Topic: IRELAND, SUMMER 2004
Subject: RE: the greener gavins
hi all !!!...guess what, we just got back from ireland yesterday morning and everything i wrote you is now in a completely different light.
ireland was beautiful, magical and the irish very friendly and exuberantly gregarious!!
...and, and here's the big surprise, the one that brought goose pimples out all over me,,,,,i found OUR GAVINS....more precisely our LIVING KENNEDYS
...and all thanks to my dad's cousin jack gavin (doris' husband) CORBOY lead. i followed and followed and followed,,, and after discovering that CORBOY was a still existing TOWNSLAND (an irish plow was to turn up 120 acres yearly, this was called A PLOUGHLAND, 12 of these make up a BALLY or TOWNSLAND. CORBOY in Gaelic means "yellow hill"· and there is only one CORBOY TOWNSLAND in all of ireland....and it happens to be at the tip of LONGFORD COUNTY (The other tip doris gave me)
...i found the Address for the Longford county genealogy research center on the internet before i left home and went there on tuesday ...only to find that the only geneologist only puts in two hours daily and wouldn't be in till the next day..but they said to try the Longford Library...
...there in a separate building exclusively dealing with local history and anchient records,,,a man named martin found a TITHING RECORD from the year 1833 which listed a PETER GAVIN as the sole Gavin tither (a one-shot record ot the taxes paid to the anglican church of england in that year) in CORBOY he had 9 acres and 32 purchases.......but martin could find no other records in EDGEWORTHSTOWN )the town to which CORBOY now pertains) OR CORBOY...he said we were at pretty much a dead end but before going to the parishes, i should talk to pauline at the geneology center the next day.....
....which i did and in 10 minutes she had a computer data bank reference to Peter Gavin's birth (our great-grand father) and 15 minutes later another record of his father James Gavin to Ann Kennedy ten months earlier (feb 11 1850). sounded too good to be true...and i asked where the original records were kept...she told me they were in st.mary's church archives....and gave me the name of the pastor of that church.....
...well i went out to the church and monsignior patrick earley went back into the church archives and found the original records written in LATIN in flowery letter for both peter's birth and baptism and for his parents marriage...with a list of the godparents and witnesses attending,
which in the case of the marriage was really a fluke because (as still is true today) marriages are celebrated in the WOMAN'S PARISH not the man's ,,,,but as it turned out the KENNEDYS are one of the oldest families in CORBOY (and back then there were only about 9 families living there) and both families (the gavins and the kennedys) were of the same parish (then KILOE PARISH)
...he told me that all the gavins seemed to have emigrated, or moved permanently because there are none listed in the GRIFFITHS RECORDS which was the next census source for tax purposes that comprised CORBOY TOWNSLAND...but there were still plenty of KENNEDYS around...
...i asked if i might go out there and talk to them, he told me sure (a little skeptically i might add)...he proceeded to sketch me a crude map with cruder instructions of how to get there and told me i would probably find MARY KENNEDY doing the evening milking
..sure enough she'd just finished doing the milking and she and christy (christopher) her son first a bit timidly but as i explained who i was and what i was after, more and more enthusiasticly,,, invited us in and started a long journey back in time, laced with old photographs and letters and intermittent phonecalls to her sisters-in-laws (brigid kennedy in dublin (same name as our peter gavin's godmother) and margaret (same name as the bride's maid at james gavin's and ann kennedy's wedding) ...turns out that back then there were only two kennedy families living in CORBOY ...the upper kennedys and the lower kennedys...and the first names, the given names were always repeated according to irish custom...so one could pretty well tell which family and which generation one was from just by the given name and the order in the family-- she seemed certain we were from her family because the other (kennedy) had completely different first names...
...she made us tea and went to fetch fresh tomatoes from the garden to make us open face sandwiches for supper, and for almost three hours tried to get me up to date with all that had happenned in the kennedy family and in corboy during the last 150 years !!
..i returned to the geneology center the next day and they are doing a complete check to see how the existing kennedys were related to our great great grandma kennedy, born in CORBOY in 1836 and married to James Gavin in their local church in 1850 just 10 months before giving birth to PETER GAVIN, and then in 1953 ANN GAVIN, with whom they arrived in New York in May of 1853. (these records correspong exactly to the ones i found in the 1856 U.S. census and then again in the 1860 U.S. census where Peter Gavin is recorded as being 9 years old, his sister ann 7 years old, his brother john -born in illinois, 4 years old, another brother christopher (possible coincidence (or probably not) that the mary kennedy i talked to has a son and a dead husband (this was the "kennedy", she was "morgan") 3 years old and finally a baby sister, maria, 1 year old -the later two, both christopher and john being born in walworth county wisconsin. Ann Kennedy Gavin, their mother was listed as being 30 years old and James Gavin 31.
..the obituary notice from the chicago paper states that peter gavin died at 83 in park row and was survived by three sisters (ann, maria and ??) and two brithers john in lake geneva and christopher in chicago, it also states he was survived by his five children, john, of oak park, paul and james of linn. helena of chicago and alice of california, Paul, of course is our grandgather. (does anyboby know what happed to christopher in chicago, or ann, or maria,,,,or alice in california?)
