The Beamish of Cork: settlers, brewers, and cousins
Catherine Travers’s mother was Catherine Beamish, and the Beamish are the best-documented of my gentry lines, traced to the first generation of the Munster Plantation, where English settlers were planted on Phane Becher’s great Elizabethan grant west of Bandon. My direct ancestor, Francis Beamish of Kilmalooda (d. 1679), garrisoned his house through the rebellion of 1641 and married Catherine Bernard, of the family that became the Earls of Bandon (Chapter 6).
My direct ancestor Richard Beamish (b. c.1675), a Cork merchant, was the grandfather of William Beamish, who founded the Beamish & Crawford brewery, for a time the largest in Ireland. So the great brewing family is a cousin branch of my own. One strange thread hangs off it: a brewer’s descendant, Huldine Beamish, was the grandmother of Carin, first wife of Hermann Göring, a distant, accidental, but documented connection.
Catherine Beamish’s own brother, Richard Beamish of Raheroon, married Elizabeth Bernard of Palace Anne in 1766; their line took the name Beamish-Bernard and held the great red-brick house near Enniskeane, so my Beamishes were cousins of the Earls of Bandon’s cadet branch, and married into the Bernards twice over.