Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Pieces of History. I'm Colin McGrath and in each episode i explore both the well-known and the overlooked stories that have shaped our world. This is the second part of my interview with Phil Donnelly as we follow his family history from the Donnelly line to the Dean's side of the tree.
Speaker: If you join me for part one, you'll remember the McGee family of Hannistown and a world shaped by faith, hardship and survival. Today we pick up that story through the Joy Dean Line, a journey that begins with a bold cross-faith marriage and stretches from the Belfast Hills all the way to the Royal Court of Spain.
Speaker: You mentioned the survival of some fragments of the 1851 census and Edwards' will. Why are these sources so rare and what did they reveal about um the family history?
Speaker: The census is is rare because basically all Irish censuses before the 1901 and 1911, they all destroyed a fire in the excuse me,
Speaker: they were all destroyed in a farm in the fort courts four coats excuse me in Dublin during the Civil War, 1921 I think it was, and by chance the records that had been collected for parts of County Antrim had been taken out from the forecourts to be publishers, to be bound.
Speaker: because that's what you had to do And they weren't on the premises. so there some fragments of those survived the the troubles at that time. And it's quite rare to find ancestors in any kind of a census with any kind of detail at that time.
Speaker: So that's what's valuable about those records. Edward's will, you you do get wills left behind by people. Not everybody, maybe, I don't know, one in every four at the most might have left a will.
Speaker: but Fortunately, we have ah Edward's will, a copy of that held at Peroni, and it does give details of his, you know, it gives gives you some insight into his family and his children and what the situation was there.
Speaker: In September 1862, he made that will. Neither his wife, Eleanor, nor his granddaughter, also Eleanor, are mentioned in it. So I think they may have both died sometime between the census and his writing the will.
Speaker: The provisions of the will do shed light on the relationship with the children. um and I'll go through them just quickly. He left what he called his farm of land that he was living in to his son Edward, who's the blacksmith.
Speaker: All the chattels and furniture were to be supposed off to pay debts except for, wait for it, the bedstead and bedding which was left to Hannah. Hannah also received 30 pounds one year after his decease.
Speaker: She seems to have been the favourite daughter. Thomas got some land. Another daughter got 15 pounds. But his son John's interesting because he was the one who had the the little garden cottage in the middle of Edward's property.
Speaker: and the will stipulated that he would receive 10 pounds when he gives up possession of the house and the garden he now lives in. If any expenses would be removed in removing him would be incurred, these would be deducted from that 10 pounds.
Speaker: He was an unwelcome tenant, it sounds like, from reading the reading of that will. Most interesting for me, actually, is he leaves money the his three sons in America.
Speaker: I didn't know about them, but because of the will, we now know that he hear had a son called Eva, a son called Barry, a son called William, and he left each of them in America, one shilling each.
Speaker: A sort of a common practice then to mention everybody in the will, perhaps to avoid legal challenges or whatever, I don't know. But they got a mention, it was a trivial amount, one shilling each,
Speaker: I didn't know about Eber, but because i know about Bernard and William, I know that they were in the family household at the time of the census in 1851.
Speaker: Eber, somebody knew, and it seems to me that he's he's mentioned in the will, therefore he's the only one of his sons who could possibly be the father of the boy who was left behind, Edward.
Speaker: So we have a name for him, Eber. at times in Antrim. To his grandson Edward he left ah eight pounds, again one year after his decease, he left some to his other three pounds to his so second grandson John.
Speaker: So that that was the wheel. Interestingly john bill farmer John Bell, a farmer of Corniglis, next door neighbour, was ah was appointed one of the executives of the will, which shows that, again, that connection between the Bell family, who were Presbyterians, and these Catholic people of the deans and the muggies there.
Speaker: That's fantastic, Phil. Just before we finish off with this side of the family and move across to the deans, then is there anything else you wouldd like to kind of sum up about how you found, again, like I said, the very outset of the episode, a lot of people are probably in the process of maybe thinking about starting to trace their own family trees or halfway through. How did you find the process from start to finish? i know you're still doing a lot of work in the background on both sides.
Speaker: Would you have any advice for anybody starting to kind of look especially people who maybe aren't necessarily living in their own country of birth or, you know, have got descendants in a different country. How would you how how did you find the experience? And have you any advice for people?
Speaker: First of all, how find the experience, I would have to say, it was incredibly exciting, especially in the first years when you were finding out things. Nobody, for example, in my Donnelly family, nobody knew what the name of our great-grandfather was.
