Ireland’s Past, Present Merge as Exiled Families Find Each Other

They crowded into the mud and stone cabin--Padian, Hanley, McDermott and the others, to plot the unthinkable: a rent strike against the British crown.

By the light of candles and a turf fire, the ragged band of neighbors spelled out their demands: legal title to land they claimed was rightfully theirs.

One hundred and sixty-five years ago, the tenants of Ballykilcline believed they were planning their town’s future. In fact, they were ensuring its demise.

Like bigger armed protests around the country, their little rent strike was snuffed out brutally, and through the usual combination of disaster and misdeed: famine, eviction, informants. Those who didn’t die of hunger were herded off to America, their one-room hovels torn down, their tiny town wiped off the map.

Ballykilcline seemed destined to vanish from memory too.

And then, more than a century later, something extraordinary happened. An ocean away from the land of their ancestors, the neighbors found each other again.

Padian. Hanley. McDermott. Once more, they are plotting long into the night, planning their town’s redemption, searching for a piece of their past. Today, they are computer technicians and journalists and fly-fishing instructors. They communicate via e-mail and an emerald-green Web site. Scattered across America, they are bound by a past that some know better than others, and by a desire to return to the place their hearts call home.

They call themselves “The Lost Children of Ballykilcline.”

“We left the land to come here,” wrote one of their ancestors in a 19th-century journal. “But no one knew we would miss the neighbors so much.”

*

Ballykilcline’s reincarnation began 10 years ago, when historian Robert Scally of New York City stumbled upon a reference to a rebellious midland town that became such an irritant, the British government decided to erase it. It did so spectacularly, paying for most of the population, about 100 families, to emigrate to America.

Intrigued, Scally headed to Ireland. Poking through the national archives, he found papers--enough to fill two pillowcases--detailing the rent strike of Ballykilcline.

The handwritten petitions told a forbidding tale, of hunger and disease and resistance, of a poor but scrappy community determined to cling to its thatch-roof cabins, its hardscrabble potato fields, its barely livable way of life.

The smell of turf still lingered on the pages.

Sifting through them, Scally met the ringleaders: Richard Padian, in whose shebeen (tavern) the rebels gathered; Mark Nary, one of a family of hotheads, always getting arrested for something or other; Hugh McDermott, the cattle rustler, the wealthiest by a dozen or so acres.

He found Father Peter Geraghty, who, as one of the few who could read and write, may have been responsible for drafting the petitions. And he met “the wily and obsequious” John Cox, rent collector, informer, most hated man in town.

“There was so much information,” said Scally, an expert on 19th-century Ireland, “it made my skin crawl.”

In his 1995 book “The End of Hidden Ireland,” Scally describes the life of the tenants and their 10-year struggle to hold on to their land. He follows the long, tedious path of the lawsuit and the increasingly violent efforts to evict those who refused to pay the annual rent of about $15. He tells of skirmishes with bailiffs, the encroaching famine, and, finally, “two blasts of duck shot” that killed Denis Mahon.

Mahon was the English landlord, who lived in regal splendor on a 10,000-acre estate that included about 20 towns, among them Ballykilcline. His murder in 1847 caused a sensation in the English press and sealed the fate of the town.

Evicted from their homes, the tenants trekked across the country to Dublin, where they were put on ships bound first for Liverpool, England, and from there, to New York City.

“You wonder what happened to the rebels when they landed in New York,” said Scally. “Did they stay together as neighbors in any sense? Did Padian and McDermott remain leaders?”

And the most perplexing question of all:

“Did any of the tenants go back to Ballykilcline?”

*

August 1995. Peter Hanley made his way down a winding country road in County Roscommon, where pink and white wild roses tumbled over stone walls and the sweet scent of hawthorn filled the air.

Like many Americans visiting Ireland for the first time, Hanley marveled at the scenery, the tranquillity, the hospitality of the locals.

But it was history, not scenery, that brought him here. Hanley’s history. His family’s past.

Historically, the area around Ballykilcline, where Hanley stood, was known as Doohyhanley--O’Hanley’s country. Hanley, an advertising executive from McLean, Va., believes he is a descendant of Catherine and Peter Hanley, who fled Ballykilcline after the town was torn down. They settled in Lower Manhattan and were buried in Queens.

Hanley knew his ancestors were from County Roscommon, but he wasn’t sure of the town. Five years ago, a friend introduced him to Scally. Over dinner in New York City, Hanley learned about Ballykilcline.

So he made this pilgrimage into the heart of Ireland. He stopped at a whitewashed farmhouse to ask for directions and introduced himself. The owner, a farmer, responded with a hearty laugh.

“Welcome back,” he said, offering a dirt-stained hand.

The farmer’s name was John James Neary, descendant of those hotheaded Narys (called “rod-irons” locally--a reference to their preferred method of dealing with those who didn’t agree with them).

“Walk down the road with me a piece,” Neary said. “I think there’s something you should see.”

Hanley followed Neary to a small cemetery, where tall Celtic crosses rise above moss-covered mounds and worn-out gravestones seem to whisper the names of the past: Padian, Neary, Cox. Beneath the gray Roscommon sky, on foreign land that was beginning to feel oddly familiar, Hanley leaned over a burial stone and squinted at the inscription: Ellen Hanley.

