Ireland: Day 2 – Saturday, June 30, 2007

I got up around 11am and went to the tourist center. I picked up all of the free hand-outs and found out that the genealogy center was only open weekdays 9 to 4 (with a break for lunch in the middle, of course). They did not have a good, detailed map of Sligo County so they told me to go into town and get one at a shop. I stopped at the book store in town and found one for 5 euro, although it still didn’t have as much detail as I had hoped. But it was water proof, which is important because it rains here about twice a day.

Stopping at a café for an ice cream cone, I overheard an author talking about research she was doing today at the library. So afterwards I went across the river to the library and asked if they had a genealogy section. “It’s closed weekends,” the lady behind the counter told me. I then decided that since everything was going to definitely be closed on Sunday too, I would spend the weekend on my bike, seeing the country.

First stop: Owenbeg. Unsure of how long it would take to bike there, I paid the 9.90 euro two-way ticket at the bus station, with the additional 10 euro fee to bring my bike along. No bus goes to Owenbeg, but one does go to Easkey, as well as Dromore West, which was a good point in between the two so I chose to take the bus to there. Turns out it’s a short route, N4 to N59 and only takes an hour by bus.

At Dromore West I was greeted by a Feeney’s Pub and a Feeney’s grocery store. I stopped in both to ask if there were any Feeney’s around, and there were of course none, but one of the customers at the store took me outside to ask his wife. Everyone I spoke to remarked on how many Feeney’s were in the area, but they didn’t know of any in Owenbeg. His wife also didn’t know, but at the same time a group of elderly gentlemen drove up. They knew of one in Owenbeg and told me the directions. Off on my bike I went.

About half-way up the turnoff I ran into an elderly gentleman riding his bike, and I asked him if I was going the right way. He pointed me towards “the Sean Feeney’s” or the “Craig Feeney’s” since neither I nor him knew which one I was looking for. I got no response to the doorbell on Sean Feeney’s house so I decided to follow the road and see where it went. It went to Owenbeg, of course. The scale on the maps really throw you off – everything is much closer than it seems.

A storm was approaching, and I saw a sign for Easky Church. No, I’m not misspelling it, it’s spelt both ways apparently, and no one cares much about it being as such. I noticed that a Feeney had once been a priest there, and that the door was open. I went inside but no one was there. So I sat down and investigated the visitor’s book while the storm passed. About a half hour later a lady came in, followed by a retired priest, and both told me about the area and the parish. The retired priest made a point to talk to me about the English invasions and how people react to being invaded, and remarked that the US should look at the history of England and Ireland to know how the hearts and minds of the people in Iraq will wind up.

A mass was happening at 7pm so I left a little before that, back up the hill to Sean Feeney’s house. He was home this time. He invited me in and we chatted about our genealogies and he decided to take me over to Shamus Feeney’s house because he might be related to me since he himself was not. I met Shamus and Joe and Jerry Toher on their farm, and we discussed much the same in front of Shamus’s stables. It was decided that Delia Gibson (Feeney) might be related, as she had aunt’s in America with the same names as the ones on my tree. Shamus claimed to be related to Delia through a third great-grandfather, though. It was good that I stopped here because I was able to arrange a ride back to Sligo tonight with Jerry since by this point I had missed the last bus back. Down the road I went to Delia’s.

Delia invited me in (I was lucky because normally she’d be in that 7 o’clock mass, but she skipped it tonight because her son would be home the next morning to go to Sunday morning mass) and was shocked to hear that I was really Jim Feeney’s son. “That cannot be, you’re much too young!” Delia was, in fact, related to me. She was my father’s first cousin, and had last seen him as a little boy when she visited America in her youth. She fixed me ham sandwiches and soup, but couldn’t let me stay the night because she was remodeling and the guest bedroom had supplies in it. We discussed many things, from how the contractors in this part of Ireland all know each other and won’t finish another’s job if you fire him for never getting the job done (the remodeling has been going on for months, her contractors working for a day and then not coming back for weeks at a time to work a second day) to how Bush had no reason to invade Iraq. I guess this is a recurring theme out here – and no, I was not the first to bring it up on either occasion. We also talked family, believe it or not.

Turns out the family farm had passed from my great-grandfather to one of his daughters, then to her son, and finally to his nephew who sold it just a few years ago. He kept the house although he sold the land, but the house is under renovation while the nephew is living in California. One family mystery solved.