James Damery

James Damery was a labourer of Shandrum in west Cork, and he is the reason this branch of the family exists at all. He was born at Kilnameela in 1827, and when the Famine broke the family's small farming world in the 1840s his parents and his brothers and sisters sailed for America. He stayed. He married Ellen Barry at Drinagh in June 1858, and both of them signed the register with a mark. His father and grandfather had been farmers with land and sub-tenants; he worked for wages on other men's fields, which is what one decade of catastrophe did to a family of the middling sort. He lived to see his own son become a builder's clerk. He died at Bandon in 1904 and no stone is known to mark him.