Stories about my Mother 14
Donegal is lousy with McElhinnys. Like with the great number of Hesters in Alabama, if you swing a cat over here, you’re going to hit one. I’ve seen at least a half dozen different spellings of the name – some add an “e”, some replace the “i” with an “e”, some replace the “e” with an “i” – but I think that they are all part of the same big messy extended family group. I love that there is as much a concentration of my mother's namesake family here as there is of my father's back home in the South.
I came to Ireland specifically to see if I could find out anything about the McElhinny side of our family prior to the mid-1800s. As amazing as online databases are, they do have their limits. My Aunt Jo, who’s married to my Uncle Michael McElhinny recently sent me a pile of information that I hadn’t seen before. It clarified some of what I thought I already knew but it didn’t get me back in time any further.
Irish history is awash in invasions, partitions, rebellions, and crises. Putting it all in some sort of order, though, helps to explain why various people might have gone where they did when they did. Like everyone else in my lineage, this branch of people didn’t stay where they started. Whether all that I think I’ve learned so far will stand up remains to be seen. For now, though, here it is.
Ireland is divided into four provinces. Ulster is the northernmost and stretches over the entire island from the east coast to the west. Within it, there are nine counties: six of these counties form the British-controlled area of Northern Ireland and the remaining three are part of the Republic of Ireland. Going back millennia, Ulster was the heart of the Gaelic world which also included Scotland and the Isle of Man. The woman whose house I was staying in during my visit told me that Ulster dealt more with Scotland than the south because the north was blocked off from the south by mountains. I don’t really see what mountains she was talking about but regardless, Northern Ireland has long had a closer relationship with Scotland than it has had with its neighbors to the south. It’s close enough to Scotland that, on a clear day, you can see it in the distance off the northeastern coast.
Lots of fighting has happened on Irish soil since the beginning of recorded time. More recently, the Anglo-Normans invaded from Britain in the 12th century. Their Earldom collapsed in the 14th. The Irish O’Neill dynasty then filled the vacuum, and they started proclaiming themselves kings. The English, however, never gave up control over the section of Ireland that they held onto after the Earldom’s collapse. During the Middle Ages, that section was centered around Dublin and was referred to as The Pale. Anything past those borders was said to be “Beyond the Pale.”
Forward to 1593. The entire world is about to radically change, and it seems to start with Irish discontent in Ulster. In Ulster, Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone and other native Irishmen finally rose up against their English occupiers and started a rebellion. The conflict dragged on for nearly a decade. The revolt came to be called the Nine Years’ War. England eventually won in 1603, but just barely and at a great cost. By the end of it, they were nearly bankrupt. The Crown now desperately needed income from outside their borders, so they started colonizing.
To solidify their hold over Ulster, and to build back their treasury they encouraged Scotts to move in and settle. Which they did. In droves.
The ancestral home of the McElhinnys is the wild and rugged Hebrides Islands off the west coast of Scotland. The promise of arable Irish land, which was much improved from what they had, must have been a powerful lure to relocate. I can’t find any records of when the McElhinnys came to Ireland but after 1603 their coming with the great wave of immigration seems to make the most sense.
How much the Crown needed money is evidenced by the fact that they were casting their nets in every direction possible. The British East India Company was given a patent in 1600 that insured them a trade monopoly in India in exchange for a sizeable amount of revenue paid back into the Royal coffers. In 1607 and 1608 Henry Hudson was hired to find a westward route to that lucrative market to increase trade possibilities, but he failed. The Jamestown settlement in Virginia was established, also by Royal warrant, in 1607. The Plantation of Ulster, in Northern Ireland, which is what the English named their colony in Northern Ireland, was simply another way for them to create more income. Little regard seems to have been paid to the fact that all this land all over the globe that the Brits were moving into, was already occupied by other people.
With the great influx of Scotts and English, the Irish became second-class citizens in their own homeland. The new arrivals were mostly all either Anglican (Church of England) or Presbyterian (Church of Scotland). The Irish, who were being pushed off their property, were mostly Catholic. The conflict between these groups persists to this day. Gaelic Ireland was no more. The Nine Years’ War was the end of it. Defeated, the Gaelic leaders - Hugh O’Neill and about ninety others - left Donegal in what is called The Flight of Earls, never to return. They ended up in Italy and Hugh and the other leaders are buried in a church in Rome.
