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| Old Church in Islandeady Relict - GCT 1998 |
Reflecting on an unproductive hour of mashing my way through capsized tombstones and bramble, in pouring rain in Islandeady Relict I came up with an urge to write an article,
Slogging Through Cemeteries, way back about the turn of the century. Procrastinating, that article didn't happen and then a few years later I found myself wending my way through waist high grasses in a cemetery in Hawaii and I did in fact write the article, and created a lecture sharing some truths of cemetery research.
But this post is about that original cemetery, for I can assure you that our 2nd great grandparents, John and Julia (Burke) Walsh are almost certainly hiding under the bog and brambles in Islandeady. For in this parish John was born and christened. Their children were all born and christened there. Those children that remained in Ireland were buried there.
BUT.... Irish death records do not give a burial place. I have found no burial records for Islandeady parish
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Islandeady Memorial
to Famine Victims |
What I, a lover of cemeteries, did find in this cemetery was a sense of peace and of passing time. The old church stands roofless in one corner of the grounds, surrounded by memorial flagstones. A memorial to the famine dead was a new addition by it's side.
(Islandeady was decimated by the famine. The Catholic population in 1834 was 9164. By the 1850s the population was only half that. Parish registers record 370 baptisms in 1844 and one hundred in 1853. Today the parish has only a little over 1500 members.)
It appears that Islandeady (
Oileán Éadaí) Catholic Parish boundaries were the same as those of Islandeady Civil Parish.
It is important to note that the Parish covered the area between (Westport and Castlebar and consisted only of small townlands. It is possible that some of the records for our families will be found in the parishes of those bigger cities.
The Geraghty family in Carrownaclea were definitely closer to Westport than to the church in Islandeady yet Carrownaclea was in Islandeady parish. The parish website says that the village of Carnacle was
ONCE a part of the parish. I can not find the village, might this be yet another corruption of the spelling of the townland? That might be an indication that the small area on this map which is part of the civil parish of Islandeady might no longer be part of the Catholic parish. I have not found any explanation of why the civil parish is split in these two parts.
In 1841 68.6% lived in 4th class housing, In 1851 only 16.5% were still in 4th class housing. Heads of households in agriculture went from 77.9% to 72.3%. Literacy made little change 16.1% of males in 1841 only increased to 19.6%. For females the numbers were 2.2% and 4.9%.
