Jeremiah Kelly (1814 - 1860)

Born 1814 in Ruan, County Clare, Ireland

Ancestors

Husband of Mary (Baker) Kelly — married 1834 in Ruan , County Clare , Ireland

Descendants

Died 27 Feb 1860 at about age 46 in Edwardstown, South Australia, Australia

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Biography

Surname: KELLY First Names: Jeremiah Death Date: 27-Feb-1860 Age: 52 Gender: M Marital Status: N Place of Death: Edwards Town Residence: Edwards Town Relative: District: Adelaide Book/Page: 9/107 Notes:

Jeremiah Kelly was born in Ireland.

Jeremiah Kelly migrated from Ireland to Australia.

Jeremiah was born about 1812. He passed away in 1860^[1]

Jeremiah was born about 1812 in Dysert, County Clare, Ireland. He lived at the family farm "Drummina" meaning "little Hills" until he was eight, then moved to the family farm at "Knockadangan" meaning "a fortress".

Family lore relates that his father, Timothy did not approve of Jeremiah's marriage so that Jeremiah and his wife Mary stayed with James (Bully) Kelly (b. 1818 son of Patrick Kelly and likely a cousin) on his property at Bealnalicka. There was a tenant family of Bakers living on this property that may have been Mary's relatives.

Jeremiah's brother, John, emigrated to Australia in 1850, and persuaded Jeremiah and his wife, Mary, to follow him there in 1852.

He applied to Her Majesty's Colonisation Commissioners for passage to South Australia and this was granted. Passage was free for suitable emigrants.

Jeremiah and Mary Baker arrived at Port Adelaide on the Phoebe Dunbar on 4 June 1852, with their children Honor, 16, Patrick, 15, Anne, 5 and James, 2.

He died of liver failure on 27 Feb 1860. His death certificate named his occupation as cattle dealer.

The family then went to live in Mintaro near Clare, Australia, where they had relatives.

Mintaro and Clare were in the heart of the South Australian wine growing district, the Clare Valley.

James was educated at the nearby Jesuit College at Sevenhill.

Honor married David McNamara and settled in Adelaide. They had 5 children.

Patrick took up land at Mount Rufus near Mintaro. He married Ellen BRADY and they had 9 children.

James took up land at Hornsdale, north of Jamestown, about 70 km further north from Mintaro. He married Catherine ERWIN, whose family came from the Clare area. It seems that his mother and sister Anne accompanied him to Hornsdale, and both are buried in the cemetery at Appila, a nearby town.

James and Catherine had 8 children. They left Hornsdale and moved to Adelaide in 1902.

Kelly, one of the most plentiful names in County Clare, Ireland

1. Driving around Dysert "This is the very road when Jeremiah and Mary walked for the last time when they took their family and left County Clare."

We are standing in the middle of the road, in Kelly country, County Clare, in the parish of Dysert (population in 1841 was 1,933 Catholics, 67 Protestants). The ever-present stone walls enclose this and all roads in the west of the country and etch the same fields and describe the parish and townlands now as in 1851. It was on this road, I was told, where Jeremiah Kelly and Mary Baker walked to town, and indeed commenced their journey of over 13,000 miles to the new Kelly country in Clare, South Australia.

This particular Kelly country is located in the townland of Drummina, where a "townland" describes the smallest territorial division in a parish. Our interest here is in the "Dysert Kellys", as they are known, to distinguish them from the Kellys of other districts. Our Irish relatives are our guides over the area inhabited by our branch of the Kellys and Bakers and the lands that held them together and divided them. Kellys and Bakers live there still, in the parishes of Ruan and Dysert, in streets with no name and houses with no number - our guides told us the region voted to keep it that way. Lest this description brings to your mind a quaint rural cottage type of habitation, indeed this and also modern dwellings abound, though usually both with central heating, cable television and internet. And most dwellings, by Australian standards, are easy commuting distance to the nearby towns of Ennis and Limerick.

