The Damerys of West Cork
My own name has been the hardest line to trace. Almost every family in this book loses threads at the same place: the crossing from England. The Joneses, the Townsends, the Lucas and the Beamish all stand firmly documented in Ireland, yet fade into tradition at the water's edge. Only the Frekes can be followed clean back into the Tudor West Country. The settlers came amid the upheavals of plantation and war. Some, by tradition, left England in a hurry for Munster, whose early records were thin and were ravaged in the rising of 1641 and the Cromwellian wars that followed. What sets the Damerys a little apart is only that they surface in the Bandon registers a generation later than most, and that, lacking a printed gentry pedigree, their Irish story is built from parish entries and deeds rather than from Burke's. But the coat they carried is the old English one of Part I; so in all likelihood they too sprang from that armigerous kindred, the link simply lost, like so many, at the crossing.
The earliest I can document in Ireland is a Richard and Margaret Damery of Bandon in the 1690s — Margaret, "wife of Richard," buried in December 1696; a son, John, buried in 1708. A family already burying a wife and raising children in Bandon by 1696 must have arrived by about 1685–90, which is the window the family's flight-from-England tradition points to.
From them to my own line, the register falls silent: Margaret's death in 1696 means our Richard, two generations later, can be her descendant only through a middle generation the books no longer record, so the join is probable but unproven. The proven direct line therefore begins one safe step lower, with Richard Damery (b. c.1720), farming at Ballymodan about 1752–66 (my 5× great-grandfather), his own baptism lost to the register's gaps, and runs down through Richard and then two Jameses: Richard, born in 1763; his son James (b. 1797), who married Elizabeth Gosnell of Kilnameela; and their son James, baptised at Kilnameela on 26 August 1827 (the one child of that family who stayed in Ireland when the rest emigrated), and who married Ellen Barry at Drinagh in 1858. From him, the line passes to Thomas Damery (1860–1947) and my grandfather Alfred Norman Damery.
The Great Famine lies beneath this chapter, and it deserves to be named honestly rather than passed over. Its full horror fell on the Catholic poor; the cottiers and labourers who lived on the potato and had nothing beneath them when it failed. This was their district: Skibbereen, whose name the world still uses for the catastrophe, lies a morning's walk from where the family farmed. A Protestant farming family of middling acres did not starve, and I will not pretend to a share of that suffering.
But the Famine decade dissolved their world all the same, and you can watch it happen in the valuation books for Kilnameela: cottier after cottier struck through in ink; "house now down"; "house has been thrown down”, and two of the struck cabins stood on James Damery's own lots. His sub-tenants were the class that died or fled. Old Richard was buried in May 1845, weeks before the first blight reports; within ten years the leases were given up, five of his six grandchildren were in America, and the farm pages carry other men's names. The son who stayed slipped in one step from farmer's son to labourer; James and Ellen signed their 1858 marriage register by mark, and it took the family three generations to climb back to the clerk's desk and the typist's chair, visible in the 1911 census return.
The Famine, in other words, was not one catastrophe but a spectrum. At the bottom it killed. Further up it uprooted, scattered and demoted. This family lived on the surviving side of that line and was remade by it all the same.
Among the family papers is a printed Proclamation of the Lords Justices of Ireland, issued in Dublin on 14 December 1750. It offers rewards for a dozen men, among them John Dammery and Andrew Dammery of Ballineen, labourers, wanted over the killing of one Derby Cullinane at Enniskeane, after a revenue officer seized a hogshead of smuggled brandy and an armed crowd fell on him. Whatever the rights of it, here are named Damerys, precisely dated, on the very ground my family farmed, and a John Tanner stands in the same company, the surname a William Damery would marry into a generation later.
America. The largest branch to cross the Atlantic was, in truth, my own family's. James Damery and his wife Elizabeth Gosnell of Keelameely, in Desertserges (my 3x great-grandparents) saw their children leave one and two at a time, the fares surely sent home in turn: Richard sailed from Liverpool on the Guy Mannering, reaching New York in April 1850 beside a kinsman James, and settled by way of Connecticut in Illinois; John crossed alone out of Cork on the Odessa in 1851. The clerks wrote them all "Demery," which is why they hid from searchers for a century. John enlisted for the Union in the Civil War and died a prisoner at Andersonville in 1864, leaving a widow and six small children. Five years later the census-taker found all six alive with their mother in Wethersfield, the eldest girl out working as a domestic at fifteen. Old James and Elizabeth followed their children across and ended their days in their daughter's household in Granby, Connecticut. James died in November 1865, the day after dictating his will. And across the ocean it reached the one son who had stayed behind: "Also, to my son James, my gun." My great-great-grandfather, remembered from a Connecticut deathbed with the most personal thing a farmer owns. The estate proved too small for its promises (every hundred-dollar legacy paid out at $71.74), and the farm was sold piece by piece; Elizabeth lived on to 1887, "invalid," in her daughter Mary Payne's house. My own line, though, did not sail. I descend from the heir of the gun: James, baptised at Keelameely on 26 August 1827, who married Ellen Barry at Drinagh in 1858. What reads here as the "emigrant branch" is, for me, the trunk. The family that left and the family that stayed parted at one Famine-era crossing, and the will shows they never stopped being one family.
Australia. Another branch, that of William Damery (1754), brother of my own ancestor John, went to Victoria. The marriage that pointed it south was that of Edward Damery to Jane Tyner of Tullyglass; and it was their son, Edward (b. 1839), with his wife Sarah Jane Barr, who emigrated to Victoria in 1863, alongside the Tyners (one of whom sat in the Victorian Parliament). A grandson of that emigrant, Edward ("Ted") Damery of East Malvern, Melbourne, compiled the family history I have leaned on throughout and, in 1979, recorded the tradition that the family's English roots lay "in Devonshire, but under the name of Amory and Emery.”
Richard's own baptism has never been found. The register fails in the very years he would have been christened; so no record names his father or his birthplace. The naming pattern of his children offers one clue: he called his first son John, so his own father was likely a John, rather than the William once assumed. But a name is not a place. He and Ann may descend within Bandon from the Richard and Margaret of the 1690s, or may have come into the district from elsewhere in Ireland, or freshly from England — with the medieval tradition of Part I still waiting to be tied on. Perhaps the family doesn't fade into Bandon; it steps into it.