Family History WA

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.

Left: The quiet rural road in Bawnlea, Kilcooly, Co Tipperary, where the Cooke family have lived since the 1770s. [Photo by the author, 2018]

When my paternal great-grandmother, Susan Cooke, boarded the threemasted sailing ship Shenir in Plymouth on 20 May 1880 for the three-month voyage to Brisbane, she may have looked like a typical eighteen-year-old exchanging a bleak future in rural Ireland for the promise of plentiful employment and good marriage prospects in Queensland, but Susan carried a secret weapon she probably believed would set her apart from the crowd. She was descended from proud Palatine Protestants, farmers described by John Wesley, who had preached to them in 1756 under an ash tree in Adare, County Limerick, as ‘a plain, artless, serious people … [whose] diligence turns all their land into a garden’. While Susan probably spoke with an Irish accent, she was more German than Irish and the tradition of epic journeys undertaken by her Palatine ancestors must surely have fuelled her courage for the voyage ahead. But who exactly were the Irish Palatines? In March 1709, in the Rhineland Palatinate region of Germany, an exodus had been gathering momentum as approximately 13,500 refugees, encouraged and funded by the English queen, fled the triple threats of the persecution of Protestants under rising Catholic dominance in Europe, repeated French incursions particularly during the War of the Spanish Succession, and – the final straw – the notoriously harsh winter of 1708-09 that caused catastrophic crop failures. Several thousand of those ‘poor Palatines’ made it to America while thousands more dispersed across Britain, buoyed by the passing on 23 March 1709 of the British Parliament’s Naturalisation Act that facilitated the settlement of foreign Protestants in England and her colonies, especially the American colonies. Among one hundred Palatine families arriving on Sir Thomas Southwell’s Irish estate in Rathkeale, Co Limerick, were Johan, Martin, Philip and Matthes Koch. Listed as husbandmen and vinedressers from Massenheim, near Weisbaden, they would have felt themselves fortified by the moral armour of their Lutheran faith as well as the skills and work ethic to continue their agricultural traditions and lifestyle. In Ireland the Palatines initially aligned themselves with the ruling British by attending the Church of Ireland, thereby distinguishing themselves from the majority Irish Catholic population. After hearing Wesley preach, many Palatines formed Methodist congregations and built Methodist chapels in their rural communities. I wonder if the eight-year-old John Cough, Johann Koch’s Irish-born grandson and Susan’s greatgrandfather, had been among the crowd listening to Wesley under that ash tree in 1756.

COULD YOUR IRISH ANCESTOR HAVE BEEN AN IRISH PALATINE?

The Irish Palatine Association, based in Co Limerick, have established themselves as the main repository of the known Palatine history and curators of the Irish Palatine Heritage Centre at Rathkeale. They also cooperate extensively with the Irish Palatine Special Interest Group of the Ontario Genealogical Society in Canada.

If you have Irish Palatine ancestors, or you are intrigued that you have Irish ancestors with German-sounding names such as Switzer, Bovenizer, Teskey, Winter – and in Wexford even the family name Keough, easily confused with the Irish name Keogh – the Irish Palatine Association would love to hear from you.

WEBSITES FOR IRISH PALATINE HISTORY:

www.irishpalatines.org– Irish

Palatine Museum and Heritage Centre, Rathkeale, Co Limerick. www.ip-sig.ogs.on.ca/ activities/past-webinars- take

the free Virtual Tour of the Irish Palatine Heritage Centre. The tour was delivered by Austin Bovenizer from the heritage centre in Rathkeale, and recorded at an online meeting of the Irish Palatine Special Interest Group of the Ontario Genealogical Society on 8 May 2021.

THE IRISH SIG IN 2022

The Irish Special Interest Group (Irish SIG) at Family History WA (FHWA) continues to meet quarterly, though the option to meet online via Google Meet can be exercised at short notice if the Covid-19 situation changes. Next ISIG meeting will be on 3 April 2022, when we will hear from members who have utilized DNA testing as another tool to sharpen the accuracy of their Irish family history searching. New members and visitors are always welcome - simply book your place using the online booking site TryBooking, details below.

FHWA also hosts many other face-to-face and online presentations, workshops and meetings, some for beginners and others for experienced researchers. Bookings are essential, and a small payment may be required for some events. See links below. We invite you to visit FHWA’s extensive library and resource centre at 6/48 May Street, Bayswater. Please consult the FHWA homepage for current opening hours, capacity limits and conditions of entry, if applicable. Happy and successful researching!