To Australian eyes, the narrow roads bounded by stone walls are far too tight, especially around corners, the fields too small and this landscape impossibly compacted and defined. Walking these roads in January 2006 is easy to bear, a pleasant stroll or drive to view dwellings, ancient raths (pre-historic forts), a sacred well and church ruin, with the occasional car or farm vehicle to make way for - usually the driver known to our guide. With the car vanished, the landscape must appear much as it would 160 years ago, although at that time the road would be crowded with desperate families.

2. Earliest Kelly's of Clare There are many Kellys in Ireland, the second most numerous name surpassed only by the Murphys. The documents and records have gaps, since records were not kept until Catholic emancipation in April 1829, and a fire in Dublin during the civil war destroyed many records in 1922. Furthermore, the baptismal records for the joint parish of Ruan-Dysert, as it was in the 1800s, do not start until 1845. There has, however, been extensive research on the Kellys of Clare, both as genealogy and narrative from records and oral history. In the 1840s Clare was mainly a Gaelic speaking area - it remained so for the 19th century and was the sharp point of the cultural, language and religious clash between Gaelic Catholicism and Tudor and Stuart Protestantism. Kellys, in both the manner of their arrival in Clare in the early 1700s and their tenure seemed to be subject to these forces.

Drummina House

Just as Clare in South Australia was the point of arrival for our Kellys, Dysert was the point of origin for the Kellys of Clare. The Gaelic "Doisert" means "A wild country destitute of inhabitants." The oldest record of the Kellys is on a headstone in the old church ruins at Dysert. The inscription reads, "God rest the soul of Darby Kelly died 11 July 1787, Erected by his son, Patrick." It seems likely that the Kellys who moved to County Clare, did so in the late 1600s as a result of two historic events: the "Cromwellian Settlement", whereby lands were confiscated from the Catholic Irish; and after the Battle of Aughrim in Galway in 1691. "Aughrim of the slaughter" marked the collapse of the Jacobite resistance to the Williamite armies, perhaps more significant than the Battle of the Boyne in bringing the dispossession or destruction of the Irish land system. We know that Kellys had started to settle in Clare arriving from Galway and Roscommon after the earlier Cromwellian confiscations of 1653. Prior to Cromwell, The O'Kellys (the "O" was dropped in most cases, during the 16th and 17th century) were one of the most powerful clans in Connaught from the 9th to the 16th century. The local Kelly clan of the 16th century were identified as a "dangerous Irish sept" by the Corporation of Galway, according to the Clare Heritage Council.

3. Kellys of Dysert Close to Drummina, we visit the old church at Dysert. This is the site of both the historic Battle of Dysert O'Dea, and more recent conflict and tribulation. The 12th century church ruins contain a carved stone doorway with an arch of animal and human heads, of odd shape and construction, clearly influenced by pilgrimages from other lands. Here are the graves of Darby, died 1787, and other graves set in the floor of the church, including a headstone of Thomas Kelly and his wife Bridget Lafferty. Thomas was Jeremiah's brother and his descendants looked after the farm at Knockadangan.

The Dysert church is an ancient site, founded by Saint Tola in the 8th century, with a holy well nearby:

Dysert is a beautiful and ancient settlement in lush green pasture and hill country, about eight miles north of Ennis, in County Clare. A clear shallow river runs through the district from Loch Ballycullinan, and there are at least two ancient wells that provide sweet water, and an ancient Bronze Age burial chamber, the Mollaneen wedge tomb, which dates from about 1500 B.C. The first known name of the settlement was Dysert Tola, after St. Tola who founded his church here in the 8th Century. It is a deeply historic site: in 1318 A.D. at the Battle of Dysert O'Dea, the local O'Deas, who had been dominant in the area since the 9th century, broke the power of the Normans in the region (then known as Thomond), stopping the advance of Richard de Clare into Clare, killing him in the battle, and holding back the English thrust into Munster for over two centuries.

Old church at Dysert

Next to the church is a small round tower, which was used, we were told, by the monks to hide themselves or their stores from the marauding Vikings. The entrance to the tower is just out of reach so that the marauders, not having a ladder, would be unable to reach it.