Speaker: and And suddenly he defined his obituary and nose name and find out all these things. And it seemed like there were discoveries every day. And that was such a buzz. Unfortunately, you you've you've eventually worked through all the available material. And then it's it's it's more humdrum, if you like.
Speaker: um for For people starting out, I think you you need to be prepared, first of all, to be ready for... spending a lot of time on it because it is incredibly time consuming, ancestry research.
Speaker: But it is, as I said before, it's very rewarding. And some people actually are looking for really close relatives, like ah they don't maybe don't know even know who their father was. So from not for those people, it's it's it's ah an incredible life changing event to be able to track them down.
Speaker: And of course, with modern ancestry resources that my aunt and uncles and my parents didn't have, you you have DNA to add.
Speaker: And it really helps a lot in completing the pictures. So it's question of if you're, I can't really tell you what people in America, for example, should do, but they seem to be ahead of us in many ways because where we don't have any, we've got so few records in Ireland, And in America, i find people's trees over there where they routinely have ancestors going back in 1500 and 1400, you know, because over there, they were keeping records right back from as far back as then.
Speaker: In Scotland, they had no problem with their census records because they're all complete and they're beautiful things to find. I've i've got some relatives in Scotland And it was a joy to find their records because they're so detailed.
Speaker: In fact, one of the daughters... of the dean family late i found out that she was a daughter because it said on her death to certificate she was certain Gilmore was her name, married name, but to give all the details of her father, her mother, her mother's maiden name, where she was born and everything.
Speaker: So they're great. But in Ireland, it's um it's a bit harder. there's ah There's a lot of different resources so you can work to. There's forums that can help you. um I couldn't really go through and list them all now.
Speaker: You need to have a look on Facebook and find the Ancestry forums and and get help there to to find out what resources are available that you can follow up here.
Speaker: We're now moving on to your other branch of your family tree. So for some listeners, can you set the scene of where they lived? what kind of world did Margaret Joy and Philip Dean live in during the mid 1700s? And again, geographically, can you set the scene and work where this is?
Speaker: In the 1700s, the linen industry was established in Lisbon in the early 1700s and in the surrounding districts. And with that came to opportunities for work.
Speaker: Men from all over the north of the island drifted into the hills around Hannistown with their families. And for many years, the area became quite densely populated.
Speaker: They built little cottages, usually one-room cabins built of sods. These could be seen from the town below dotting the hillsides. They would work in small garden patches of ground around their dwellings to grow potatoes and other vegetables.
Speaker: The landowner considered them to be tenants at will, that is, tenants that can be evicted without notice. But of course, before eviction, if they were evicted, a rent was demanded from them.
Speaker: Amongst the new arrivals who came to that area of the town was a family of a tenant farmer named Philip Dean. What can I say about the geography? We're talking about the Belfast Hills, which is that range that goes from the southwest to the towards the northeast of Belfast.
Speaker: And so mostly they were on high land on hillsides. And in the Pansdown Parish, in in little valleys and dales and hillsides there, they had quite good land there. But where where Philip came to on what's known as Black Mountain above Belfast. It was not that kind of land. It was a more harsh environment.
Speaker: And I guess you can think of the deans as being the newcomers. So, you know, the the the better land was already gone, taken, occupied by other people, and they had to take what was available, and that's what they did.
Speaker: <unk>m Talking about a period now where there's an unholy alliance. At some point during the mid-1700s, a Presbyterian woman named Margaret Joy wanted to marry Philip Dean, a Catholic tenant farmer.
Speaker: In order to do so, Peg, she was known, she took the vows and was baptized a Catholic. The couple wed secretly, knowing that the marriage would be viewed in horror by her strict Presbyterian family.
Speaker: Not only were the two families from opposite sides of the aisle, but also there was an immense gap between the social standing of a tenant farmer and the illustrious Joy family.
Speaker: On the other hand, this unholy ah alliance has been seen as something of a badge of honour by Philip's people right down to this day. So much so that the surname Joy has been frequently adopted as a Christian name by many of the descendants of Philip and Peg.
Speaker: Francis Joy Craig Joy's father was Francis Joy, 1697 to 1790, prominent figure in Ulster in his lifetime, probably best remembered for establishing the news Belfast Newsletter in 1737, which remains the oldest English-language newspaper still in publication.
Speaker: Also remembered for his grandson, Henry Joy McCracken, who was hanged in Belfast for his part in 1798 Rebellion. Peg Joy was Henry Joy McCracken's aunt.
Speaker: The family were Protestant Presbyterians of French Huguenot origins. In 1685, Protestantism became illegal in France when Catholic King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which prior to then i had afforded them some protections under the law.
