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  2. Kevin McMenamin: Birth: 1944. Death: 1945

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Notes
a. Note:   OVERVIEW Tyrone is the largest of nine counties in Northern Ireland, which like Canada is part of the British Commonwealth. The rest of Ireland, the Republic of Ireland,(1) consists of twenty-six counties. Ireland’s division into counties(2) began in 1210 A.D. under the rule of England’s King John. Tyrone was one of nine counties comprising the historic Ulster province. Tyrone is an inland county with no access to the sea. Omagh, its county seat, stands at the confluence of three rivers, rich in salmon, trout, and mussel pearls. Laugh Neagh on its eastern border is the largest lake in the British Isle.
  In 1936, I asked my McMenamin grandfather about his roots. The name of his native county I wrote down as "Teerone". Most teenagers today could probably do better at spelling it. I was twenty three then. Many of my Irish acquaintances have shown little interest in their roots. their parents were generally the children of immigrant parents, children who, as adults, developed little interest in the "old country". It is among the grandchildren of immigrants a feeling for family began to surface, a generation later.
  One 19th-century American has written "The sacred tie of family, reaching backward and forward, binds the generations of men together and draws out plaintive musings of our being on the solemn alteration from cradle to grave."(3) Another once wrote: "It is surely no credit to any man to be regardless of the past from which the present has sprung, and without which the present cannot be interpreted."(4)
  Joseph P. McMenamin
 June 28, 1985
  1. In 1922, it was the Irish Free State, of status similar to Canada. In 1936, this was abolished and a new state, Eire, declared independent of England. In 1949, with other changes, Eire became a Republic.
 2. Some were named after Chief towns like Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Longford.
 3. Edward Everett
 4. Amos C. Carpenter
  THE COUNTY TYRONE
 Its area is about that of the State of Rhode Island. Its climate is variable with an average rainfall of 55" in the northern part and 42" in the southern part. Its topography is also variable with hills, dales and flat plains. Its name actually means land of Owen.
  When my grandparents were toddlers in Tyrone (1858) there were 66 McMenamin househoolders listed for the county; and almost twice as many in Donegal. But comparatively few elsewhere. No wonder McMenamins marrieed McMenamins in those days.
  McMENAMIN ROOTS IN TYRONE
  McMenamins originated in northern Ireland. Some have their roots in Donegal or Derry; mine were in the County Tyrone. My father’s parents were born there in the 1850’s. Government records of that decade list some sixty McMenamin households in Tyrone, one hundred in Donegal, and only fifteen in Derry. The occupants obviously had survived the conquest of Ulster two hundred years earlier.
  Ulster was Ireland’s northernmost kingdom. (The others were Leinster, Meath, Munster and Connaught.) Until 1650 A.D., Ulster was the most completely Irish part of Ireland. For centuries it had been ruled by O’Neill chiefs. It was an O’Neill chieftain who drove Viking invaders out of Ulster even though they had conquered and were ruling most of the island. Among the supporters of the great O’Neill (and O’Donnell) clans of Ulster were our McMenamin ancestors. In the bardic Annals of Loch Ce, 1303 A.D., one may find the documented deaths of an Ulster chieftain’s two nephews. Both were McMenamins. The roots of our Gaelic surname are deep; the history, dark and sad; it is covered in a future chapter.
  Ireland’s history covers centuries of conquest. After Viking rule was crushed, English invasion began. By 1600 most of the island was under English control and by 1603, all of it.
  Then it was that Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, surrendered Ulster and all of Ireland’s people submitted to British rule and law. The conquered were ordered to renounce their loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church as England had previously done.(1) However, loyal followers of O’Neill, including the McMenamin families, refused and so lost their lands and civil rights. Their descendants endured two centuries of poverty and despair.