Close to the old church is Saint Tola's Cross, and nearby is the ruin of the residence of the Rev Synge. The Synge family were at the centre of the conflict in Dysert O'Dea during the1820s. From the mid18th century, the Synges became major landowners in Dysert O'Dea as a result of land confiscations and allocation to protestant planters. The Rev Edward Synge had become a fundamentalist evangelist, and in an effort to improve the local inhabitants, established the "soup school", whereby he offered food, money and clothing to parents of children in return for their conversion to Protestantism. Refusal brought increased rents and evictions for uncooperative tenants. With poverty and ever-present and starvation looming, there was considerable conflict and violence associated with Synge and his school, and these tensions led to the school being burned down in 1826. It was in this atmosphere that Jeremiah's father Timothy was evicted from Drummina.

Darby lived in Drummina, which means "Little Hills", a fine farm location in the townlands of Dysert, with a view of the Burren hills opposite. We know that Darby Kelly was born early in the 18th century, occupied Drummina and was buried in the old church in Dysert in 1787. Drummina has been occupied by Kellys to this day. Timothy, probably Darby's grandson, also lived in Drummina but was evicted in 1820, when Jeremiah would be about 8 years old. From there Timothy moved with his family to a farm in the nearly townland of Knockadangan, in the Parish of Kilmaley, five miles away to the west (from the Gaelic "Cnoc a Daingean", meaning 'A stronghold'). Tithe records show that Timothy was here in 1826. It is believed that Timothy paid £100 for the tenancy, a large sum at the time. This indicates that the cause of his eviction was not money, but most likely related to "religious" tensions in the Dysert district caused by the evictions, harassment of tenants and burning of houses by the landlords and their agents. When Timothy arrived at the newly leased dwelling at Knockadangan, he found the house and the thatched roof burned out. Family lore has it that prior to the move, Timothy had warned a family named Powell that their house was to be burned. He re-roofed the house and there they stayed.

It is most likely in this location that Jeremiah grew up with father Timothy, his sister Ellen and four brothers. There was John, who married Ellen Fitzpatrick and migrated to Australia in 1850, and Patrick, Timothy and Thomas. It was Thomas who inherited the farm at Knockadangan. When Jeremiah married Mary Baker about 1834, it is said (family lore again) that he was disinherited, and had to move to another branch of the family. Where they lived in the 16 odd years between their marriage and migration to Australia is a little unclear. However, an account was given by Father Donnelly, parish priest of Dysert, in a letter sent to Father Peter Kelly in Australia in 1982, where he describes Jeremiah's marriage as "unacceptable to the father, and he was disinherited. In the meantime he probably lived with another branch of the family in 'Bealnalicka' - they are still there." Father Donnelly is referring here to land on which the Baker's were tenants, in Crusheen. Bealnalicka, according to the Griffith valuation in 1855, is a townland in the parish of Ruan occupied by James Kelly. This James Kelly (born 1818) was most likely a cousin of Jeremiah, and his father Patrick occupied a large amount of land in the Ruan parish. We shall return to this James who looked put up Jeremiah and Mary.

Bealnalicka

Jeremiah and Mary spent the period between about 1834 and 1852 in the one of the most severely affected areas of Ireland by the Great Famine of 1845-1848 struck. They had four children while they were there: Honor, in 1836, Patrick in 1835, Anne in 1847 and James in 1850.

4. 'Traisin relationships'

Next day we drive into Ennis with our guide to reconnect an already established link between the Australian and Irish Kellys from an earlier generation. Here we visited the Kelly sisters Creina and Beccy, who lived in Ruan until recently, and were now aged 85 and 80. Their liveliness and conversation was gentle and unstoppable, a continuous ebb & flow accompanied by tea and sandwiches and cake. The occasion recalls an earlier time when people lived through the medium of talk. Our guide mentioned that before television, people used to gather in one house, not all relations, to catch up and find out what was going on.

Creina and Beccy received their first visit from an Australian relative when they were aged about 35 and 31. Their father was Pappy (Patrick), whose grandfather James was the likely cousin of our Jeremiah. Father Peter Kelly, who is Jeremiah's great-grandson, visited the family in Ruan from Australia in 1951. Peter was 37, and this was the first contact our Australian Kelly clan had with the Irish relatives. In a letter from that year, Peter relates Pappy's astonishment at meeting such faraway relations, and soon got down to the business of making the connections. Peter quotes one of Pappy's daughters as saying, "He's always traisin' relationships."

