Richard Hennessy (1724 - 1800)

Born 1724 in Ballymacmoy, Killavullen, County Cork, Ireland

Ancestors

Descendants

Died 8 Oct 1800 at about age 76 in Cognac, Charente, France

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Biography

Richard Hennessy is Notable.

Richard Hennessy, native of Cork, Ireland, widower of Hélène Barret, died on 16 vendémiaire IX (8 October 1800) in Cognac.^[1]

Richard's early education is mentioned in a paragraph of a document on the early life of Nano Nagle: Nano’s cousin, Edmund Burke, eleven years younger than her, attended O’Halloran’s school when he lived with the Nagles at Ballyduff. A classmate of Burke’s was a certain Richard Hennessy whose family leased lands from the Nagles. Richard, like many other sons of the Catholic ‘informal gentry’, would become an officer in the Irish regiment of the French army before retiring to Cognac and opening the distillery that still bears his name. Historians have coined the phrase informal gentry to describe this materially impoverished class who yet considered themselves well-born and proud descendants from a cultural, social and political elite. Nano and her sister Ann were more secure in their wealth and more advantaged in their connections than Richard Hennessy, yet their journey to pursue their education and live a sophisticated and free social life in Paris would also have involved subterfuge. Like Richard’s move to France, Nano and Ann travelled by being trafficked by smugglers on a cargo ship from one of the Cork or Kerry harbours: and that chapter is the focus of another post. ^[2]

Sources

1. ↑ acte de décès: Archives départementales de la Charente: Cognac, 1798-1803 (an VII-an XII), Cote 3 E 108/25, acte 5, vue 40, consulté le 8 juin 2019, lien permanent: http://archives.lacharente.fr/ark:/61904/s00552b5fdac55d3/55a034ade8137
2. ↑ Nano Nagle: The Life and the Legacy by Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney [1]

• Wikidata: Item Q3430860, en:Wikipedia