Michael’s family history

Family tradition is that my great grandfather, John McManus, was 12 years old when he came to Durham from Ireland. He did not come with his parents and little is known of them. At his marriage in 1866 John stated his father was James, an Agricultural Labourer, and that he was then deceased. I later discovered through Census returns at Crook, Co. Durham that John and his brother, Thomas, were from the Kilronan Parish area around Keadue and Ballyfarnon, in the north eastern Barony of Boyle, County Roscommon. Interestingly, I later discovered that Kilronan is the ancient McManus territory of Tir-Tuathail:

"In 1411 MacManus of Tir-Tuathail and his son were slain by the sons of Rory MacManus." This MacManus "was the head of a branch of the O'Conors who were seated in the north-east of the Barony of Boyle in the County of Roscommon. The territory of Tir-Tuathail still retains that name, and comprises all the parish of Kilronan." (Annals of the Four Masters and Sotheran, 1871:79).

It does seem likely that John and Thomas' parents had died in the Great Famine around 1847 and other, unknown, persons had brought them to Durham. The state of the poor Irish around this time is well documented and a description of events at Carrick-on- Shannon, Leitrim, near Kilronan, gives some insight into the national problem and, like many others, the distress John and his family were probably suffering:

"At Carrick on Shannon well over a hundred persons waited outside the workhouse to apply for thirty vacancies, and a painful and heart-rending" scene took place, mothers imploring that two or three of their six or seven children be taken in, since it was impossible to feed them on 8d or 10d a day. Mr. Forster particularly noticed that the children looked "like skeletons, their features sharpened with hunger and their limbs wasted, so that there was little left but bones, their hands and arms in particular being emaciated, and the happy expressions of infancy gone from their faces, having the anxious look of premature old age." A member of the Board of Guardians remarked callously to him that the poor "were dying like rotten sheep"; and two clergymen said that while they were at their meals "poor famishing wretches appeared before the windows and groan in the most pitiable manner." Throughout the country, he noted, pigs and poultry had "entirely disappeared."  (Woodham Smith, 1962:153).            

When I traced what was probably my great grandfather's baptism record in 1838 in the Parish records at Keadue I discovered his mother was Elizabeth, maiden name Kelly. The Kelly’s are an old Kilronan family.