron, “superior to any of the iron now used,” become a museum piece or heirloom. With five children in addition to his wife to feed, Thomas made the pragmatic choice to turn this archaeological find to his own use and profit, consistent with his capitalizing on the new Dungiven-Derry road with his inn. Campbell found the curious axe some hundreds of feet from an ancient ruin, Lis(h)nagorp, ‘fort of the bodies.’ These ancient forts, ‘giants’ graves,’ or ‘Danish forts’ were ringed enclosures from ca. 500-1100, essentially fortified farmsteads into which a family and its livestock could retreat from marauders. The Roe and Faughan valleys had many such enclosures, and the Ballymonie area seems to have been particularly dense with them. When the pressure of an expanding population in the early nineteenth century pushed the Irish up the hillsides,
their agricultural labours often disturbed these graves and forts. In the winter, farmers would dig them to redistribute the material around their holdings, not only to amend the soil but also to even the ground for plowing and planting.

The OS Memoirs provide a fascinating glimpse into the cultural transformations of Thomas Campbell’s generation’s attitudes toward these and others monuments of antiquity. Traditionally, giants’ graves or Danish forts were left untouched, as they were uncanny sites. As the Memoirs for Banagher note, these sites “are nearly all in good preservation, the peasantry imagining that anyone who touches a stone of them will afterwards receive perpetual disturbance from the fairy tribe” (p. 38). From many grew hawthorns or other ‘gentle bushes’ that served as ingress or egress for the ‘gentle folk,’ the ‘green-coated army’ who inhabited another world that humans entered or disturbed at their peril.

From our perspective, Thomas Campbell’s activities in digging up and destroying the fort seem natural enough for someone young and industrious with a growing family. The Memoirs document that farmers needing to feed their families increasingly broke with the traditions of awe for ancient sites in order to increase the size and fertility of their acreage for crops. In Campbell’s case, this “disenchantment of the world” in Max Weber’s sense may have been strengthened by his stint in the British army. Weberian technical rationality runs any modern western state military organization, and Campbell’s three-year encounter with the nineteenth-century British army system probably contributed to his ‘disenchanted’ view of giants’ graves and fairy forts. ,In this particular clash between ‘redcoats’ and ‘greencoats’, the redcoats ,won.

Despite his willingness to tear up a ‘Danish fort’ to improve his farm without fear of harassment from the ‘gentry,’ Campbell was no modern sceptic. Another story from the OS Memoirs for Bovevagh shows that for Thomas Campbell, disturbing old pagan monuments was one thing, but uprooting Christian symbols quite another:

In the holding of Patt Roe McCloskey, townland of Ballimony, there stands a very ancient stone cross, very coarse and roughly constructed…This stone cross is erected in a very large and ancient stone wall that was thickly studded with old bushes, one of which at present overhangs the old cross. … At some former period a Mr Calhoon removed the aforesaid cross from its original berth to his own dwelling, to place it as a lintel over a doorway, in which use it remained for some months, during which time a desolation of cattle and other disasters attended the family and chattels. He also had several warnings from some invisible messengers that his misfortune and distress could continue to increase, till he would leave the stone cross back in the place from which he took it. At length Calhoon consulted his friends and clergy on the above project, who all advised him to act as directed by his nightly but invisible guest. He took the friendly advice, took down the stone cross from over his door and erected it in its former place, where it since, and at present, remains undisturbed. Informants Thomas Campbell, P. Brolly and many others.

Calhoun’s nightly messengers and invisible guest are structurally similar to the visitants from the ‘green-coated army’; in other stories told in the Memoirs, as are the retributions of ‘desolation of cattle and other disasters’. However, for Campbell to have related this story to the Ordnance Survey writers, there must have been an important difference in his mind between his tearing up the fort Lisnagorp and Calhoun’s moving the stone cross to repurpose it as the lintel of his
doorway. While the OS writers often attributed both types of story to Irish credulity and superstition, Campbell’s stories reveal that he saw the world in selectively disenchanted ways. A disenchanted view could shift stones from old forts unscathed, as nothing more than useful building blocks, but woe was sure to betide the one who moved stone shaped as a cross. In the 1830s, some monuments of antiquity were still powerfully ‘enchanted’.

