A PLACE TO CALL HOME To read, to fear, to hope, to pray, To lift the latch, to force the way.
Lines from a verse written inside the front cover of the pulpit Bible from the former Wesleyan Preaching House in Killeheen, Co Limerick, exhibited in the Irish Palatine Museum and Heritage Centre, Rathkeale.]
What was it that made Chris Timoney’s Tipperary-born emigrant greatgrandmother, Susan Cooke, different from all her other Irish ancestors? Though Susan was raised on a farm in Ireland’s rural heartland, her surname hinted that her people had not always been Irish. But Susan’s story, which Chris had expected to be typically Anglo-Irish, took another path altogether. Exploring the evolution of the surname in Ireland from Koch in 1709 to Cough in the 1770s to Cooke in the 1800s, Chris learnt that Susan was descended from Irish Palatines. Delving further into the Palatine story, Chris discovered a pattern of recurring cycles of migration. She found the analogy between the Palatines’ peregrinations and the Biblical ‘wandering in the desert’ irresistible, especially since the Palatines wore their religious difference with pride. A Place to Call Home is the multigenerational saga that focuses on the Cooke family to trace the Irish Palatine story, from their exodus from Germany in 1709, through the settlement in Co Limerick and the creation of a satellite community in Co Tipperary in 1772, to yet another disruption and dispersal as many Palatines joined the mass emigration from Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century.
72 | THE IRISH SCENE