So here we are in 2006 with Pappy's daughters, 'traisin' again, although not trying very hard. Amid constant demands for more tea and more ham sandwiches and more Christmas cake. Creina tells us the one who was good at this ('traisin') was their brother Jerry, who died only recently. Back in 1951, Peter showed Pappy the baptismal record of James (called Papa by his Australian grandchildren), dated 1850, which he had discovered the previous day in the Dysert parish records. On this basis, Pappy was sure they were related, since, he reasoned, the Kellys of the Ruan-Dysart area were of the same stock. Peter states, "Pappy says we are undoubtedly Drummina Kellys."

In his letter, Peter writes how he related to Pappy an anecdote of his (Peter's) grandfather, Papa (James), who said that "some relation of his was the strongest man in Ireland," known as "The Bully Kelly". Pappy was excited to confirm that "the strongest man in Ireland" was indeed his grandfather James (born 1818), the relation and protector of Jeremiah and Mary.

There is the connection here with the Bakers, because James, "The Bully", had the Baker family as tenants, and allowed Jeremiah and Mary to stay at Bealnalicka. Our knowledge of the Baker family in the mid 1800s is sparse. There is a Michael and Thomas Baker listed as living in the parish of Ruan in 1855, in the Griffith Valuation. According to the Baker family, now living in Ballyalla, Mary had at least two brothers: Edmund who married Honor Coffey, and Michael, who married Mary Kelly in Adelaide. (Mary died in childbirth in 1861.) Edmund and Honor had two sons and six daughters - four of these girls emigrated to South Australia in the late 1800s. It seems likely that Thomas was the father of Mary and her siblings because Michael's 1859 marriage certificate shows his father as Thomas Baker. In his will, Michael Baker left £90 each to Patrick, Anne and James Kelly as well as sums of £20-30 to five of their sister Honor McNamara's children. The Bakers of County Clare lived in the townland of Carrowkeel in the parish of Crusheen. While Mary, Michael and four nieces moved to Australia, Edmund stayed behind. His grandson, John Baker, married Maureen Hanrahan and had eleven children, including Sean, Monica and Marjorie and other family members who live in the Ruan area.

One of the Bakers in front of the house where Mary Baker grew up

Pappy pointed out to Peter Kelly that the great names for Kelly boys were Jeremiah, James and Patrick. The reader may need to take care to account for the repetition of names over and across generations.

5. The parish of Ruan Outside the village of Ruan, we walked down a narrow road with Kelly fields on either side. Ruan means "red land", and refers to a grove of alder trees, which dye wool a red colour. On one side is the vault of the Porte Kellys, on the edge of a field by itself, built there despite the bishop refusing Old Jer's (our Jeremiah's cousin) bequest in 1882 that the new church be built next to it - £500 to the church and £500 the vault. The new Ruan church was built 100 metres up the road in Ruan itself. Opposite the Kelly vault is the grand abandoned house of Porte, acquired by Old Jer in the 1860s, facing Dromore Lake. It is here that the "melancholy incident" occurred, in which Old Jer's son Jeremiah drowned in the lake on the property in 1893, aged 28 years. There is a story that after his marriage ceremony, his wife lifted her veil and he discovered he had married her sister. The Porte house, though still owned by the family, is presently unoccupied, and looks neglected and abandoned.

Ruan Village, with the Burren in the background

Around the parishes of Ruan and Dysert we encounter traces of Celtic history and stories in the land, both pagan and Christian: pre-Celtic ringforts, holy wells, hedge schools, of ollavs - the dispossessed hereditary poets and musicians. As we step around the ring of stones for one of the old forts, our guide tells us that to disturb them was not only bad luck but also protected by law, and told us a story of a local farmer who used old stones from the raths to build a shelter for Angus cattle. They all died, one by one.

It is significant that the Kellys were able to survive the times with their wealth seemingly intact, throughout periods of Catholic land dispossession, unrest and precarious tenancies. Absentee landlords had acquired lands from the confiscations during the Cromwellian settlement, and employed subletting landlords, like the Reverend Synge, who leased farms on these lands for limited periods to families such as the Kellys. After the famine, the tenancy system began to break down, as organised rent strikes and resistance forced many landlords to sell and leave their lands, with small farms being bought by tenants. The Kellys, it seems, were known to have land and wealth, as indicated by the will of Old Jer, and the stories of the wealth and even gold of the Kellys of the region.