Catherine and Peter Hanley had a daughter named Ellen. Could she be his great-grandmother?

“There is no doubt that they had incredible spirit, this little group of people, the way they lived and fought against all the odds,” he said. “And against all odds we are finding each other again.”

Hanley whispered a prayer over Ellen’s grave. Then he asked Neary if he would sell his land.

*

Back home, Hanley went on-line to search for other descendants of the Ballykilcline rebels. In Poulsbo, Wash., he found Maureen McDermott Humphreys.

Humphreys’ search for her Irish roots began years earlier, with a battered brown trunk on a Cleveland street.

She was cleaning out the house of an aunt who had died when the lid of the trunk caught her eye. It was plastered with strips of handwritten notes, fading scraps of a journal pasted there a century earlier. Humphreys spent months on her knees, peeling off the notes, most of them illegible. But a few jumbled sentences made her keep on peeling.

“My Da was born in Allykilcline and so was my Ma,” wrote the author, Thomas McDermott, Humphreys’ great-great-grandfather.

And so began her search for “Allykilcline.”

Like Hanley, Humphreys had already done enough research to know that she was descended from Hugh McDermott, who emigrated from Ireland in 1847. She knew his son, James, had married another Irish emigrant and that they had moved to Ohio with their son, Thomas. She knew James had been killed in the Civil War.

But Humphreys, a fly-fishing instructor, had never heard about the rent strike, the neighbors, or the heartache of Ballykilcline.

“It was such a warm feeling,” she said of that first e-mail from Hanley. “This connection with so many people from the past, this reaching into the present.”

Today Humphreys and Hanley e-mail each other weekly, sharing information, searching for more neighbors. So far, they have found 13 families, including James Padian in Houston; William Fox in Brentwood, Tenn., and Thomas Shanley in Woodinville, Wash. They built a Web site and designed a logo: a farmer gazing toward a thatched cottage, green hills in the background.

And they gave themselves a name: The Lost Children of Ballykilcline.

*

Ballykilcline, 1840s: “Our families are really and truly suffering in our presence and we cannot much longer withstand their cries for food, as we have no food for them and our potatoes are rotten.”

The letter, on exhibition at the Famine Museum in Strokestown, County Roscommon, was written at the height of the great hunger, which killed 1 million people and caused 2 million to emigrate. It is one of hundreds of petitions from the starving poor who lost everything when their potato crops failed.

Today the ridges of the abandoned potato fields rise gently beneath the grass, achingly beautiful and sad, sloping down to Lake Kilglass.

“When the crop failed there was nothing they could do but leave,” said John James Neary, standing in his fields in the heart of Ballykilcline. “This is what they left.”

There are no markers to indicate what happened here, no monuments to the past. Just overgrown potato fields and local lore--and, of course, the neighbors.

Beside Neary is his neighbor, James Cox, great-grandson of the “wily and obsequious” informer mentioned in Scally’s book. It was Cox, Scally says, who profited from the town’s agony, earning money for his spying. Cox also appears to have capitalized on the evictions by charging a fee to drive tenants by horse and cart to the emigrant ships.

The allegations are backed up by documents. But James Cox is having none of it.

“A load of rubbish,” he snorts, making veiled threats about a lawsuit should anyone tarnish his family name.

“Those were desperate times,” he added. “People did what they had to do to survive.”

Cox offered a compelling reason for his ancestor’s cooperation with the English landlord. At one point, he said, the landlord fathered a Cox child, although the relationship was “on the wrong side of the blanket” and cannot be documented.

Whatever the reason, the Cox family remains a strong presence in the neighborhood. Cox owns a farmhouse near the old shebeen where the rebels plotted. His daughter and son own houses down the road.

“I’ve lived here more than 70 years,” he said. “Walked to school barefoot down these roads. And there wasn’t a word about anyone being obsequious until that American fella started it all.”

*

The Americans are changing Ballykilcline, even as they try to preserve it. This summer, a professor from Illinois conducted an archeological dig in one of Neary’s fields. There’s talk of building a memorial to the emigrants, and of a reunion in Ireland next year.

Padian. Hanley. McDermott. They want to walk in the footsteps of their ancestors and pray over their graves. They want to visit the site of Padian’s cabin and meet the neighbors who remain.

“And where do the Yanks think they are going to have their reunion?” wonders Neary, from the hill above the lake. “Right here in my field?”

The Yanks aren’t worried. Haven’t they inherited the fighting spirit of “the most lawless and violent set of people in County Roscommon?” Against all odds, isn’t that same spirit drawing them back?

“If they can make it to New York with barely the clothes on their backs,” said Maureen McDermott Humphreys, descendant of the cattle rustler, “then we can make it back to Ballykilcline.”

Already, there has been a reunion of sorts. In May, Humphreys invited Thomas Shanley, a descendant of Nary, to dinner at her home. The two had never met, although they had communicated through e-mail. But both live in Washington state, and both have strong connections to the rebels of Ballykilcline.

Shanley drove two hours and took a 45-minute ferry ride to Humphreys’ house. In the driveway, the strangers embraced.

“Welcome, neighbor,” Humphreys said.

She threw a rack of lamb on the grill. She pulled up a chair on the porch. As their spouses faded into the background, the two neighbors ate and drank and talked all night long, about the past, about their future, about the Lost Children of Ballykilcline.