EARLIER this year Bantry’s connection with the inventor of the modern submarine, John Philip Holland was marked by the installation of an information board in the Spirit of Love garden beside the Abbey cemetery.
BY LIZ O'MAHONY
The information board was the culmination of many years of work to confirm the town’s links to Holland, whose father was from Bantry, and to note it.
Houlihan is the older version of the Holland surname and the project involved the search of 32 different spellings of the Houlihan surname in records for the Bantry and Muintervara areas.
That’s one of the reasons why this was a very challenging but ultimately worthwhile search.
Starting with the local connection – John Holland Snr was born in Bantry around 1800.
As baptismal records for Bantry are not available from July 1799 until January 1808, there is no record of John Holland Snr’s baptism, so we had to rely on other records to tie the information in.
The first such record we have is of John Holland Snr joining the British Coast Guard in February 1822, at the age of 22 years.
Bearing in mind here that the Irish Coast Guard followed in later years. In that record it states ‘where born’ as Bantry.
The main family connection we know of is the family of Timothy Houlihan and Catherine Murphy who married in Bantry in February 1842.
We have established records of 10 children born to Timothy and Catherine:
Mary Holland 1843; Ellen 1844/45; Catherine Whoolhane 1846; Daniel 1847; Mary Houlihan 1848; Michael Whooley 1851; Anne Holland 1854; Timothy Whoolahan 1857; Cornelius Whoolahan 1859; Bridget Whoolahan 1861.
They probably lived in the Blackrock Road area or the surrounding streets.
In the mid to late 1860s, Timothy and Catherine, along with some of their family, moved from Bantry to an area between Killarney and Tralee in Co Kerry.
It looks like there were already other family connections in that area.
From details in the Kerry records, some of the family were employed on the local railways, and Mary and Ellen worked as teachers in schools in the area.
Marriage and family records have been found for Ellen, Daniel, and Mary (1848) in the Kerry records.
Mary, born 1848, was possibly the main key to the Bantry connections.
In 2014, the school that Mary taught in were doing research for a school celebration, and on speaking to an elderly lady who had connections to the family, she informed them that Mary was a first cousin of the submarine inventor.
Regarding the family members who remained on in Bantry – one of these, Michael, born in 1851, married a local girl, Hannah Kelly, in Bantry in February 1877, and they had four children while living in Bantry.
Addresses given for those births are three in Blackrock Road and one as The Quay.
They then also moved to the Killarney area, and the rest of their children are registered as born in Killarney.
A number of their children died at a young age, and in February 1900, Michael also died, aged just 48 years.
Hannah then moved back to Market Street in Bantry, closer to her own family, with their remaining five children, as we see from 1901 Census records.
What is most interesting is that local people still have memory of the last members of this family living in Bantry, prior to their deaths in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Only recently we have found details of their death notices which show they are buried in the Abbey cemetery in Bantry – close to where the information board stands today.
In relation to other members of Timothy and Catherine’s family, who remained on in Bantry, due to the very varied spellings of the surname, no definite information can be tied in successfully as yet, but that is still a work in progress.
The other family connection we know a little of in relation to John Philip, is the aunt he lived with in Cork city when he had to take time out from teaching in the early 1860s due to ill health.
Even though we have handwritten pages from the John Philip Holland Collection in the Paterson Museum, which state, ‘while staying in Cork, he lived at Ashburton, at the Western end of Glanmire Hill’, we have so far failed to tie any of this information in, despite hundreds of hours of research.
The other information we have in relation to this family is a letter received in 1995, written by a John Holland living in the US, who stated that he believed the person who John Philip lived with in Cork was his great great grandmother. No name was given for this lady.
He also states that his great grandfather was John J Holland, born in Cork in 1831, who went on to marry Margret Murphy, also from Cork, and both emigrated to the US. No definite record has yet been found to verify any of this information, possibly because not all Cork city records have been digitised.
All the information on John J Holland and Margret Murphy’s family is available online, but again, nothing on John J. or Margret’s parents.
In the US, John J and Margret Holland’s family also lived in Jersey City, Hudson, New Jersey – not far from where John Philip and his family lived. (Note the spelling of Margret here is the spelling taken from her gravestone & other records.)
So while we may have a lot of pieces of information, we also have a lot of blank spaces. We will keep on searching in the hope of finding another little nugget of information to fill some of those gaps.
I now we wish to make an appeal to the people of Bantry and the greater area – while, over the Christmas period, you sit down talking with your families, if you have Holland or Houlihan (all 32 variations) ancestors from the area or know of any information that may be helpful to our search, it would be of great assistance.
• Liz can be contacted at [email protected]
