Two names share one line of Griffith’s Valuation.
Griffith’s Valuation is not a friendly document. It was compiled parish by parish in the 1850s to work out how much in rates (tax) each landholder should pay, and it reads exactly like what it is: a ledger. A townland, a landlord, a list of names, a plot number, a description — “house, office and land” — and an area in acres, roods and perches. Nothing about who anyone was. Nothing about how they got there.
I had thirty-nine page-scans of it, covering every Coughlan-variant holding across five townlands in the parish of Clonmacnoise. Most of them went nowhere useful. But a distant cousin’s outreach pointed me in a direction, a very helpful direction.
Her 2nd Great Grandmother was a Coughlan, who was married to James Condron and they were in a house on Plot 5. And on plot 5 there were two houses.
Plot 5, Clonfinlough
Townland: Clonfinlough. Landlord: Robert Lawder. Plot 5: house, office and land, 25 acres 2 roods 10 perches — call it twenty-five and a half acres. Occupier: James Coghlan. Sharing the plot: James Condron.
That’s the whole entry.
Who were the couples in those two houses?
James Coughlan married Anne Condron on 14 February 1833. Their children: Mary (1834), Patrick (1836), Thomas (1838), Margaret (1840), Kieran (1848), Rose (1853) — and a James whose birth year isn’t recorded (need to sort that out).
James Condron married Margaret Coughlan around 1840. Their children: James (1841), Martin (1843), Anne (1848), Patrick (1850), Margaret (1851), Maria (1852), Thomas (1853).
A Coughlan man marrying a Condron woman, and a Condron man marrying a Coughlan woman, about seven years apart, on what the valuation shows as one shared farm. That’s not a coincidence you get by accident in a small townland.
Margaret Coughlan was my fellow researcher’s ancestor.
Across the Pond in Wisconsin….
In April 1889 the Watertown Republican, a small-town Wisconsin newspaper, carried this line among its social notices: “P. Caughlin arrived from Boscobel on Saturday last, accompanied by his niece, Mrs. John Kinney.” P. Caughlin is Patrick, by then settled at Clyman, Dodge County. Mrs. John Kinney is Margaret, the daughter of James Coughlan and Ann Condron.
The Margaret Coughlan called ‘niece’ to Patrick, and who visits him in Clyman from her home in Boscobel, has a marriage registration record from 1866. It names her father as James and her mother as Ann Condren — an independent, contemporaneous document, made in her own words at her own wedding, and it lines up exactly.
This – plus a raft of appropriate DNA matches – is probably as close to proof as we are going to get that James is Patrick’s brother.
We get even more when we look into the life of Australian immigrant Catherine Coughlan.
And James and Ann’s son Thomas had a wedding at sixty years old that very nearly ended in a riot.