The Branches
The Damerys did not stay in one place. These are the branches the research knows; if yours is here, or should be, get in touch.
How many of us are there? A census compiled by the French cousins about 1990 counted nearly 400 Damery households in seven countries, perhaps a thousand people: 160 in the United States, 121 in France, 59 in Canada, 17 each in England and Ireland, 3 in Australia and 1 in Switzerland (Paul Damery's history). A small name, well travelled.
West Cork: the home web
Bandon, Desertserges, Kilnameela, Glandore, Dunmanway: the documented heartland from Richard Damery of Ballymodan (c. 1720) onward, farmers and labourers, the sons who sailed and the sons who stayed. This is the web this site documents person by person. Start with Chapter 1 and the West Cork interactive tree.
Connecticut, USA: the Kilnameela emigrants
About 1850 the farming family of James Damery and Elizabeth Gosnell of Kilnameela left for America; Richard sailed from Liverpool on the Guy Mannering in April 1850 and founded the line at Granby, Connecticut, from whom came Judy Wight of Utah, one of the three researchers whose work underlies this site. One son, James, stayed in Ireland: my own line.
Canada: the New Brunswick Damerys
By family account (~ throughout, from Greg Damery's correspondence, July 2026), this line was part of an American colony of the name around Boston, said to go back to the seventeenth century; one of them, grown wealthy, is said to have commissioned research into the family tree in the mid-1700s. Around 1783 the family came north to New Brunswick with the Loyalist settlement of Saint John, and prospered in the lumber trade on the St. John River, a timber baron's house on an old strip farm marking the high-water mark, until the fortune ebbed with the coming of iron ships after 1865. One great-uncle of the line fought in the First World War in the Champagne country of France, in or near one of the villages that carry the name Damery.
The line continues today; its best-known member for our purposes is Greg Damery, artist and musician, whose correspondence prompted the Journal series that begins with There is a Damery hanging in Boston. No documented connection to the Bandon line (?). If you are a Damery of the Canadian or Boston lines with papers, photographs or family stories, join the tree.
Melbourne, Australia: the Tullyglass Dammerys
From William Damery (1754) and Elizabeth Tanner of Tullyglass descend the farming family who held that townland until 1988. Edward Damery (1839) took his family to Victoria in 1863, where the name became Dammery; since July 2026 his line stands in the documented tree itself, the join proven from both ends of the voyage. His grandson Edward John Barr "Ted" Dammery wrote the family's first history in 1978, and the College of Arms granted arms in the old tradition to Edward Dammery of Melbourne. The two lines converge at Richard Damery of Ballymodan (c. 1720), which makes the Melbourne Dammerys and me cousins in the fifth degree, on the reconstruction the records currently support.
England: Gloucestershire and Devon
The older English clusters, Tortworth and Yate and Codrington in Gloucestershire, Chappell and Bishops Nympton in Devon, with their drift into Amery and Emery, are set out on the Name page. One of them is almost certainly the well the Cork family sprang from; no record yet proves which.
The French Damerys of Caen, Paris, Lorraine and the Vosges kept their own traditions: a marquise who followed Marie-Antoinette to the guillotine, boys smuggled to the English family's protection, a colonel dead at Eylau, an admiral at Lorient. Colourful, cherished, and so far uncorroborated; they are recorded as tradition in Ted's history.
Is your branch missing?
Better still: join the tree and your family's line becomes its own interactive branch here.
Damery, Dammery, Damory, any spelling, any continent: write to me. Corrections and additions are always welcome, always checked against the records, and always credited.