Speaker: French Huguenots faced terrible choices. they could either convert to Catholicism or face life in a prison or flee the country. Faced with this persecution, around 200,000 Huguenots in France fled to seek safety in non-Catholic nations.
Speaker: The arrival of Huguenot artisans and manufacturers significantly benefited the economies of their new countries, particularly when they contributed to the industries like textiles and watchmaking.
Speaker: Many went to England, but some, including Francis Joy's father, Richard, came to Ireland. The religious divide in Ireland at that time, the three main religious beliefs were Protestant Church of Ireland, the Presbyterians, and Catholicisms.
Speaker: The Church of Ireland was the only officially state-sanctioned religion. It had been modelled on the English Church of England, which was established in the 1500s by King Henry VIII. Religious intolerance was rampant,
Speaker: and none were more extreme than the Presbyterians. Maria McCleary, in her biography about Mary Ann McCracken, wrote of Mary Ann's grandmother, Captain John McCracken's mother was a strict Presbyterian, stern and uncompromising.
Speaker: On Christmas Day, she would sit conspicuously at her spinning wheel as a protest against the keeping holy of such a time. In the 1700s, Legislation known as the penal laws were brought in directed almost exclusively at the Catholic majority population, but it also affected the Presbyterians.
Speaker: They were known as the dissenters of the North because they were Protestants. They dissented from the originals official official religion of the established church, the Protestant Church of Ireland.
Speaker: Under these laws, the Catholics became effectively third-class citizens. They were excluded from political, social and economic power. They couldn't vote, own land, bear arms or join the military.
Speaker: They couldn't run schools, they couldn't join professions and in fact Catholic churches were outlawed throughout the country. Respiralians also suffered but to a lesser extent.
Speaker: Their marriages were not recognised and they couldn't join the public service. So it was in this social and religious environment that Peg Joy had chosen Philip Dean to be her partner in life.
Speaker: The couple's first child, Joseph Joy Dean, was born in Hannah's town around about 1752. Hannah Byrne's name, McGee, 1845 to 1938, Tornogrof has left us with some anecdotes about this boy Joseph.
Speaker: He was Hannah's grand uncle. Hannah Hall Gaunt Lady was intensely proud of her ancestral heritage and loved her country with fervent hatred.
Speaker: She was an excellent storyteller, relating tales she had heard from her mother who remembered the people who had climbed Colton to attend Mass in the penal days and the terrible times when the wreckers came to their home in the rock to raid and plunder.
Speaker: One of her anecdotes concerns the confirmation of this boy, Joseph. The name that was chosen for the reception of the sacrament was Joy, but the officiating bishop rhymed on this.
Speaker: He would prefer the name of a saint. However, ever Haig was insistent, so Joseph was selected as the patron saint and the name Joy allowed to remain.
Speaker: We can sense the resentment that Pegg must have felt towards the family who had disowned her when she defied them, but also she was confronting the Catholic tradition to insist her son have the name Joy.
Speaker: Father Joseph Joy Dean, an Irish chaplain to the Spanish royal family. The Dean family was not blessed with worldly wi wealth, so it is likely that Joseph as a boy and during his early manhood contributed to his family's upkeep.
Speaker: however The young man had a strong vocation, a calling from God to the priesthood. In those penal days, Catholic churches and religious education were banned in Ireland. The only option for men aspiring to the priesthood was to travel to Europe, where there were seminaries in Catholic countries such as Spain and Italy.
Speaker: Joseph began his studentship in the Jesuit Irish College at Salamanca in Spain. He was self-educated and on several occasions earned his way when hard-earned money was scarce.
Speaker: He later travelled to Lisbon in Portugal where he completed his religious education at the Irish Seminary of St. Patrick there. In 1792, he was ordained Dean.
Speaker: as a priest fatherdae Joseph was a very well-educated man. Later he held a professorship at the seminary in Lisbon. He also spoke several languages, French being one of those. Anna Burns held in her treasured possession until the end of her days a prayer book, Devotions to the Sacred Heart, which had been translated from the French and revised by Reverend Joseph Joy Dean.
Speaker: yeah At this time, there was great upheaval in Europe. Drastic changes had already begun during Father Dean's years in Spain, including the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, which were reverberated around the globe, particularly so in those countries that still supported a monarchy.
Speaker: We might wonder if Joseph was uneasy about the effect the revolt would have on his own native land, smouldering as it then was. At that time, all of Europe was suffering from terrible anxiety. The French were waiting in blood. Paris was panic-stricken. Father Dean must have heard the news of the organized massacre of the royalists in the prisons of the French capital and the declaration of war against all kings on behalf of all peoples in November 1792. January the next year, Louis the for sixteenth of France was guillotined.
