Eugene Callaghan and the Fermoy connection

In the early 2000s I found a record in the Irish National Archives that puzzled and occasionally obsessed me for over fifteen years.

Timothy O’CALLAGHAN was the universal legatee (recipient) for the effects of £143 and 15s from Johanna O’CALLAGHAN, late of College Road, Fermoy.  This widow had died on 29th January 1894 and her will was settled on 30^th April 1894.

This inheritance would be worth the equivalent of about £18,000.00 in 2017.

There were other O’Callaghan tailors working on South Main St, Cork (e.g. Cornelius at number 7 in 1915) but no others were named Timothy, and none at 83 South Main St. Surely it was our Timothy, with an incorrect notation of his address, or was this another red herring? 

A Davis descendent told me in the early 2000s he thought there was a DAVIS connection to Fermoy through farming.  In the 1893 Guy’s Directory there was a number of O’CALLAGHAN merchant and tradespeople in the area.

I could not find any records of Johanna, or of Timothy’s father Eugene in my searches in the 2000s. I’d even been to Fermoy and driven along College Road for inspiration (I was passing, I’m not totally obsessed).  Who was this Johanna? 

In 2018 I finally discovered a newspaper article from the Irish Examiner of May 05, 1894.

This article demonstrates Eugene and his wife had owned a property.  It suggests that Timothy was a good man, ‘assisting’ his father and step mother for what he claimed to have been twenty-four years.  It suggests that Timothy was the oldest, or possibly only, living or Ireland-based child of Eugene Callaghan, and there were no living or local children from Johanna and Eugene’s marriage. 

This article confirms an O’CALLAGHAN link to Fermoy, as the final home of Timothy’s father and step mother and a place that Timothy reportedly visited often.  Was Timothy’s place of birth, as recorded in the Census of 1901 and 1911, really Cork City?  Is it possible that Timothy moved to Cork city in search or in receipt of a tailoring apprenticeship? Or did Eugene move away from Cork City to farm and labour after the famine?

Johanna was recorded as 63 years old when she died.

Eugene had died less than two years earlier.  He was recorded as having been 84 years old.

1892 – Death of Eugene Callaghan my great, great, great grandfather.

If this death record about his age is accurate Eugene was born around 1808.  He had survived the cholera epidemic that swept through Ireland 1832 – 1834.  He and his son Timothy had both survived the Great Famine.  

Two pieces of evidence (Timothy’s marriage cert and Eugene’s death cert) show us that Eugene, my great, great, great grandfather, had been a farmer and labourer.

I have found no evidence of Eugene’s marriage to Johanna and therefore do not yet know when or where this took place, or when Eugene’s first wife died, or who she was. 

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