  I was fifty-two before visiting Tyrone and this visit was all too brief. We drove across the county west to east in two days. Once I had read of it being a gloomy place but I found it with a dramatic beauty all its own. The visit was in mid-August and the weather ideal for enjoying landscapes. There were brief stops at several cemeteries and churches, with an increasing sense of inadequate preparation. The year was 1965. If only I knew then what I know now.
  Now, twenty years later, I have read the 1802 Statistical Survey of the County Tyrone with observations on the Means of Improvement. It was authored by a contemporary of my great, great grandparents -- a John McEvoy of Rash, near Omagh. (Omagh is scarcely fifteen miles from my paternal grandparents’ native townlands so I wonder if they ever visited it before emigrating in their late teens.)
  How much of Ireland outside of Tyrone did this author, McEvoy, actually know? One wonders. He prefaced his observations with a remark about his county’s "opulence and variety". Later he mentioned sites of old Druid altar and Danish forts which the "common people" held in great reverence; also, "other monuments", stone crosses with "hieroglyphic figures and holy wells’ held in great veneration by the lower classes, especially the Roman Catholics who visited them on pilgrimages.
  My great grandparents, James and Anne McMenamin, were buried in Magherakeel cemetery which has a holy well from which St. Patrick is said to have drunk. They were of the "lower class". They had married four years before the famine. They never saw any of the fifty some grandchildren, one of whom was my father. Their graves lack a lasting marker and McEvoy helps us understand why. James and Anne were poor farm tenants on 17 acres, such a small parcel of land. Back in 1802, McEvoy wrote this about Tyrone’s tenants: "Tenants in general are so wretchedly poor that a great length of time elapses before any permanent advantage can derive to them from the improvement of their farms, which do not yield probably one-fourth of what have been possible if money had been provided for ditching, draining and liming -- i.e. better management. the landlords would greatly benefit from this and it would increase the value of their property. The repair of houses and offices(2) generally fall upon the tenant, hence buildings are usually in need of repair or if repaired, are poorly done."
  According to McEvoy these peasants rarely had meat to eat. The very poorest subsisted on potatoes, a dependable food source even from poor soils. It was forty years after McEvoy’s report that the reliable potato failed the already hungry Irishmen. The critical year of the Famine was 1847, a year of too many cool, wet and cloudy days favoring the growth of a ravenous mold parasite on potato plants. Even tubers left over in storage were attacked and destroyed. By winter many of the rural poor were starving. Quakers opened soup kitchens offering daily rations but thousands began to die.
  But James and Anne were lucky to live in an area that raised oats and barley as well as potatoes, one of Tyrone’s better agricultural regions. According to Griffith’s Land Evaluation survey of 1858 , they leased seventeen acres from an Anne Tennent. I would hope that they had a cow and a horse and surely some poultry. Whatever they had, they survived the Famine years with their two babies and went on to have seven more children.
  It was only two years after the Famine that Queen Victoria made a brief "look-in" visit to Ireland. This was the year when London’s Quarterly Review contained a lengthily article "Tours in Ireland" featuring some ugly comments about Victoria’s Irish subjects saying, for example, that the Irish peasants for three centuries had been known for their "natural indolence and sloth, reluctance to labour and lazy contentment". One writer admitted there had been a "mischievous system of land-letting" and that many landlords were "impatient, improvident and unjust" but went on to say that this "would have been insignificant" had the Irish peasants been "active and Industrious".(3)
  Such remarks were typical in this rambling series of commentaries about the current "tours" in Ireland. The different observers seemed oblivious of the history that shaped the peasant’s plight, a history that could help explain the loss of incentives and motivation, those urges that generate industrious activity.