Pappy further related the story of the Kellys of the area: that they did not originate from Clare, but arrived in about 1700. Pappy recalls his grandfather saying they came from Galway, "There were some English soldiers maltreating a priest, and the four Kelly brothers came by and saved the priest and killed the soldiers. So the priest imposed on them a penance that they were to leave Galway. He really did that for their own sakes - to get them out of harm's way. So they came to Clare." This account is consistent with the movement of the Kellys after the Battle of Aughrim in Galway about that time, and also links with the astonishing story about the O'Kellys they were pursued to west Clare.

6. Leaving Ruan and Dysert While the records that show the exact details of our Jeremiah's lineage have not survived, the bonds of land and the clan still live, and still connect the Australian Kelly-Baker descendants with these parishes and ancient lands. Most striking is the constancy of the landscape: the drystone walls that define the same fields. Drummina in Dysart has remained in Kelly possession from Darby in the late 1700s until the present time. However, the land also divided and dispersed the clan, as Timothy's farm passed on to one son, Thomas, while two sons, John and Jeremiah, departed to Australia.

Jeremiah and Mary Baker arrived at Port Adelaide on the Phoebe Dunbar on 4 June 1852, with their children Honor, 16, Patrick, 15, Anne, 5 and James, 2. Jeremiah died in 1860, and their descendants number over 600.

Jeremiah Kelly was born in Ireland.

Jeremiah Kelly migrated from Ireland to Australia.

Jeremiah was born about 1810 in Dysert, County Clare, Ireland. He lived at the family farm "Drummina" meaning "little Hills" until he was eight, then moved to the family farm at "Knockadangan" meaning "a fortress".

Family lore relates that his father, Timothy did not approve of Jeremiah's marriage so that Jeremiah and his wife Mary stayed with a cousin called James Kelly on his property at Bealnalicka. There was a tenant family of Bakers living on this property that may have been Mary's relatives.

He applied to Her Majesty's Colonisation Commissioners for passage to South Australia and this was granted. Passage was free for suitable emigrants. He arrived in South Australia with his wife and four children on 7 June 1852 on the Phoebe Dunbar.

He died of liver failure on 27 Feb 1860. His death certificate named his occupation as cattle dealer.

Author: John Hannon John and Bronwyn visited County Clare in January 2006.

1. Clare Heritage Centre, Corofin

2. Tony Morgan, A History of a Clare Kelly Family, and Ray Kelly's genealogy, located at <http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hilaryr/archive.htm>

3. Tony Morgan, page 5.

4. Letter from Father John Donnelly, parish priest of Dysert, to Father Peter Kelly, 8 November, 1982.

5. Maps of Clare showing Dysert, Ruan and Crusheen A map from 1837: <http://www.rootsweb.com/~irlcla2/Lewis1837map.htm> A contemporary map: <http://www.spirited-ireland.net/map/clare/>

6. See "One night in 1789", and the Falkirk letter, where the O'Kellys are pursued and Thomas Kelly settles in Dysert. http://members.iinet.net.au/~jhannon/kelly.htm Now we have a new source:

[Source: Raymond KELLY's Notes at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hilaryr/html/notes.html. Notes NI0328 and NI2691]

[NI2691] The Kelly ancestry John Hannon Presentation to the Kelly-Baker celebration on 5 October 2002, Clare, South Australia

Available with Powerpoint presentation (link no longer exists)

The Kellys, our Kellys, began with Jeremiah and Mary Baker. Now they are still going with 693 at last count.

The Kelly stories go back centuries, and are stories based on factual evidence, family legend and speculation. The stories of our Kellys, Jeremiah's in particular, is a shifting one, with absences and missing links. Some of these stories have been kept alive in Australia for 150 years, and on occasion have met up with Kelly stories from Ireland. Over the years we have been able to hear separate accounts from Kelly descendants across the globe, and now communicate these stories using the internet.