Thomas Campbell’s daughter Catherine (ca. 1831–71) married Bernard McCloskey (ca. 1825–89) of Leeke townland in Bovevagh parish in 1848. In a stroke of luck for my research, and indeed for understanding rural tensions leading up to the 1798 Rebellion, the Memoirs for Bovevagh contain several references to a notable occurrence befalling this extended family in 1795:

Under this head it may be observed that the most remarkable event that has occurred in modern times in the parish was the murder of Brian Backagh McCloskey of Leek in the year 1793. He was supposed to have been about to make information to the Revd John Harvey against the ‘Shakers’, who had been for some time destroying the crops of the reverend gentleman. Accordingly, McCloskey’s house was set fire to by a midnight party. He attempted to escape through the window but was beaten back by the butts of guns and burned to death. The daughter and mother, seeing that they were surrounded, stood under the door jamb and, being sheltered by the top, as well as by the thickness of the walls, which in cabins is usually broader than the human body, were thus saved from the fury of the flames by their providential presence of mind. A party came down and rescued them before their situation became too precarious. The flames were drawn from them by the draught of the burning house going through the chinks of the door.

Elsewhere it is noted that McCloskey was ‘better known as Shane Backagh’. The Memoirs indicate that men in the neighborhood were accused and tried for the crime; one was jailed for several years, while others fled to America. The jailed man, David MacLurg, became the occasion for a United Irish potato digging (political protest-cum-military exercise) in November 1796. The incident persisted in local memory not only to the next generation, when it was recorded by the OS, but even down to the twentieth century as a local ballad commemorating the digging was sung in ceilidhs around the Roe Valley (PRONI D/4017/2).

Was this unfortunate victim one of my McCloskeys? The 1766 Religious Census enumerates a Shane McCloskey as the only ‘papist’ (Roman Catholic) in the townland, the remainder being ‘seceders’ or Presbyterians. The first trial of the accused MacLurg took place in September 1795 at the Derry Assizes. The laconic notes from the Derry assize sessions of Summer 1795 indicate that John and Bridget McCloskey, whose houses were burned the night of 18–19 June 1795, received compensation from the county in the amount of fourteen pounds, seven shillings and sixpence. The arson attack was thus directed not only against Brian McCloskey, but apparently against related families as well.

A John McCloskey of Leeke was counted in the 1831 census, and he is known to be the father of Bernard, Catherine Campbell’s husband, as well as of five other sons and a daughter. Four of those sons show up in Griffith’s as farmers in the same townland, and two were known to have emigrated to the US. Given that in 1831 there were no other McCloskeys in Leeke, the John receiving compensation in 1795 is very likely the John of the 1831 census, and therefore my third great-grandfather. He was most probably a family member of the murder victim, whether brother, son, or nephew.

Other information in the OS Memoirs confirms this likelihood in my mind, and ties together other circumstances begging for explanation. It is known from family records that the John of the 1831 census, Bernard’s father, was the holder of the Brae Face Tavern on the public highway in Leeke (this is now Drumrane Road between Limavady and Dungiven). How did he get his start as a publican? What was his capital? And how did any of his sons, let alone four of six, purchase farm leases in the same townland at a time of land competition?

The OS Memoirs for neighboring parishes, including Drumachose (Limavady) and Dungiven, note several relevant facts. First, ‘dram drinking’ was an essential part of the culture, whether to keep off the cold, to seal bargains properly at fairs, or to celebrate life’s passages at christenings, weddings, and wakes. Second, the memoirs note in several places that publicans were the only ones with capital that could be invested.

Here’s my story for John: Having received compensation from the county for the burning of his house in the tithe disturbances of 1795, he set up as a publican on a small plot of rented land in Leeke townland. By 1799 or 1800, he had accumulated enough money to marry and start a family (the gravestone in Dungiven of his first son, James, gives a birth year of 1800). A new distillery and brewery just a few miles away at Limavady provided ready supplies of necessary fluids for the trade (OSM Drumachose, pp 120–121).

Over time, his profits were substantial enough that he was able to assist his sons in their acquiring leases to farms in the townland. This would explain how not just one but four of his sons were able to enter a highly competitive land market.

The Memoirs can also provide clues that might tip the balance in a researcher’s consideration of whether to commission a professional search. Is such research worth the expense given the possibility of negative results? What sort of evidence could make the odds of a fruitful search higher? Here’s an example. One of Bernard McCloskey’s brothers, Michael, was said to have left Leeke for Belfast. Other family notes from my grandparents’ generation said that he married Elizabeth Dailey and had two daughters, Bella and Roseanne.

