Athenry to Gorteen (Gurteen)

The next day was a genealogy day, heading for Athenry, just a few km east of Galway. We’d been looking for ordnance survey maps and hadn’t been able to find the quadrants we needed. It took us a while to track them down at two different Galway bookstores, but we got it done.

Athenry is the place where possibly Larry’s Howard relatives came from. We were looking for a Thomas Howard, who would be the great great grandfather (married to the aforementioned Flynn - Elinor). We had a good look around, checked out the castle and asked questions (“Howard - that’s an English name, isn’t it?”) and walked in a very old cemetery at an old Dominican priory. There are lots of these old abbeys, priories, monasteries, castles, and towers all over the place. The cemetery yielded no Howards. But every cemetery has lots and lots of very old small stones scattered all around marking unnamed graves. A very hard thing to do. Some cemeteries, we found, have helpful lists of those buried there. One in Athenry did, but no Howards. We did have good conversations, saw lovely things, and had an afternoon beer in the local pub.

Old Dominican Priory and Graveyard, Athenry

 When we left Athenry we went a very short distance north to a land area called Ballydavid North where we know Thomas Howard farmed. In Ireland land and tax records are really the only records available to find anyone because all the records were burned in the Civil War. So nothing else exists from 1921-1901. Finding your Irish roots is a tricky item. If someone didn’t own land or work for someone who owned land (that would be Larry’s family) you can’t find much. When someone rented land from an owner, their name was included in that owner’s tax record. That is very helpful these 150+ years later. We found Ballydavid North and took some pictures of the land in the exact location. Cool.

Ballydavid North

The Crossbar, Gurteen

We then headed north to Gorteen (pronounced, and sometimes spelled Gurteen) where we were booked at the Church View Guest House for three nights. Gurteen looked to be equidistant between Athenry and Louisburgh, the two main areas where we were exploring Larry’s family. We checked in to our lovely room and then went next door to the pub for a great dinner. There is a really good cook in The Crossbar Pub in Gurteen, County Sligo.