USEFUL LINKS

Contact Robyn O’Brien, Convenor Irish Special Interest Group: irish.sig@fhwa.org. au

Book a place at the next Irish SIG meeting at TryBooking: trybooking.com/BLPZM

Book for future FHWA events at trybooking. com/eventlist/genealogy

Go digging for Irish resources at FamilyHistoryWA’s Irish SIG webpage Join FamilyHistoryWA Facebook group – researching family worldwide, open to all. Join in the chat or ask a question. FamilyHistoryWA (FHWA): fhwa.org.au T 08 9271 4311 For some Irish Palatines, however, Limerick would turn out not to be their Promised Land. By 1772, with the community already outgrowing the Rathkeale estate and Southwell’s heirs abandoning his original promise of permanently favourable rental conditions, more English landlords, having observed the farming successes of the original Palatine settlements, began to seek a piece of the action. One such landlord was William Barker, who invited a small group of disgruntled Limerick Palatines to his Kilcooly estate in the east of County Tipperary, and so began another exodus, a new generation joining the throbbing pulse of Ireland’s internal migration. Among the travellers was Susan’s great-grandfather, John Cough, who would have walked the eighty miles, perhaps driving a few cattle and transporting basic farm and household equipment, ready to apply himself to farming in another new location. As John and his fellow Palatines climbed the hills above Kilcooly Abbey into Bawnlea and gazed down on the fertile, green plain of Tipperary’s Golden Vale, did they dare to hope their wanderings were finally over? The Griffith’s Valuation maps of one hundred years later reveal a Methodist chapel and preacher’s residence sandwiched between fields and cottages rented by Peter Cooke, Henry Cooke and Susan’s father, Adam Cooke, in Bawnlea. Even today Henry’s descendants still farm the same fields, and the original Methodist chapel is perhaps Ireland’s most enigmatic milking parlour, complete with stone portico and decorative arched windows. In the 1880s, however, it was Adam’s children who would revive the ancestral migratory behaviour. Adam Cooke and Julia Bible had married in Kilcooly on 4 November 1845, a month after the blight, phytophthera infestans, was first identified in Irish potatoes. While the aftermath of the next six years of starvation and disease would halve Ireland’s population before the century was over, it was a domestic tragedy that transformed the fate of the Cooke family when Julia died giving birth to their seventh child in 1866. Ten years later Adam died and over the next seven years all of their children emigrated, two to North America, the other five – including my great-grandmother, Susan – to Queensland. Did this latest emigrant generation view themselves as desperate exiles from a bleak future in rural Ireland? Would this be their final journey to their very own Promised Land? The Irish Palatines’ rock was their faith, but it was

tinged with a lingering religious prejudice probably ingrained since the persecution of their ancestors back in the Rhine Palatinate. In 1827, Susan’s forebears living in Tipperary had shown their contempt for the majority Irish Catholics by signing the anti-Catholic petition. I find it ironic that those Catholics to whom my own Palatine ancestors sought to deny rights and freedoms included all the other Irish lines of my ancestry: my Dwyer and Breen families in Donaskeagh, Tipperary South; my Costigans, Mahers and Nowlans in the Barony of Ikerrin, Tipperary North; and my McMahons from Portroe near the shores of Lough Derg, Tipperary North. In the Ireland of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many Palatines had managed to marry within their Palatine community and retain to some extent their distinctive identity. In Australia, Susan would go on to marry two Protestant husbands in the 1880s and 1890s. I suspect Susan may have held some uncompromising ideas when it came to teaching the next generation about obedience, self-discipline and responsibility, judging by some Queensland court reports that she beat her son and that she sued her step-son for £3/1/- board. Twentieth century Australia, however, would prove a very different social environment, and I wonder what Susan, her parents or her grandparents would have thought of her many descendants’ mixed marriages with Irish-Australian Catholic spouses, including those in my direct line. The five Cooke siblings thrived in south-eastern Queensland and today, nearly a century and a half after their arrival, hundreds of Susan’s and her siblings’ descendants still live within 150 kilometres of the homes where the five settled. As that Bible verse suggested, perhaps my Palatine ancestors having ‘lift[ed] the latch’ three times in six generations, finally did ‘force the way’ to their Promised Land, a little corner of Australia that their descendants could call home. ~ Christine Timone

Thursday 17 March 2022

Maylands

Golf Course Swan Bank Road

Maylands.

Registration from 7.00 am

Supporting: The Claddagh Association and the Charlotte Foundation Irish Club Golf Society Bank account details: BSB 306044 Acc: 0518027 Bookings, Format: TWO BALL AMBROSE. Contact: $75.00 per person - Two tee start from 7.30am Peter McKenna includes a BBQ lunch after the game. 0447258000. Jack Ebbs 0450675167. Carts available at individual’s own cost. Booking for carts 93703211. HOLE SPONSOR: $500.00 (includes two teams of two players, banners Tom Quinn displayed on the day. 0412236498. Raffle on the day, plus lots of novelties.

St Patrick’s Day

Conditions of Entry 1. 2. NO BYO ALCOHOL Proof of VACCINATION required Prizes Galore 3. MASKS must be worn in PROSHOP and

FUNCTION ROOM

Phone 08 9401 1900