Katherine Ryan Sweeney -seeking place of Ireland birth

As a general piece of advice, it’s wise to take a relaxed attitude to dates of birth for folk born in Ireland in the 1800s. Most people didn't celebrate birthdays and often didn’t know when they were born, and when later officialdom asked for a date, they often just made one up.

Secondly whilst most Catholic families were pretty quick to get their children baptised, and so that date can be reliable, they sometimes left it a while before registering the birth (especially if they lived some distance from the nearest Registrar). It was free to register a birth within a certain number of weeks, but after that there was a late registration fee. Obviously no sensible person wanted to pay that if they could avoid it, so it was common to “adjust” the date of birth to one that avoided any fee. So even when you find someone’s date of birth it may not be anywhere near correct. (And the proof of the pudding is that you may well find a baptism say 2 months before they were apparently born).

So open mind required on dates of birth.

Next, you say you have gone through all the possible Ryan births between 1881 and 1887. Did you include those with no forename? It was quite common in those days to register a birth without a forename. Of the 6170 Ryans born 1881 – 1887, 154 had no forename. Not helpful I know, but you need to be aware of that.

Can you confirm that neither Katherine’s marriage nor death certificates have any parents names? You are going to struggle to find the right family without them.

Did she have any siblings? (And if so, have you investigated their marriage and death certificates for parents names?).

Angela,

Your William Ryan lived in the townland of Mucklone, which is part of the parish of Castlebrack. So you need to focus on the map of Mucklone.

Looking at Griffiths (compiled in 1851 for this parish), I can see William on plots 10 & 13 as you said. Plot 10 is land only (ie there was no house). Plot 13 contains the house.  So he had a farm and 20 acres on plot 20 and then another 5 acres on plot 10 which he shared with Sarah. (If 2 people lived in the same townland and had the same name, the clerks would differentiate between them by use of an agnomen or nickname. This hasn’t occurred with Mucklone, so you can be fairly sure it’s just the one William Ryan).

I can see plot 10 in Mucklone but there’s no plot 13 on the Griffiths map. That is probably because the map was compiled 20 years later and some of the plots will have changed.  If you are trying to find Mucklone today, the modern House of Gowns (Eircode R32 X6N4) is in the middle of it.  Off the N80 road.

Judging by Google Earth Mucklone remains an agricultural area, as it was in 1851. However many of the smaller farms will likely have been consolidated into larger farms now, and many of the older buildings demolished.

In the 1901 census there were 7 inhabited houses in Mucklone and a population of 32. (No Ryans). All were engaged in farming in one way or another.

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Queen_s_Co_/Cappalough/Mucklone/

Angela,

I can’t answer the question of how the family paid for their tickets with certainty but it’s possible that they did it by selling the farm. As you say, the property was rented but there would still be quite a bit of capital that belonged to the Ryan family and not the landlord. They could sell the unexpired portion of their lease, plus the animals, crops and farming machinery, and the contents of the house. That all together might easily have paid their fares.

I don’t think it was as bad as "leave or die”. The famine years were long past by the time your family left. I think it was more that they had a choice between a hard life with little money in Ireland or the prospect of something better overseas. The same factors that drive most modern migration. Plus they wouldn’t have wanted to leave their elderly parents. Presumably the parents felt too old to emigrate. Thomas would have stayed on the farm for his parents sake. Once his parents were both dead then he was free to leave.

Someone evidently bought their farm and kept it going after they left, so it was probably viable, but maybe not all that profitable? Perhaps the land wasn’t all that good?

Irish emigrants to America and elsewhere wrote home and told those back in Ireland all about life in the US, plus there were many articles in the Irish papers about life in America, so the Ryans would have been fully informed about their prospects.  There will undoubtedly have been some sadness in leaving – you have perhaps read about American Wakes as they were called where your departure was treated like a death – but at the same time there was probably a skip in their step too.

Plenty of "Irish angst" plays explore this dichotomy. Brian Friel’s ”Philadelphia here I come” for example.