Serendipity and the Memoirs have allowed me to fill in some of this story. While attending the Ulster Historical Foundation’s conference in Belfast in 2006, I nipped out to look around the famous Linen Hall Library. I came across the card index to the Belfast Newsletter, and casually flipped through looking for family names, not expecting to find them, as my Derry farmers were not the sort (I thought) to make Belfast news. Yet there was a Michael McCloskey, merchant of Glasgow, married in 1839 to Elizabeth Daly, daughter of Daniel Daly, Esq. at Tamlaght O’Crilly church by Rev. John McLoughlin.

The parish serves the towns of Glenone (Derry)/Portglenone (Antrim), which span the River Bann. The ages roughly fit, and the Glasgow connection was plausible, as many of Michael’s nieces and nephews, as well as brother Bernard, moved to that area in the 1870s. The OS Memoirs for Tamlaght O’Crilly mention that Daniel Daly, merchant, contributed the land for the national school in Glenone/Portglenone. This verifies that her father was substantial enough to aspire to notice of his daughter’s marriage in the Belfast paper.

If a family is named in both the Ordnance Survey Memoirs and the Belfast Newsletter, then the chances that they were of enough standing to leave other records behind seemed good enough to call in professional help.

A family history search by the Ulster Historical Foundation turned up Daniel Daly’s will (PRONI MIC/15C/3/1), in which he mentioned his granddaughters Isabella and Roseanne McCloskey, children of his daughter Elizabeth, now married to Roger Birney. John McCloskey’s son Michael had evidently died in America in the 1840s, leaving Elizabeth to return home with American-born Bella and Roseanne.

These select examples of how the OS Memoirs have assisted me in retracing the history of families and townlands could easily be multiplied many times over. My experience has left me to conclude that the Ordnance Survey Memoirs are essential reading for anyone researching people and localities in the north of Ireland during the long nineteenth
century and, as such, are an essential source for providing context for family searches in pre-Famine Ireland.

A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities made possible the study of Ordnance Survey manuscripts and illustrations at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin.

Thanks also to the Royal Irish Academy for permission to reproduce illustrations from the Ordnance Survey materials, and to the Deputy Keeper of Records at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland for permission to reference materials in their holding.