Behind it all one can sense a calling or a longing - these stories promise to connect us, the Kelly descendants in Australia, with the struggles of their ancestors - largely over land, language, religion and culture - back to the time when the Kellys were beyond the Pale, literally, and before that when the rule of English law was preceded by Brehon law - Ireland had a system of community land title where the chieftain was elected.

While the Kelly stories feature some shadows and half formed figures, the tales of my childhood that my mother Patricia told me are largely true. How the Kellys shifted from their lands in Connacht and settled in Dysert O'Dea in County Clare as a result of wars against the English - either the Battle of Kinsale in 1602, or as a result of the Cromwellian land confiscations in the mid to late 1600s. And the fateful appearance at the Battle of Falkirk of John Patrick O'Kelly, his family pursued to the west of Clare where they hid for seven years in the Kinvarra mountains - but I will come to that.

Where our ancestor came from: First, we know that the family arrived in Port Adelaide in 1852, with the four children Honor, 16 and Patrick 15, Anne 5 and James was 2. (This photo of Honor - she looks about 18 - must have been taken in the 1850s). Jeremiah and Mary were probably married about 1835, but there is no record of the marriage, only records of the birth of James and Anne, since parish records were not kept for Catholics until 1845.

Jeremiah and Mary connect us to a particular patch of earth located in the parish of Ruan-Dysart, a place that suffered badly from crop failure in the 1840s.

It is thought that Jeremiah emigrated on the advice of his brother John, who arrived in South Australia a year earlier, in 1851 aboard the ship 'Catherine', with his wife Ellen Fitzpatrick and 2 sons ['Catherine' arrived at Port Adelaide on 26 May 1851, having left Liverpool in Jan 1851, according to The Ships List, SA Passenger Lists, 1847-1886, http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/australia/catherine1851.shtml)]. Martin Kelly and his wife Bridget McMahon also arrived in 1851 on the 'Catherine'. It is likely that Jeremiah and John were related, perhaps cousins, of Martin.

So there are three strands of related Kellys who arrived in Adelaide at about the same time, but they will have to hold their own reunion because they wont fit in here.

Jeremiah's dad Jeremiah' s father is the singular most ambiguous figure in the story. But if we don't know who he is, we know something of his personality. It is known that Jeremiah displeased his father with his marriage, was disinherited and stayed with another branch of the Kellys at Bealnalicka before emigrating. My uncle Peter Kelly remembers his grandfather James, Jeremiah's son, referring to some relation of his as "Bully Kelly, the strongest man in Ireland". Father John Donnelly, writing to Peter Kelly in 1982, made reference to a "Bull Kelly" in the neighbourhood.(1)

This wrathful parent of Jeremiah is our enigma. He has different names according to different Kelly historians. Is it Patrick, or Timothy, or even Jeremiah (2), and there were an awful lot of Jeremiahs. But think about this disinheritance - it would most likely have been absolute and total, leaving Jeremiah and Mary landless in a place where you had land and family or nothing. They would have had little choice but to leave the region (although it was some 15-16 years between marriage and emigration). The indications are tantalising but imprecise.

Colonel O'Kelly Let me take a leap here to one of the most legendary pieces of Kelly history from the region. When my uncle Peter Kelly visited Ireland in 1951, he met Louise Connolly, who gave him a copy of a note concerning her ancestor Colonel John Patrick O'Kelly who died in Falkirk in 1746.

He also obtained a transcript of the fireside chat "One night in 1798" by Diarmud O'Kelly warning his sons and nephews of the dangers of taking up arms, and of the story of their pursuit by 'the Butcher Cumberland', as the Duke was known, and of the gold they carried with them. (see http://snipurl.com/falkirk)

The Falkirk documents mention four brothers, Patrick, Thomas, Diarmud and Morty, all sons of John Patrick O'Kelly. Diarmud's descendants are well accounted for by the O'Kelly Lynch descendants, and their story about how they ended up via various evictions and pursuits in (Knocknahilla), Mullagh.

Diarmud, in the fireside chat of 1798, mentions his brother Thomas 'who still lives at Dysart, twenty miles from here'. Peter Kelly's own research gives him 9 children. Our knowledge of Thomas stops there. That's all we know about him or his children.