The genealogy websites list the birthplaces of my 2nd great-grandfather as well as my 3rd great-grandfather, both named John McElhinny, as being in County Tyrone. My grandfather, however, told my mother that they were from Horn Head in Donegal. I tend to believe him more than I do the online information. At any rate, County Donegal is where I’ve just been. Records from the late 18th and early 19th centuries are hard to come by. The office of Public Records in Belfast has spool after spool of microfilm of church records and municipal meeting records. They are, unfortunately, listed by parish and then by date of entry. I say unfortunately because that means you need to know which church they were part of and then patiently go through all the records pertaining to that church. The entries are chronological, not alphabetical. My brand new PRONI (Public Records of Northern Ireland) card gives me access to these records for the next ten years. At some point, I will have to go back.
Horn Head is a small peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean in western Donegal. It is extremely rocky and desolate. It has a fierce beauty that seems thousands of years old. It must have been a brutal place to farm. These days the steep ground is covered in sheep, but back in the day, people grew potatoes in the thin, stony soil.
As Britain started becoming industrialized in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, English workers left their farms and started working in factories. They needed to be fed so the British government started using Ireland as their grocery store. Most of the crops grown in Ireland were, by law, exclusively meant for export to England. This left the Irish only potatoes to eat. A variety called the Lumper was the strain of choice. It was hardy and grew well where the soil was useless for other crops. Instead of diversifying and planting many different varieties which would have helped hedge against disaster, most farmers chose to grow the well-adapted Lumper.
John McElhinny Sr. and his wife Frances emigrated to America in 1828. Before that, however, an 1821 census lists him as living on Rossville Street in Londonderry, or Derry as it’s popularly called. Derry is a small city about 45 miles to the east of Horn Head. Three people were counted there in that document which was probably John Sr, Frances, and their three-year-old son John Jr.
I say probably because I have no real way of knowing if this is the right John or not. To me, however, it makes some sense that it was. If they planned on going to America, they would have needed some money. They weren’t going to make any of it on Horn Head farming potatoes. Derry had a lot of linen and clothing factories and other manufacturing facilities where he could potentially have gotten a job and started saving up. Maybe it was here that they learned the carpentry skills that they would use later to such great effect in Canada.
Derry is an old walled city. At the time, only Anglicans were allowed to live within the walls. Catholics and Presbyterians had to live outside the walls. Rossville Street was very much outside the high stone walls down below in an area called Bogside.
It seems as if when John Sr. and Frances left, they didn’t take John Jr. with them. Their son would have been ten. There is an 1834 residence report that puts a John McElhinny in Loughnagin. This is farmland not far from Derry and even now doesn’t have any paved roads. Perhaps he was placed with relatives there so that his parents could establish themselves overseas first.
In 1845 crisis struck. The Irish potato crop failed. A virulent fungus decimated all the Lumper potatoes. It all happened very quickly. The British government did little to help the Irish people who were now on the brink of starvation. They refused to stop exporting the other crops for their own people. They also would not ease any of the tariffs that had been placed against imported grains from other countries for fear of what that would do to their economy. The Irish began dying.
Nobody knew how the blight traveled. At the time, nobody could even identify the cause of it. The potatoes would get lesions on them and then turn black and rancid. During the winter, people started eating the stores that had been put aside for seed and, because they were starving, killed and ate their milk cows. The following season the blight was worse. There was nothing to plant. Their land was unfit to plant anything else, anyway. The cows were gone and nobody had any money to buy anything else to eat.
At the time, the government in London was dominated by the hereditary House of Lords. These aristocratic men had the power to override anything decided on by the House of Commons. They did not care about the Irish peasantry. They were considered a drain on British resources. Anything that they could have done to alleviate the crisis, the Lords refused to do. They kept on importing other Irish produce to feed their workers and kept their industries running. There were even some in that group who felt that the impoverished Irish dying off by the thousands was a solution to their problem.
1846 was worse than 1845 and 1847 was even more devastating than either. Over a million people perished from hunger or from diseases caused by malnutrition. Another million people, with just enough means, had no choice but to leave. That included my 2nd great-grandfather John McElhinny, Jr. His ship, Marion, sailed from Londonderry and arrived in New York on April 12, 1847. He is listed on his arrival form as a laborer who made the crossing in steerage.
I recently found a military record for John McElhinny Jr. that shows him enlisting in the US Army to fight in the Mexican-American War in late 1847. It lists him as being 28 years old and a laborer from Derry. For an Irish guy fresh off the boat, the army was probably the only way he could have made any money at all. It helps explain what he might have been doing between the time he landed and then many years later when he’d become a successful furniture maker in Brockville, Ontario.
