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Cullonaughton - Tom's ancestors' former home

We found the hillside village of Cullonaughton, the home of our ancestors, located halfway between Swinford and Foxford in "The Callow". It isn't even a town, barely a village, and consists of only about 70 people scattered in about 35 homes placed far apart.around the bottom and beside the beautiful Callow Lake. No one we met in Cullonaughton knew of Grandpa of course, he had left that area in the late 1870's as a teenager. As soon as I mentioned his father's name though, (Hugh Edward "Ned" McGowan) everyone knew immediately how we were connected to the McGowan's that they knew or knew of. Ned our great grandfather and our great grandmother Mary Conyngham had five children, Mary, born and died in 1857, Patrick, born and died in 1859, another son named Patrick born 1860, died 1949, Grandpa born 1861 died 1939 and Edward, born 1863 died 1944. Ned died in 1896 but he and his father (our great great grandfather, Edward Hugh McGowan) were the original people to clear the land and to begin the McGowan farm in the late 1830's or 1840's. 

The local church (St. Thomas in the Callow) has been there in that spot, virtually unchanged (except cosmetically) for two hundred and three years and it is where all of our ancestors attended church and were baptized. The original altar and sacristy are intact as well as the holy water font (now painted brown) and the original baptismal font, they all date from 1812. The church has of course been updated over the years, new roof, new floors, electricity and modern conveniences but it is the original footprint with most parts of the church, including the hand hewn wooden choir loft all original. Brian and I were invited to attend mass there with Margaret McGowan the next day and we both did. It was a surreal experience to know that I was sitting where all of the McGowan's before me had worshiped for almost two hundred years.

As you will see by the two signs at the entrance to the village that leads back into the hillside property along and above Callow lake, the village is spelled two different ways. Though the spelling variation is slight it has existed so for a very long time. Recently the decision was made to finally name the village as it was originally spelled on the 1830 census. The "Old McGowan Property" part of this video shows the home that is currently standing on that property and that was erected about 15 or 20 years ago. It is of course a large and much newer home, nothing like the small homes that were common when the original house was built. When I complete the blog I will include some early pictures of the original McGowan home before it was torn down about 1970. They come from our newly discovered 2nd cousin (Grandpa McGowan's brother Edward's granddaughter), Kathy Grbac who lives in Lompoc, California. Kathy' mother, Ellen (McGowan) Conway grew up in the McGowan home in Cullonaughton and came to Chicago in 1927 with Grandpa McGowan's help.    

As an interesting tidbit of information one of Grandpa's nephews, Hubert McGowan (Patrick's Son) came to Chicago from Ireland, with Grandpa's financial assistance about 1920 and became a Chicago fireman. When he retired from the fire department he returned to Cullonaughton. He was still well remembered by the older people that we met because he had lived into the late 1960's. We tried to find the original land from written descriptions and copies of pictures from long ago that we received from cousin Kathy. After some lengthy frustrating and fruitless driving up and down the dirt roads and trying to match up the description we had brought with us with what we could actually see I asked Brian to pull over near the bottom of a long driveway up to a home.  I figured there was no way we were going to make the trip to Ireland and give up our search that easily. I walked up the driveway to the door and knocked. A child answered and I asked for his mother who appeared behind him. I explained "This may sound odd but my name is Tom McGowan, I'm here from America and trying to find my ancestors farmland. can you help me?" She said, "Well come right on in Tom McGowan, you're very very (yes, she repeated very)  welcome here, we know the McGowan's well, will you have a cup of tea?"  That was our introduction to Helen and Ian Clarke and their family. At their suggestion I spread out a number of old photocopies that I had brought with me from pictures that had been taken in the 1970's.  Everyone looked at the photos trying to recognize familiar views but the area had become much more heavily overgrown in the past fifty years. When the pictures had been taken it was cultivated farm land and looked different than now. Helen left a voicemail for her friend Margaret McGowan and told her about our visit. She gave me Margaret's phone number and suggested that I call her back later that day.