The link with Thomas Given that Jeremiah's father, Mr Kelly, was relatively well to do in the Ruan district, it is quite possible that his wealth is linked via land in Dysert to Thomas O'Kelly, one of the four brothers, who settled in Dysart in the late 1700s.

Jeremiah's father could be Thomas's son, if we take into account the spacing of the generations, and the possession of gold in Thomas's family.

When Jeremiah and Mary eloped and provoked the Old Testament style wrath of Bull Kelly, they came to Australia and brought forth a multitude, so to speak. And with this paternal defiance, perhaps they brought a rebellious streak to the Kellys which, you may have noticed, erupts every now and again in various families. Its not just the increase of Kelly clan population from 2 to 690 odd in six generations, but the kinds of achievements and preoccupations that they pursue - you could describe the Kellys here as magnanimous - not a fashionable word in current times - and now this multitude has extended the Irish diaspora into the diversity of culture that is this country.

Footnotes 1. Bull Kelly has been identified, and he is not our Jeremiah's father. He was identified by both Fr John Donnelly (letter 1982) and "Pappy" Kelly, who said Bull Kelly was his grandfather James (1818 -80), brother of "Old Jer" Kelly. This is recounted in a letter by Peter Kelly to his parents Frank and Sheila in 1951.

This makes our Jeremiah 6 years older than James "Bully" Kelly, and probably a cousin.

Dates taken from Ray Kelly's GEDCOM database, http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hannontan/archive.htm

2. Patrick is our Jeremiah's father, according to Antoinette O'Brien from the Clare Heritage Centre in her work for Des Caulfield, 28 April 1997, is the father of John Kelly, who arrived in Adelaide in 1851. Timothy is our Jeremiah's father, according to Ray Kelly in his database, and Jeremiah, through my mother Patricia Hannon (nee Kelly), Peter Kelly's sister.

The oldest record of the Kellys (of Dysert) is on a headstone in the old church ruins at Dysert. The inscription reads, "God rest the soul of Darby Kelly died 11 July 1787, Erected by his son, Patrick." It seems likely that the Kellys who moved to County Clare, did so in the late 1600s as a result of two historic events: the "Cromwellian Settlement", whereby lands were confiscated from the Catholic Irish; and after the Battle of Aughrim in Galway in 1691. "Aughrim of the slaughter" marked the collapse of the Jacobite resistance to the Williamite armies, perhaps more significant than the Battle of the Boyne in bringing the dispossession or destruction of the Irish land system. We know that Kellys had started to settle in Clare arriving from Galway and Roscommon after the earlier Cromwellian confiscations of 1653. Prior to Cromwell, The O'Kellys (the "O" was dropped in most cases, during the 16th and 17th century) were one of the most powerful clans in Connaught from the 9th to the 16th century. The local Kelly clan of the 16th century were identified as a "dangerous Irish sept" by the Corporation of Galway, according to the Clare Heritage Council.

Kellys of Dysert Close to Drummina:

The old church at Dysert is the site of both the historic Battle of Dysert O'Dea, and more recent conflict and tribulation. The 12th century church ruins contain a carved stone doorway with an arch of animal and human heads, of odd shape and construction, clearly influenced by pilgrimages from other lands. Here are the graves of Darby, died 1787, and other graves set in the floor of the church, including a headstone of Thomas Kelly and his wife Bridget Lafferty. Thomas was Jeremiah's brother and his descendants looked after the (family) farm at Knockadangan.

The Dysert church is an ancient site, founded by Saint Tola in the 8th century, with a holy well nearby:

Dysert is a beautiful and ancient settlement in lush green pasture and hill country, about eight miles north of Ennis, in County Clare. A clear shallow river runs through the district from Loch Ballycullinan, and there are at least two ancient wells that provide sweet water, and an ancient Bronze Age burial chamber, the Mollaneen wedge tomb, which dates from about 1500 B.C. The first known name of the settlement was Dysert Tola, after St. Tola who founded his church here in the 8th Century. It is a deeply historic site: in 1318 A.D. at the Battle of Dysert O'Dea, the local O'Deas, who had been dominant in the area since the 9th century, broke the power of the Normans in the region (then known as Thomond), stopping the advance of Richard de Clare into Clare, killing him in the battle, and holding back the English thrust into Munster for over two centuries.

