Ireland Road Trip part 2 - Judith Doyle

The children of Martin Fitzhenry and Judith Doyle were born in Clohasta (Mary, 1838) and Stackley (all the rest 1840-1847).

When I asked Mary in the Abbey Centre where Stackley was, she was very sure of the directions she gave me to the townland, a couple of miles north of Graiguenamanagh, out past Mooneen on one of the minor roads.
When I looked for Stackley on the map, it didn't seem to exist, and neither did it appear when I googled it.

However Mooneen was previously known as Moneen (that led me a merry dance trying to find that in modern Ireland), so I started some creative phonetic searching and found the townland of Stakally. I had noticed the tendency to spell the townlands phonectically in the registers, but as Stackley was spelt consistently the same throughout, I thought this at least was the proper spelling!

In Griffith's Valuations (the register of who owned property and who was renting it in Ireland), in 1850 a Judith Doyle was renting land in Stakally (no buildings attached) from James Brophy, who was sub-letting the land from Sir Josiah C. Coghill, Baronet. Sir Josiah owned all the land in Stakally.

Stakally is the next townland north of Moneen (Mooneen in modern spelling), where a Judith Fitzhenry was renting a house and garden from her joint landlords Anthony Wellman, John Flood, Mrs Rebecca Creane and Mrs Elizabeth Walsh. Again, these four people owned all the land in Moneen.

Were these two women one and the same person? It was common for married women to continue to use their maiden names. What wasn't usual however was for married women to rent property in their own right. It would have expected that if Martin was still part of this family, then the property would have been in his name. Sometime between 1847 and 1850 I expect Martin left the family either through migration, desertion or his death. This was the time of the Irish famine, so the death of a young man would not have been uncommon. This may have also been when Judith's child died.

Nowadays, the old buildings of Moneen and Stakally have gone, but there are what I believe are the remains of an old church at Stakally... in a cow field. Here's the best picture I could get of it. It could of course be just an old cow shed.







Here is a picture of the grand gates leading to the farm at Stakally - they look like they were built after 1850, but these were the landmarks given to me so that I knew that I was in the Stakally townland area. If there's one thing that I found on this trip, it is that townlands aren't signposted in the conventional way... it was more a concept of where you were rather than a marked area.

Here is the excellent Griffith's Valuation website so you can have a look at the entries and see how close the two townlands were, on maps used at the time for the Valuations.
Admiral Sir Josiah C. Coghill, 3rd Baronet Coghill of Coghill, County York, resided in Belvedere, County Dublin.
He owned extensive lands in County Kilkenny.
He died 20 June 1850.
Ref: The Peerage.com and Griffith's valuations


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