Helen said, "we'll do better by getting into the car and starting the search that way". We drove down to the bottom of the driveway where she and Brian met. We then followed Helen's car and she led us up and down the "boreens" (grassy cart paths, the only roads within the village) while we followed behind, trying to locate familiar spots from the pictures. We found a few places that matched the photos but not the McGowan farm. She said that Margaret (our distant ?? cousin) knew precisely where it was. I called Margaret that afternoon and we made plans to meet at her home the next day which we did. When we first met Margaret McGowan, her brother Michael and their mother Mary, they were standing in their front yard waiting for us as we arrived. Margaret's mother took one look at me in the doorway, threw her arms around my neck and told me I was "the spitting image" of Hubert McGowan. I remember our Dad talking about Hubert while we were growing up.  Mary told me how he had come back to Ireland after he retired from the Chicago Fire Department and bought a red VW and that it was the only car owned in the entire village. She said he drove up and down the grassy roads in the village for years He taking anybody that needed a ride to where they wanted to go. I had heard of Hubert but here was a person who had actually known him and remembered him well. She also knew his siblings that have only been names in my ancestry research files for all these years. She put a face and a personality onto all of them. She is eighty three years of age and full of wonderful memories which she freely shared with us for over an hour while we all sat in their kitchen together, a magical experience!

The distant cousin that we met  there, Margaret McGowan and her family, gave me the definition of Cullonaughton. She said that "Culle" in Irish means woods, or forest and Naughton was the name of the original landlord of that entire area so Cullonaughton simply means "Woods of Naughton". That would tell us that the land was heavily wooded until it was cleared for farmland which must have been a herculean task. The forest is back now and covers most of the farmland in that area now. The land and Callow Lakes are such a beautiful setting, it's even more stunning than I could have imagined. Margaret McGowan, in the video, is guiding me down the path on the old McGowan farm to Callow lake. She told me that she had played all along the path with the other McGowan's as a child and that the path led down to the original fishing (and swimming) hole at the lake. She said that all the McGowan's including our great great grandfather, great grandfather and grandfather and all of the family members had walked down that same path to that same fishing hole for almost two hundred years. It was an experience that I will never ever forget!

Every home that we went into (six) the peat stove was in the center of the small kitchen right near the front door and that is where people gathered to talk. Margaret McGowan showed us how the peat is cut by a machine while in the ground and then stacked in piles to dry. Once dry it is an excellent and very clean source of fuel.

				Peat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Peat (turf) is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation or organic matter that is unique to natural areas called peatlands or mires.[1][2] The peatland ecosy...
In the larger cities it's likely that natural gas is used for heating and cooking but in the rural areas which comprise most of Ireland, Peat is seemingly the prime source of energy. It grows in the ground in bogs, is natural and replaceable by nature.

We loved the entire trip but the days we spent in Cullonaughton were extremely special. It was the end of a lifelong quest for me, I found my roots and it was an adventure unlike anything that I could have imagined. I was walking in the very footsteps of all of those who came before us.

The people of Ireland, in by themselves are the most wonderful offering of the country. Without fail they were warm, sincere, smiling, welcoming, helpful to a fault and extremely accommodating. The Irish have earned their well earned worldwide reputation for being friendly and the McGowan's and their friends all took us into their homes and their lives in a "heartbeat". They hugged us and told us that they wanted us to know that they considered us their family and that we would be very very (yes, repeated again) welcome at anytime that we could come back to visit. It was truly a wonderful experience!

County Mayo

In addition to the connections to Tom's distant relatives and visiting the location of Tom's ancestors homes in Cullanaughton (details in a later post) we had a wonderful time "being locals" in Swinford, County Mayo.  There are not many sites to see in the area but there is a lot of history.  The most well known is the Great Famine of the mid 1800s which resulted in mass starvation, disease and emigration.  One million people died and another million emigrated during this period, reducing the Irish population by one quarter.  There were so many deaths that many people had improper burials in anonymous mass graves.  One of these mass graves is at the Swinford Workhouse (now a medical facility) which is marked by a single tombstone and plaque.  No one knows the identity of the people buried here.  Even more tragic is the "Procession of the Souls" memorial, a children's grave across the street that was only recently built.  It is basically a nicely done sign and path to the grave site of many unidentified children that died during the Great Famine.  As you can see in the pictures, the grave sites are only identified by an unmarked stone or rock.

Downtown Swinford

This part of County Mayo, in western Ireland (by the way, they spell it Maigh Eo) was the hardest hit area during the potato famine of 1857 (and off and on for a century to come) There is a major burial plot with hundreds of unidentified bodies rapidly buried in a mass grave, just up and behind the church. There is also a separate little field, "Procession of Souls", nearby that is marked only with small ordinary field stones, one for each of hundreds of tiny graves of infants and young children who died of starvation and disease during that terrible time. The death rate was appalling, people were literally dying in the streets. The economy was devastated and there was no money or time to permanently identify the occupants of those little graves, they were buried within hours of their deaths and marked with only a small stone picked up from the ground near the grave and placed at the head. They remain that way today. Now that all who knew who they were in their tiny plots have died,the occupants of those graves remain unknown now forever. 