Close to the old church is Saint Tola's Cross, and nearby is the ruin of the residence of the Rev Synge. The Synge family were at the centre of the conflict in Dysert O'Dea during the1820s. From the mid18th century, the Synges became major landowners in Dysert O'Dea as a result of land confiscations and allocation to protestant planters. The Rev Edward Synge had become a fundamentalist evangelist, and in an effort to improve the local inhabitants, established the "soup school", whereby he offered food, money and clothing to parents of children in return for their conversion to Protestantism. Refusal brought increased rents and evictions for uncooperative tenants. With poverty and ever-present and starvation looming, there was considerable conflict and violence associated with Synge and his school, and these tensions led to the school being burned down in 1826. It was in this atmosphere that Jeremiah's father Timothy was evicted from Drummina.

Darby lived in Drummina, which means "Little Hills", a fine farm location in the townlands of Dysert, with a view of the Burren hills opposite. We know that Darby Kelly was born early in the 18th century, occupied Drummina and was buried in the old church in Dysert in 1787. Drummina has been occupied by Kellys to this day. Timothy, probably Darby's grandson, also lived in Drummina but was evicted in 1820, when Jeremiah would be about 8 years old. From there Timothy moved with his family to a farm in the nearly townland of Knockadangan, in the Parish of Kilmaley, five miles away to the west (from the Gaelic "Cnoc a Daingean", meaning 'A stronghold'). Tithe records show that Timothy was here in 1826. It is believed that Timothy paid £100 for the tenancy, a large sum at the time. This indicates that the cause of his eviction was not money, but most likely related to "religious" tensions in the Dysert district caused by the evictions, harassment of tenants and burning of houses by the landlords and their agents. When Timothy arrived at the newly leased dwelling at Knockadangan, he found the house and the thatched roof burned out. Family lore has it that prior to the move, Timothy had warned a family named Powell that their house was to be burned. He re-roofed the house and there they stayed.

It is most likely in this location that Jeremiah grew up with father Timothy, his sister Ellen and four brothers. There was John, who married Ellen Fitzpatrick and migrated to Australia in 1850, and Patrick, Timothy and Thomas. It was Thomas who inherited the farm at Knockadangan. When Jeremiah married Mary Baker about 1834, it is said (family lore again) that he was disinherited, and had to move to another branch of the family. Where they lived in the 16 odd years between their marriage and migration to Australia is a little unclear. However, an account was given by Father Donnelly, parish priest of Dysert, in a letter sent to Father Peter Kelly in Australia in 1982, where he describes Jeremiah's marriage as "unacceptable to the father, and he was disinherited. In the meantime he probably lived with another branch of the family in 'Bealnalicka' - they are still there." Father Donnelly is referring here to land on which the Baker's were tenants, in Crusheen (Note: there seems to be an error here as Crusheen is not in Ruan Parish where Bealnalicka is, but in the neighbouring parish of Crusheen or Inchicronan. There are many Bakers in Crusheen to this day - possibly the Baker's of Bealnalicka came from Crusheen). Bealnalicka, according to the Griffith valuation in 1855, is a townland in the parish of Ruan occupied by James Kelly. This James Kelly (born 1818) was most likely a cousin of Jeremiah, and his father Patrick occupied a large amount of land in the Ruan parish."

Bealnalicka

"Jeremiah and Mary spent the period between about 1834 and 1852 in one of the most severely affected areas of Ireland by the Great Famine of 1845-1848 struck. They had four children while they were there: Honor, in 1836, Patrick in 1835, Anne in 1847 and James in 1850."

Sources

1. ↑ Death: South Australian Registry of BDM reg no 1860/9/23107, Clare District, at https://www.genealogysa.org.au and KELLY, Jeremiah Found in 'Death Registrations' Database: at https://www.genealogysa.org.au.

• "Family Tree," database, FamilySearch (http://familysearch.org : modified 24 September 2018, 10:11), entry for Jeremiah Kelly(PID https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/4:1:964G-LN1); contributed by various users.
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