Agnes Bridget HYLAND, the seventh child of Patrick and Mary Teresa (Egan) HYLAND was born 7th January 1901 in Rosscarbery, County Cork.
The Hyland family returned to Cork city in 1904 where they lived at 32 Commons Road, Monard, in north Cork.
The Cork winter of 1904/5 was to have dramatic consequences that must have haunted my grandfather for years to come.
My great aunt Agnes died on Monday 30th January 1905, 23 days after her fourth birthday. The death certificate recorded she had died at the North Infirmary [1] from shock as the result of accidental burning, with the information referred from the Coroner, Cork City. An inquest had been held.
The Cork Examiner of the Wednesday morning of February 1st 1905 reported the Coroner’s findings:
The story of Agnes’s death reached beyond Cork, with an article appearing in the Kerry Weekly Reporter on February 4th, 1905.
I can only imagine the horror of trying, unsuccessfully, to save his sister stayed with my 14 year old grandfather Michael. Without recounting this find, I asked my aunts and mother if their father had seemed unusually concerned about them around fire. It struck a chord for them. Maura, the eldest daughter recalled there had been a fire, having heard something of it from the late evenings spent talking with her mother.
Agnes is buried at St. Joseph’s Cemetery, Ballyphehane, where others of her family were later buried. She lies ‘1st north of Mary Murphy’s head stone’. Her grandmother Mary T. (Desmond) EGAN was buried with her a month later.
Suaimhneas síoraí dá hanam, Agnes.
[1] The North Infirmary was the first general hospital built in Cork. It was originally built in 1719, and in 1836 a new hospital was built. It was a fever hospital in 1847 during the famine. Some time after Agnes’s death wounded WW1 soldiers were treated here, as were Republicans injured in the war of independence. It closed in 1987. It reopened as a hotel in 1996 and has been the Maldron Hotel since 2008.
In Search of Thomas Davis 