The Swinford Workhouse

Mass burial site from the Great Famine

The memorial to the children's grave

Children's grave stones

In the town of Swinford, about six kilometers from Cullonaughton, is a pub called Mellet's that has been there since 1797 and was surely the prime watering hole for all of our Irish ancestors. The pubs in the small towns there are different from here in America, they are much more of a family gathering place, not just a bar. People are there to share time with each other and to talk so the noise level is always pleasant. Friends, family (including older children) and neighbors gather to share time with each other. We enjoyed sipping the famous Guinness beer while watching a wonderful (TV broadcast) Irish football match between County Mayo and Dublin, an amazing, energetic, fun experience that you'll see on the video. Talk about team rooters! They all wore County Mayo (Maigh Eo) team jerseys and wildly cheered at every play in the game. We got there early and as the crowd grew larger as game time approached people eventually asked if they could share our booth with us which we readily agreed to. Before long, during the game, crowded together, we soon had their arms around our shoulders and we found ourselves living in the moment with them, singing Irish songs and enjoying our Guinnesses. Some Irish pubs in towns feature evening authentic traditional Irish music sessions, the better ones are quite wonderful. 

Our visit coincided with the All-Ireland semifinal matchup in Gaelic football between County Mayo and arch-nemesis Dublin.  Gaelic football is a cross between soccer, Australian rules football and rugby.  Honestly, it's a bizarre game that looks more playground than professional to me, but I think all sports are like that when you think about them logically.  None of them make much sense until you realize they are all games and all have arbitrary rules.  However, the fun of it all is throwing logic out of the window and immersing yourself in the excitement of the moment; which we did as we became staunch County Mayo GAA football fans fully equipped with our County Maigh Eo flag and scarf.  Dublin started quickly in the game and Mayo kept it close throughout until near the end when Dublin appeared to put the game away.  But the Mayo fighting spirit persisted and Mayo scored a goal (3 points) and 3 one point something-or-others-that-look-like-field-goals and the game was tied at the end.  It was a remarkable comeback and it left the fans in the pub in good spirits and gave them a reason to hang around and merrily drink some more (the Irish are very good at that).  In Gaelic football a tie game doesn't not mean an overtime or shootout but rather a replay of the entire game a week later.  Sadly, we were not able to hang around for the next game and Mayo lost in a blowout.  But we remain avid fans and have our flag and scarf proudly displayed in our home office.

The game - the reactions are the same all over the world

The final score is 2-12 to 1-15, which is a tie (trust me).  Let's do it again!

The house shown further along in the video at the "Heritage Museum" depict more closely what the McGowan house originally looked like and we were told the interiors and exteriors of those tiny older homes were all the same so if you see one you've seen them all to a very good degree. I suspect that the houses shown at the Heritage museum are a little larger and more deluxe than the actual McGowan home must have looked like because these are about twenty years or more newer than our family home was. The grey two story home presently located there now is the third to exist on the property. The original home (1830-40?) was torn down by one of the McGowan's in about 1970 when most of the large farm was sold off. One of Kathy's uncles built a newer version of the smaller old original home for the remaining McGowan's living on the property at that time but that too was razed when the property sold again and the new owners (living in England most of the time) built the current larger home. There are still remnants of the old original home existing, though fragmentary and the flagstone floors and stairs as well as a small stuccoed original cow shed (now newly remodeled and roofed) that still stand as they have since first built by our great great grandfather in the early part of the 19th century. I asked for permission to remove a small piece of the limestone flagstone wall to carry home as a souvenir of our visit. 

Homes of that time consisted of only three small connected rooms. The center room was the living area (I'd guess it to be about 8' X 6') which contained one double bed in a covered alcove, a few pieces of furniture and the fireplace for cooking and heating.To one side of the living area (the lower room) was a room that was the part of the home where the livestock were kept in most family homes, yes...indoors.You will see a rusty horseshoe imbedded into the original inside wall of the McGowan "lower room" of the old house. The reason for the horseshoe (and there were probably a number of the horseshoes originally) were to tie the animals to that to contain them inside that room. The animals were the most valuable family possession and in the evenings they were usually herded indoors and secured with a harness to one of the horseshoes imbedded into the wall for the night. The "lower" room was set about 2" below the level of the main living area and had no windows. 