1. Trevor Parkhill, ‘School Records and Their Value for Genealogical Research,’ Familia: Ulster Genealogical Review 1 (1985), 8–11. While the official townland name is ‘Leeke,’ usage among the McCloskey emigrants and indeed in the Roe Valley today is consistently ‘the Leeke.’ A few other townlands in the area follow this usage, notably ‘the Main(e)’ in neighboring Balteagh parish (this usage can be found in PRONI D/1550/162/K/2A, lease of 1784; and in D/1550/162/K/2C, will of John Kane, 1866). Thanks to Dermot Rafferty of The Grey Gables for additional local inquiries on ‘the Leeke.’
2. In national perspective her attendance was middling as well: in 1881, 50% of national school pupils attended 100 days or more. David Fitzpatrick, “ ‘A Share of the Honeycomb’: Education, Emigration and Irishwomen,” in The Origins of Popular Literacy in Ireland: Language Change and Educational Development 1700–1920, ed. Mary Daly and David Dickson (Dublin, 1990), 167–87 at 170 n.6.
3. Available at www.eppi.ac.uk, and searchable by keyword, title, and other data elements. Not all material has been uploaded in full text form, but there are enough national education reports on Ireland to provide contextual data for almost every decade after 1831. This is a particularly welcome resource for those lacking access to libraries with the full run of British parliamentary papers. On the value of British parliamentary papers to family historians, see William Roulston, ‘British Parliamentary Papers and the Local Historian and Genealogist,’ Familia: Ulster Genealogical Review 18 (2002), 63–82.
4. Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, Forty-Seventh Report, 1880, with appendices, 202–203, retrieved from www.eppi.ac.uk.
5. Appendices to the Forty-Sixth report of Commissioners on National Education in Ireland, Appendix B, ‘Reports on the State of Schools,’ p. 9, retrieved from www.eppi.ac.uk .
6. Unpublished manuscript of Helen Heffernan (1903–1996), family history notes, transcribed M. Wack.
7. John Logan, ‘Sufficient to Their Needs: Literacy and Elementary Schooling in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Origins of Popular Literacy (n. 3 above), pp. 113–137. The Twenty-Sixth Report of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, 1860, contains a table (pp. 62–63) giving levels of proficiency of enrolled children. At Largy in 1859, 21 were in the 1st level, 25 in the second, 11 in ‘sequels,’ 20 in the third level, and none in the fourth and higher. The average age of pupils was 10. This was the first post-famine cohort, and had not had time to advance to the fourth class and above. Donald H. Akenson, The Irish Education Experiment: The National System of Education in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 233 provides national data from 1865 on percentages of students in the various levels of proficiency. Only 7% were engaged in studying the fourth level of textbooks, and the majority were in the first two levels.
8. William Bole in his 1880 report on the state of schools in Derry and Donegal (n. 5 above) comments that there was not marked improvement in students’ reading results, as “the number of ‘mere passes’ is increasing, and of ‘satisfactory passes’ declining” (p. 13).
9. Bole (n. 5 above), p. 14.
10. See Fitzpatrick (n. 2 above), ‘A Share of the Honeycomb’ on Irish women, education and emigration. A letter from Bernard Newman to his mother Elizabeth McCloskey Newman (6 Aug. 1907) mentioned meeting a neighbor who had emigrated to Australia and then returned. Quoted in William Kincaid Newman, ‘Newman Family History, Ch. 2, The McCloskeys in Ireland,’ unpublished manuscript, p. 21: ‘I also met a man, quite old, who has recently returned from
    Australia who knew you all.’
11. Fitzpatrick (n. 2 above), 178. Graeme Kirkham, ‘Literacy in North-West Ulster, 1680–1860,’ in Daly and Dickson, Origins of Popular Literacy, (n. 2 above) 73–96, esp. 87–88. Agnes’ cousins from Leeke, Michael and John McClusky, advertised their grocery business in Ayr with clever, indeed sometimes punning poetry that extolled their blend of ‘Peacemaker’ whiskey. In one poem, Chamberlain and Kruger reconcile over ‘a special dram from Ayr’: ‘It’s very pleasing now to see / That Joe and Kruger do agree / Seeing they have both confessed / M’Cluskey’s whisky is the best. / They’re confident it will not fail / When it arrives in the Transvaal; / Then we shall hear of war no more / One glass will tame the wildest Boer.’ Another, ‘De Wet and Every Day Wet’ plays on the rainy weather in Ayr and the Boer figure De Wet to propose: ‘I’ll dae my best tae meet this chap, / And I’ll gi’e him a soothin’ drap, / Tae put an end / Tae a’ this wicked war an’ strife, / An’ make him civil during life; / Then he’ll gang home an’ treat the wife / Tae the Peacemaker blend.’
12. Bole (n. 5 above), p. 14. Agriculture was taught through the Agricultural class book, ‘which attempted in simple language to teach how best to manage a small farm and kitchen garden. The book covered everything from crop rotation to field drainage to proper diet for farm labourers and was an admirable collection of popularized agricultural theory.’ Donald H. Akenson, The Irish Education Experiment: The National System of Education in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 235.