Ulster, along with the rest of Ireland, officially became part of the United Kingdom in 1801. As more and more English moved in, the Irish, of course, got more and more displaced. Catholics and the Scottish Presbyterians were actively discriminated against. Laws were enacted that favored the Anglicans over the rest. Not only could non-Anglicans not live where they liked, they were not allowed to vote.
There was continual unrest. So much so that in 1921, Britain divided Ulster, creating a largely Anglican Northern Ireland and leaving the largely Presbyterian and Catholic counties to join the rest of Ireland. Of course, Northern Ireland wasn’t purely Anglican and the large minority, who were now even more oppressed and ignored became more and more vocal in their opposition to the Crown and to how they were being treated.
By the early 1970s, taking their cue from the anti-apartheid protests in South Africa and the Civil Rights movement in the United States, the disenfranchised Irish minority started to organize protests. They marched.
On January 30th, 1972, in Derry, a demonstration was held in the Bogside. It started as a peaceful march. The protesters were angry but unarmed. Even so, British soldiers opened fire on the crowd and shot twenty-six people, killing fourteen of them.
This was the event that we now know as Bloody Sunday. One of those who was killed was a seventeen-year-old boy who died on Rossville Street, the very street where John McElhinny, Sr. and his family had lived 150 years before. His name was Kevin Gerald McElhinney.
Bloody Sunday sparked a national outrage that led to years of violence and bloodshed. At one point in the 1980s, Derry had become the most heavily militarized place on the planet. A British commission called the Widgery Tribunal investigated Bloody Sunday right away and decided that the shootings were justified as the victims were gunmen and bomb-throwers. Dismissed as a government whitewash, the minority fought back. Continual local pressure finally forced the government to launch a second investigation in 1998 called the Saville Inquiry. After twelve years, in 2010, the Saville tribunal concluded that the killings were, in fact, unjustified and unjustifiable. None of the victims had been armed and none posed a threat. The tribunal found that the soldiers had lied in order to justify their murder of those fourteen people.
Only then did British Prime Minister, David Cameron formally apologize to the Irish people. To date, none of the soldiers involved have yet been charged with unlawful killing.
In a recent letter to the Public Prosecutor, lawyers for Kevin McElhinney describe what happened to him. “Kevin was seventeen years old when he was shot as he crawled in a southerly direction along the western side of Block 1 of the Rossville Street Flats, in the direction of its main doors. He sustained five gunshot wounds, the fatal wound entering the inner side of the left buttock, causing injury to the abdomen and fragmenting before exiting the body... The tribunal are sure that Kevin McElhinney was posing no threat to soldiers when he was shot. He was simply trying to crawl to safety. In the Tribunal’s view he is likely to have been throwing stones towards the soldiers, but this activity was posing no serious threat and had ceased by the time he was seeking to escape and was shot. The Tribunal are sure that Kevin McElhinney did not have a rifle or any other form of weapon with or near him when he was shot.”
Kevin’s father lived to see his son exonerated but his mother did not.
I did not know what I was going to find when I came to Donegal. I had the census report that listed John McElhinny as living on Rossville Street, but I had no idea what the significance of that place was. When I drove onto it, I was amazed. These days not only are the old houses where John and his family lived gone but so are the Rossville Flats. A single wall from an old row of houses still stands as a memorial with the words, “You are now entering Free Derry,” painted on the side. Murals depicting the events of Bloody Sunday and its victim are painted on the new row houses there. A remarkably moving museum called the Free Derry Museum now stands almost on the spot where Kevin and the others were killed. It’s an overwhelming experience to walk through that neighborhood.
I don’t know what connection I have to Kevin but even if we are only 10th cousins, I do believe that we are joined in some way. I visited his grave in the Derry City Cemetery and was overwhelmed. I wanted to leave something there, so I decided to leave a coin. Most of what I had in my pocket had the Queen’s portrait on it which is the last thing he’d want, so I left a Euro.
I can’t get over the fact that he was only seventeen.
There’s a kind of traditional Irish fishing boat called a currach. In Dunfanaghy, where I stayed for a few days, the McElhinney’s are one of the few families that still make them. A placard at the small local museum said, “The unique shape of the Dunfanaghy currach was developed by the late Jim McElhinney and perfectly adapted to local waters. It was said that he could stay out hauling herring in rough seas long after other boats had retreated into the safety of the bay. The template and the skills to use it remain safely in the hands of his sons.”
And so the line continues.
Loved this, Richard! Very informative and moving. I'm wondering if you've ever visited the Irish Memorial, by Glenna Goodacre, in Philly. It's the most moving work of art I've ever seen. I wept at the meaning and sight of it. It's truly remarkable.