Tom Hennigan's family home built in the 1870s.  (Brand new thatched roof)

To the other side of the living area there was a room referred to as the upper room, about 2" above the living area. This room was reserved for the elderly or the most senior members of the family. In some cases it had one small window, in most cases there were none. Everyone else slept where they could find a corner on the flagstone floors. There was usually a small loft above the "lower room" that was primarily used for storage but younger children, who could manage it, scrambled up there to sleep. Families with ten and sometimes fifteen children were common so it was crowded.

At that time most of the British colonies, Ireland, Wales and Scotland were taxed heavily by England. One of their taxes was, believe it or not, on the amount of  glass in a window. (called a daylight tax) Because of that the windows were usually very small. We were told by the museum curator that the more creative of the people used dried and stretched animal placenta to fit within the small window frame instead of glass. While it was opaque and obscured the view it did allow a small amount of daylight through and that wasn't considered taxable. Someone eventually remembered the idea of the Dutch door that opened in half from top to bottom. The Dutch door became common, that way the top half of the door could be left open to allow light to enter the house while the bottom half was closed to keep small children inside. This gave birth to the phrase "daylight robber" which has now passed into history, I had never heard of the term until we were there. The British felt cheated of their tax by the Dutch door.

Many people died of tuberculosis (and cholera and dysentery) in those early years and it was only discovered after modern hygiene was understood that the reason became apparent. Having animals closely confined within the house with few (or no) windows to ventilate the resultant unpleasant conditions was a prime cause for many unnecessary deaths. The windows shown in the "Heritage Museum" homes in the video are larger and more numerous than what would have been common in most small homes. That home is authentic by the way, the owner of the museum and his family had all grown up in that house and he has lovingly restored it to preserve homes of that style that are now crumbling and disappearing all over Ireland. The reason that the small homes were usually bright white was they they were covered in lime (not paint which was unaffordable and unavailable) to keep fungus and sickness under control. The roofs were always thatched straw and though they too are rapidly disappearing in newer dwellings today. The thatched straw roofs still exist but the insurance premiums are prohibitive so only the "determined Irish who insist on tradition" retain them. They are commonly seen in the smaller villages however. The thatched straw roofs last for seven to ten years and then they must be replaced.

One of our final stops in Mayo was the Addergoole Titanic memorial to the local people who were on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, eleven of which perished and three survived.  Two McGowan's were part of this group:  an aunt who perished and a niece who was rescued.  This story is a published historical novel, The Girl Who Came Home.  The protagonist of the story is based on Annie McGowan, the surviving niece.

The Antrim Coast in Northern Ireland

Giant's Causeway

On the northern border of Northern Ireland is the picturesque Antrim Coast.  Our first stop was at Giant's Causeway, a geological formation of about 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, each with five to seven sides, formed about 50 to 60 million years ago.  

The locals insist that this is not true, but instead the causeway was made by an Irish giant, Finn McCool.  Finn built the causeway to scout a potential adversary from Scotland he heard about, another giant named Benandonner.  When he arrived in Scotland, he saw that Benandonner was much bigger than himself so he retreated home and in a panic his quick thinking wife dressed him in baby's clothes and told Fin to pretend he was an infant. Benandonner arrived shortly after and he saw the size of the giant baby and was terrified of the thought of the size of the father so he retreated back to Scotland even more hastily as ran to Ireland.  Finn immediately broke up the causeway and that was that.

The pipes of The Organ

The Chimney Stacks

Dunluce Castle

Dunluce Castle is just a few miles from Giant's Causeway on the Antrim Coast and was built in the 13th century by the 2nd Earl of Ulster (Ulster is a province in Northern Ireland).  It changed families only a couple of times in documented history, first to the McQuillan family then to the MacDonalds, who defeated the former in battle in the late 16th century.

View from the castle

It is difficult to avert one's eyes from the captivating beauty of the Antrim Coast, but taking a minute to turn 180 degrees one notices the beauty of the farmland and countryside.  If you have mental images of Ireland, these probably fit them... minus the sun.  We have noticed that every section or property seems to be bordered with a stone wall or hedge.