  James and Anne McMenamin must have been exceptional peasants; they must have been hard workers. They were among the one hundred tenants under thirty-eight landlords of parceled Tyrone farms according to Griffiths’s 1858 Land Evaluation records.(4) They would have been classified as tenant farmers, a step above "cottier". A cottier was a sub-tenant; working a plot of land only big enough to raise potatoes. Legally they had less rights than tenants. Their housing consisted of one-room windowless cabins, having earthen floors and usually a loft. The tenant-farmer hardly fared better in dwellings. Their’s may have had a window or two, a chimney, stone walls and but still earthen floors. One can with little difficulty, realize some of the discomforts and hardships of a crowded, growing family -- especially in the cold damp weeks of winters. Four of their eight sons managed to escape this plight by emigrating.
  One of them was Patrick, my grandfather. Fifty years after the publication of Griffith’s famous volumes Patrick owned and worked without tenants a 160-acre farm in America, an Illinois farm larger than all but one of those leased by the thirty-eight landlords in his father’s Tyrone!
  My grandfather was the sixth child of James and Anne McMenamin. He was born on May 25, 1854. His older sister and brothers were 10-year-old Kate (already familiar with the chores of motherhood), 8-year-old Michael, 6-year-old Owen, 4-year-old James and 2-year-old Ned. (Ned’s slightly deformed feet were already a concern to his parents.) Anne must have been a sturdy woman. She had three more children after my grandfather; all nine saw adulthood and lived to a "ripe old age" -- except Owen who died of typhoid fever at forty-four.
  Rearing nine children (eight of them boys) during those post-Famine years was exceptional. Epidemics of cholera, typhus and dysentery took many of the survivors. Not since Europe’s Black Plague had a people been so decimated; and this included one McMenamin family living not too far from James and Anne. Testimony of this, I found during a brief stop in St. Patrick’s Cemetery at Castlederg in August, 1965. There one can see a McMenamin family gravestone bearing the names and burial dates of five sisters.
  They died as follows: Mary at 22, in 1865, Catherine at 31, in 1865, Margaret at 28, in 1868, Ellen at 25, in 1870, and Honora at 31, in 1889. James and Anne must have attended their burials and wondered at their own family’s record. We too must wonder. Without child clinics, immunization, vitamins and pediatricians, they raised nine children to maturity. Their losses resulted from emigration.
  Michael1, their eldest, left at twenty in 1866. An uncle, Ned McMenamin, already settled near Albany, New York, helped Michael find work as a farm hand. At twenty-nine, Michael returned to Ireland, built a cottage for his aging parents and then brought a bride back to America. James first purchased a 30-acre farm and then a 155-acre farm in Clifton Park, New York. Meanwhile some of his brothers had begun to leave2.
  Patrick, my grandfather, left Ireland at nineteen, with a friend, Jim Crowe. The year was 1873. Patrick’s betrothed was a colleen of the same surname, Mary Anne McMenamin, from the nearby town of Killeter. Three years after his leaving she joined him and they were married on June 8, 1876, in Greenbush, New York.(5) After their second baby, my father, came, Patrick moved his family to Illinois, where he eventually purchased a 360-acre farm and reared ten children (I am the first born of that second son, John.). According to several of those ten children, Patrick and Mary Anne always claimed not to be close blood relatives. There are so many McMenamin families in the Ireland of their time this is possible. Mary McMenamin, my great grandmother, mother of Kate and the eight boys was a McMenamin prior to marriage also. Patrick’s brother Henry (the New Zealander) also married a girl whose maiden name was McMenamin.
  Owen went with his wife, Mary Jane Crowe (sister of Patrick’s emigrating companion) and first born, James. Qwen lived in Rensselaer, New York for ten years before moving his family to Chicago. There he died of typhoid within days of his thirteenth child’s birth1. "Tyrone" actually means "land of Owen".
  James left also, but not for good. James was the family’s "restless wanderer" . After working in Pittsburgh five years he visited his brothers in New York (1888) and Illinois and finally left for Australia. He died after settling down back home in Ireland, a confirmed bachelor, affectionately called the "Australian".