Speaker: And in February, Holland, then Spain and March were drawn into the maelstrom. One year later, Britain, too, was sucked into the whirlpool of war.
Speaker: Joseph Mind must have often wandered back to his home and the precarious situation in Ireland. It is likely he was aware of the ghastly perpetrations being carried on there and that no one was safe from attacks and no place secure.
Speaker: Even in his native Hannistown, midnight outrages were frequent. Innocent, inoffensive peasants were ruthlessly shot and robbed and their property burned.
Speaker: Many of his own relations suffered with the rest. As an Irishman, his heart must have ached for his brave cousin, Henry McCracken, first incarcerated in Kilmainham jail in Dublin and later executed at Belfast.
Speaker: It was in the reign of Charles IV that Father Dean, shortly after his ordination, became chaplain to the royal family and a tutor to the royal children, teaching them English, among other subjects.
Speaker: A charming little tale of his life in the Spanish court is told. One day, Father Dean, talking to the royal mother-to-be, the Queen, made a humble request which greatly appealed to her.
Speaker: She agreed and promised that if the child was a boy, he would be named Joseph, in honour of the royal chaplain. Well, as it happened, a daughter was born to King Charles, but the Queen kept her word.
Speaker: The child's baptismal name included Josephine. After a time, Father Dean was transferred to Rome, to the great disappointment of the royal family, for he was a beloved favourite there.
Speaker: He spent a considerable considerable period in Rome during which time Emperor Napoleon was crowned king of Napoleonic Italy in 1805. Finally though, in 1825, the penal laws were being relaxed.
Speaker: He could go home. The numbers of priests in Ireland remained low and the church needed them to return to their homeland to care for their flocks and to build churches.
Speaker: So Father Dane was chosen for an Irish mission On the 2nd of December, 1825, Father Dean was appointed parish priest of Blanchardstown in North Dublin.
Speaker: There he built a church and a seminary, both named for St Bridget. Father Thomas McNamara, who came after Father Dean in Blanchardstown, tells in his memoirs how Father Dean, in his latest year later years, reminisced about old Belfast in the 1770s.
Speaker: seventeen seventy s Father Dean used to interest the young people in his parish by telling them telling them about the state of religion in his country when he was young.
Speaker: He said that the greatest wonder he ever saw in his youth was three peaced priests together in Belfast. There was no church or chapel at that time, with a few Catholics in the town. Still, there was a priest among them, and when Sunday morning came, the faithful looked in a certain direction to see if they would have a mass.
Speaker: The signal used to be a man carrying a box under his arm containing the holy vestments and two others carrying the various parts of a portable altar.
Speaker: As they went through the fields, they used to look about to find the best shelter depending on the direction the wind was blowing. Someone would guide the priest to the chosen spot.
Speaker: His poor flock would quickly gather around him. Some would stand to his right and some to the left. to provide shelter for the altar. The rest knelt down on the moist soil to assist at the holy sacrifice under the open canopy of heaven.
Speaker: The dear old priest returned from this distressing picture to exclaim with gratitude to the Almighty, could I ever have expected in those days what I would see and hear today.
Speaker: After a long and active career, Father Joseph Joy Dean died in Dublin in 1836,
Speaker: The beautiful church of St. Bridget at Blanchardstown still stands as a lasting memorial to his work there. The little church bears a window to his memory and a blast brass p plaque gives the date of his demise.
Speaker: Father Dean, 1750 1836.
Speaker: So Hercules Dean appears in the maps in 1820, sorry. That's correct, yes. So how does his story capture the word of the tenant at the time and the landlords too?
Speaker: At that time, the landlords, I can talk about the landlords for sure. Sorry, skip the history of the flights of the erals and all the rest of it. But basically, ah English landlords often chose to reside on their estates in England. It was convenient for them to lease large areas to middlemen who were known one as immediate lessors.
Speaker: And they would, in turn, sublease smaller parcels to the tenant farmers. So there was two levels of profit that were being taken on tenants' land. On Hercules' land, his land, his his immediate lessor was ah a man named William Hunter.
Speaker: And we actually have a record of... ah william William Hunter Sr. who had died in 1808 and the lease on what what they called attractive mountain land was to be sold after his death.
Speaker: And they advertised that you could expect, the buyer might expect a profit of £60 year from the full grazing rights on the land. with rents payable by the tenants at will. So it was a ah business proposition for people to think about.