13. Bole, p. 13.
14. Fitzpatrick (n. 3 above), p. 173.
15. In the 1766 Religious Census, Shane McCloskey is the sole ‘Papist’ in Leeke townland, all others being Presbyterian (PRONI T/808/15264). A Bryan Shane ‘Backagh’ McCloskey lived in Leeke in 1795, the locally-renowned murder victim of agrarian unrest, noted in Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland, v. 25: Parishes of Co. Londonderry VII, 1834–5, North-West Londonderry, ed. Angélique Day, Patrick McWilliams, and Nóirín Dobson (Belfast: Queen’s University Institute of Irish Studies, 1994), pp. 27, 54, 59. The 1831 Census lists John McCloskey, Roman Catholic, as resident in Leeke, heading a household of two females and four males.
16. The Hamiltons of Leeke are first documented in the 1740 Protestant Householders census, where a Samuel is listed (PRONI T/808/15258). Samuel Hamilton is noted as holding 43 acres in Leeke at will from Edward Edwards, Esq., of Straw, in 1758 (Belfast Newsletter Dec. 22, 1758). I wish to thank the Ulster Historical Foundation for the research report that contained this reference. In the 1766 Religious Census, Samuel Hamilton is listed as a Seceder (Presbyterian) along with all others in Leeke except Shane McCloskey, “Papist” (PRONI T/808/15264). In 1777 Samuel Hamilton witnessed the will of Edward Edwards of Straw (PRONI D/2547/1), and in a land document of 1857 (PRONI D/1550/160/24/2) we learn that Samuel’s son Joseph took over the Leeke farm, and his sons Samuel and Joseph sold part of it to Michael Mullan. The Townland Valuation of 1831 (PRONI VAL 1B/514/A, fol. 22v–23r) bears out the relative luxury of the Hamilton house and “offices” [outbuildings], rated then at £4 and 8 shillings. The 1831 census found the Presbyterian Samuel Hamilton
    heading a household in Leeke of 5 males, 3 females, and one female servant. In Griffith’s (1858), Samuel Hamilton leased 43 acres to Patrick McCloskey, son of John (n. 16 above).
17. Thanks to Seamus Hasson, Dungiven, for sending a copy of Fr. Mooney’s Dungiven parish death register for winter 1870-71, during which Eliza Devine McCloskey died in November and Catherine Campbell McCloskey in February.
18. William Makepeace Thackeray, The Irish Sketchbook of 1842 (Dublin: Nonsuch Publishing, 2005), 301.
19. PRONI VAL/1B/514/B.
20. Akenson, The Irish Education Experiment (n. 7 above); Mary Daly, ‘The Development of the National School System, 1831–40,’ in Studies in Irish History Presented to R. Dudley Edwards, ed. Art Cosgrove and Donal McCartney (Dublin: University College, 1979), 150–163.
21. J.R.R. Adams, ‘Swine-Tax and Eat-Him-All-Magee: The Hedge Schools and Popular Education in Ireland,’ in Irish Popular Culture 1650–1850, ed. J.S. Donnelly and Kerby A. Miller (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), 97–117. On hedge schools, see also Patrick J. Dowling, The Hedge Schools of Ireland (London: Longmans, 1932); Antonia McManus, The Irish Hedge School and Its Books, 1695–1831 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004).
22. ‘Grandmother [Elizabeth McCloskey] Newman … also read a great deal and always regretted that she had not had a college education,’ according to her grandson William Newman. William Kincaid Newman–Autobiography, ed. James B. Newman and Katherine K. Newman (Luray, Virginia: LuLu.com for The Newman Family, 2005), p. 49. She set up a revolving education fund into which all her children paid, and the fund paid for college for each in turn.
23. On Dungiven classical schools see John MacCloskey, Statistical Report of the Parishes of Banagher, Bovevagh and Dungiven, Co. Londonderry, 1821 in Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland, v. 30: Parishes of Co. Londonderry, X, 1833–35, 1838, Mid-Londonderry, ed. Angélique Day and Patrick McWilliams (Belfast: Queen’s University Institute of Irish Studies, 1995), 12.
24. On John MacCloskey, see David O’Kane’s introduction to the Statistical Report of the Parishes of Ballinascreen, Kilcroghan, Desertmartin, Banagher, Dungiven and Boveva in the Co. of Londonderry (1821). (Draperstown: Ballinascreen Historical Society, 1983). John O’Donovan also points out that there was an accomplished scholar in Limavady in the 1830s, Patrick O’Hagan, who, in contrast to John MacCloskey, ‘was always at war with the priests and well-dressed peasantry of the country.’ John O’Donovan’s Letters from Co. Londonderry (1834) ed. Graham Mawhinney (Draperstown: Ballinascreen Historical Society, 1992), 128.
25. OS Memoirs, v. 25 (n. 16 above), pp. 3, 25, 27, 28, 55 on schools of Bovevagh parish in the mid-1830s.
26. The Autobiography of Thomas Witherow 1824–1890, ed. Graham Mawhinney and Eull Dunlop (Draperstown: Ballinascreen Historical Society, 1990), 17–29.
27. John MacCloskey, Statistical Report (n. 23 above), p. 14.
28. Quoted from Logan (n. 7 above), ‘Sufficient to Their Needs,’ p. 131.