  Hugh was the last of James and Anne’s sons to leave for America. I am not sure of the year he left Ireland. He was married in St. Mary’s Church in DeKalb, Illinois in 1885. Hugh also married an emigrating Irish girl, Mary Maguire. They reared seven children and also purchased a farm in DeKalb County. My grandfather Patrick sponsored Hugh’s emigration. They were always very close. There are a number of early group photos of their families together on various occasions.
  Henry2 and John (the youngest sons of James and Anne) never chose to travel. They remained close by their aging parents along with lame Ned3, spinster Kate4 and James5, "The Australian". It seems incredible this remarkable couple should die without seeing any of their forty grandchildren1. Their last days ended in the cottage Michael provided, cared for by Kate2 and her bachelor brothers.(6)
  In the high ground of Magherakeel Cemetery the bones of James and Anne McMenamin have dissolved into the Irish earth whose nutrients maintained their sturdy bodies. They, too, had parents and grandparents who are part of our legendary family history. Beyond their time we find fragments and anecdotes that tease the curious. Before their time family records were not kept; it was illegal to keep official entries of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths in Ireland’s Catholic churches. Given the year of their first born’s birth as 1844 and that they would have been in their early twenties, that is that James and Mary would likely have been born around 1820, they could have lived till 1890 (their seventies). There is no exact dates of their deaths.
  For two centuries England’s Penal Laws prohibited Ireland’s Roman Catholics from keeping such vital statistics. These laws were enforced rigorously, particularly during the 18th century. In 1829 (about the time James and Anne were infants) Catholic Emancipation was bestowed upon Ireland. Like Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation the implementation was slow. It was 1863 before baptismal and marriage records began to appear in Termonamongan, the parish of James and Anne. (By then, my grandfather, Patrick, was nine years old.)
  Termonamongan’s boundary lines have changed during this century. Geographically it consists mostly of that western-most protuberance noticeable on ant map of the County Tyrone. Termonamongan is one of Tyrone’s oldest parishes, it’s history goes back to St. Patrick. Its Gaelic name consists of termon, an ancient term for any land set aside for church maintenance; and of mongan, the Mongan family(7) who had been its hereditary wardens for centuries. Such wardenship carried with it protection, right of sanctuary, and immunity from lay exactions. So, the name Termonamongan is a historical relic.
  Termonamongan was truly a McMenamin parish in the nineteenth century. In Griffith’s Land Valuation, the County Tyrone lists forty-eight McMenamins as "occupiers" of land in this parish alone. Not one of these owned the parcels of land they occupied. Like James and Anne these McMenamins were peasants, either tenant farmers or mere cottiers. Most of them were illiterate, holding on to the Roman Catholic faith their English rulers wanted them to abandon. They descended from generations of despair.
  If there was an epitaph placed on the grave of my great grandparents in Magherakeel Cemetery it might well read :
  "And there are some of whom there is no memorial;
 who are perished as if they had never been,
 and born as if they had never been born,
 and their children with them.
 But these were men of mercy,
 whose Godly deeds have not failed.
 Good things continue with their seed."
  Ecclus: 44, 9-11
  1. Two centuries later, 82 percent of the Irish people belonged to the Roman Catholic Church even though the government had prersecuted them in favor of the established Church of Ireland. See p. 165, The Church of Ireland, D.H. Akenson, Yale University Press, 1971.
 2. Office was the Victorian term used then for any small outdoor toilet closet; these were considered an asset to one's property.
 3. "Tours of Ireland", The Quarterly Review, 85: 503-504, 1849.
 4. In 1858, James and Anne lived at Edenreagh on 17 acres leased from Anne Tennent.
 5. According to their children, they always claimed not to be close blood relatives. There were so many McMenamin families in the Ireland of their time, this is possible.
 6. Henry finally married at fifty.
 7. In Magherakeel Cemetery, no tombstone is more impressive than that of Father Cornelius O'Mongan, ordained by Oliver Plunkett in 1674 and died in 1724. Somewhere nearby lie James and Anne McMenamin.


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