Speaker: notice in a newspaper in 1808 that tells that Patrick Dean, who lives on the premises, will show any person. he was He was appointed to show anybody around the boundaries of the property and the area of the property.
Speaker: So that was that was the Dean's role there. They were to show people about it. By that time... hercules comes along well he he's he's he was born in 1774 we don't know really that much about his life but we know we can support pinpoint where he was at different times baptism, old church baptism records and so on basically he really it's really really featured quite prominently on Patterson's beautiful map that was done in 1820 that you mentioned and from that that map we can see that he had a large swath 340 acres subleased to Hercules, and it actually refers to it as Dean's Mountain on the map.
Speaker: This was before the British-style Ordnance Survey came along where they didn't didn't have personalisation of maps like that anymore. so He also had a map also shows us he had also had a lease of land on the lower slopes of the mountain in Ballydown Fine Town Land, ideal for dairy farming. um He married Mary McAleese and he they had children together. They three boys, four boys, sorry, and a girl, Hercules Mary.
Speaker: The girl rose... She married a Gilmore, went off to Scotland and has many, many descendants over there still living to this day. But the three plasters are interesting. That's John, Joseph, John, James.
Speaker: Each became tradesman plasters. Again, that says a little bit that that the Dean family weren't the absolute bottom of the the barrel in terms of social standing. To begin to be to be a tradesman, to get it to get an apprenticeship in those days, if your father had have some money or influence or both.
Speaker: So they they became tradesmen plasters, and they chose to, so two of them, jo John and Joseph Joy, settled at Carrickfergus, north of the entrance to Belfast Loch.
Speaker: James and his family raised his family on the Inishoan Peninsula at Movil by Lochfoyle, at the maritime entrance to the town of Derry. Sir Arthur Chester also, it should be noted, had been awarded the title of Baron of Carrickfergus's,
Speaker: Carrick Fergus and Inishon for his military efforts in Ulster on behalf of the Crown. So what's the connection between these two regions so widely separated? Antoine Donegal. He is a town to Belfast and Derry both were strategically important in military sense and flourishing centres of commerce.
Speaker: In the 19th century, the merchants of Derry and Belfast had established a lucrative trade of goods between them. Railways didn't yet exist and transport by road was simply not an option. Any roads leading away from the town soon and fizzled out in the stony tracks in the countryside.
Speaker: Instead, wooden-hulled sailing ships plied the seas around the treacherous north rocky coast of northeast Ireland. The Redmonds were a family engaged in securing maritime safety for those ships and their crews.
Speaker: Their men were the lighthouse keepers and pilots who guided ships through dangerous waters and the coasts who would pool survivors from the sea if a vessel foundered. In contrast to the majority of Ireland who lived on the land, the Redmonds were scattered around the coastlines from one end of the island to the other.
Speaker: James Dean and his brother Joseph Joy married two sisters, Eleonora Redmond and Teresa Redmond. At the hamlet of Shove on the Inishoan Peninsula, there stands a lighthouse to guide ships at the entrance of Loch Foyle.
Speaker: There was a pilot who lived there. It was his job to help shifts navigate the dangerous shallows into Derry. He married another sister, Eliza Redmond.
Speaker: This leads me to the charming tale of so-called maiden lighthouse lovers that is connected with the Redmond family. The maiden rocks are located 800 yards apart in the Irish Sea, about five miles off the coast of Lorne.
Speaker: The two rocks posed a serious hazard to shipping, so in 1829, twin lighthouses were built on them. In the early days, the keepers of the lighthouses and their families lived on the site for the whole year.
Speaker: In the eighteen thirty s William Redmond was the keeper of one lighthouse. Tom McKenna was the assistant keeper on the other. When William's daughter Mary Ann and Tom met, they fell in love.
Speaker: He visited her her often by rowing a boat across the 800 yards distance between them. It has been speculated that when the seas were rough, the couple communicated by semaphore.
Speaker: Legend has it that the parents disagreed the romance and tried to end it. There was a falling out after which Mary Ann's father, William Redmond, forbade them to meet.
Speaker: Love was too strong and in 1839, the couple eloped and married in Carrickfergus. That was Phil Donnelly, whose work on the Joy Dean branch of his family tree opens a vivid window onto Ireland's past, from cross-faith marriages and tenant cottages to journeys that reached all the way to the Spanish royal court.
Speaker: Stories like these remind us that the history often survives in quieter threads, in the choices families made, the land they worked and the memories carried through generations. You can follow Pieces of History on Instagram and Facebook at Pieces of History.
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