29. The children were not allowed to attend singing or dancing schools, and their ‘companionship was very carefully guarded’ (Elizabeth). It is handed down that their father used to lull his children who had toothaches to sleep by reciting the (three-page) ‘Prayer to the Blessed Virgin.’ For a brief overview of the ‘devotional revolution hypothesis,’ see David W. Miller, ‘Religious History,’ in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research, ed. Laurence M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher (Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2005), 61–76. Philip Donnelly, The Great Church of the Roe: Limavady Parish (Limavady: Limavady Printing Co, 1982) describes the ‘Big Mission of Limavady’ in 1854, which Bernard McCloskey almost certainly would have attended.
30. McManus, Irish Hedge School (n. 21 above), traces the growing indignation in the nineteenth century over bawdy reading material in the hedge schools.
31. Return from National Schools in Ireland of Number of Pupils who have daily read portions of Holy Scriptures, 1843 vol. 51, Enhanced British Parliamentary Papers on Ireland, 1801–1922, retrieved from www.eppi.ac.uk .
32. On tutors in the home see John Logan, ‘Governesses, Tutors and Parents: Domestic Education in Ireland,’ Irish Educational Studies VII.2 (1988), 1–19.
33. Elizabeth’s mother, Catherine Campbell, descended from the Campbells of Muldonagh, Bovevagh, Co. Derry, listed in the 1766 Religious Census as “Seceders” i.e. Presbyterians (PRONI T/808/15264). That may have been a factor in the unusual Bible ownership by a Catholic family of the mid-19th c.
34. Catherine McCloskey of Dungiven (1817–1902), sister of the emigrant Hugh whose letter to his nephew about getting a good education before emigrating is preserved in PRONI (T/1767), kept a list of births and deaths of her children on the last pages of her Bible. In an interesting parallel to the Leeke Campbell-McCloskeys, Catherine’s mother was a Presbyterian (Douglas), and may have brought the practice of Bible entries to her marriage with the Catholic George McCloskey. Thanks to Jo O’Reilly of Belfast for a copy of the relevant pages. A second parallel is noted by M. A. Higgins and P. Bryson, ‘John O’Kane (Senior), Farmer, Maine townland, Drumsurn, Co. Derry, 1781–1865,’ The Winding Roe 6 (2007), 30: O’Kane, a Catholic who owned land, married the Presbyterian Jane Haslett (sister to Rev. Henry Haslett, minister at Castlereagh). According to Higgins and Bryson, ‘Jane made John write down the main dates of his life, his birth date, their marriage date and birth dates for their children. He also noted their baptismal dates…’
35. The Derry Almanac and North-West Directory for 1871 (Belfast: Books Ulster, 2003), p. 156.
36. Letter of Ellen Dies McCloskey Horan to her sister, Elizabeth McCloskey Newman, Aug. 23, 1899, quoted by William Kincaid Newman, ‘Newman Family History, Ch. 2, The McCloskeys in Ireland,’ unpublished manuscript, pp. 16-17: ‘You will see by my letter that I am in Ballymonie. Well the place is not much changed, but the people are all gone. My uncle’s family is out of my grandfather’s place and there is only two of them in the town. The two boys are married and the girls are all in Derry Dressmaking.’ On the development of the shirt industry in Derry, see the brief overview in Avril Thomas, Derry- Londonderry, Irish Historic Towns Atlas No 15 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2005), p. 7.
37. This characterization is indeed borne out by valuation data from 1831 and 1858, which shows that this family had the second most valuable land in the townland, and lived in the most valuable two-story stone house. Griffith’s Primary Valuation, Parish of Bovevagh, p. 127, townland of Leeke, reveals that in 1858 Patrick M’Cluskey leased a holding rated at £33 annually from Samuel Hamilton, just slightly lower than David Pollock’s £36 holding farther down the Roe braes in Leeke. Patrick’s house, however, was rated the most valuable in the townland at £2.
38. Thomas, Derry-Londonderry (n. 36 above), 37–40.
39. Ellen Dies McCloskey Horan to Elizabeth McCloskey Newman, Aug. 23, 1899 (n. 37 above): ‘Then made our way to the beautiful land of the Leek. You would scarcely know our old home. There has never been any one living in it since we left it and it looks very neglected. There is very few left in that part now. The school house is gone. There is just the walls of Maryann Mellon’s house standing. I could not begin to tell you all the changes.’ See Adams, ‘Swine-Tax,’ p. 98 (n. 21 above).
40. Mason Gaffney, ‘Henry George, Dr. Edward McGlynn, and Pope Leo XIII,’ a paper delivered to the International Conference on Henry George, Cooper Union, New York, 1997, revised 2000, p. 2.
41. The Troy Press (Troy, N.Y.), July 17 and 18, 1891: ‘Young Agnostic’s Burial’; ‘Hoosick Falls Excited: Religious Influences Make a Sensation in the Village’; ‘More About the Boy Drowned Several Days Ago.’ I wish to acknowledge Mr. James B. Newman for kindly providing copies of these articles.
42. Information from Helen Heffernan, Agnes’ daughter, preserved in unpublished family history notes transcribed by M. Wack. Among other acts of independence, Agnes cut her hair short and rode a bicycle in public. A ‘Sister’s Blessing’: ‘May every blessing on you wait / While journeying to your rest / May you while in a vale of tears / With happiness be blessed/ And when about to close your eyes / In deaths final sleep / May you be seen to smile with joy / While all around you weep. May 24 ’85 Your Loving Sister Agnes’