Cornelius Keefe

Cornelius (picture attached) arrived in South Wales (probably the Abergavenny area) at or around 1882. Although Uncle Joe (b1917) is not sure that they necessarily travelled together, Cornelius came from County Cork with his 2 brothers (I don't know which definitely did what and Patrick, my own name, has also been suggested as another possible name)...

1. Timothy or Timmy (or maybe who apparently died of influenza while they were in South Wales) - there is a Timothy 9 years Cornelius's junior living in Bedwellty in 1891 (Uncle Joe has suggested Bedwellty was where they lived)

2. Jeremiah or Jeremy (who returned to Co Cork. after failing to settle and went onto live in the USA, possibly Wilkes-Barre, PA or Chicago, IL).

Cornelius moved up to Bersham Colliery on his own and married on Christmas Eve 1883. He was the lead charge hand there within a few years - family legend suggests that his expertise in explosives was one of the reasons the brothers had left Cork!

Originally from County Cork - Uncle Joe is not sure whether this is the Blackrock area of Cork City or either the town of Fermoy or Castletownroche in County Cork.  Having found that his father was called Timothy via Cornelius's wedding certificate, I think that Castletownroche is the most likely option, but I still need to research this further.  The attached link gives a history of Castletown Roche (described in Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, 1837) which makes it sound quite like Ruthin (my home town in North Wales)...
http://www.from-ireland.net/lewis/cork/c/castletownroche.htm

After numerous trips to Cork neither he nor his Dad (my Dad's Taid) & Uncle Ted could find any more details of the family ancestry! Uncle Joe recalls staying in the Victoria Hotel in Fermoy on one such trip (can't find details of this place on the web). He also recalls Taid and Uncle Ted saying that there weren't many of their family left and that they'd all gone to Chicago. Including one cousin (possibly Jeremy's son), Joe thinks was called Arthur, who had married the heiress of a jam & marmalade producer in Chicago. Young Arthur had further endeared himself to his wealthy father-in-law by observing that he was making poor use of the farm land he was only growing fruit on. Arthur encouraged him to introduce pigs to the land as well and this led to a lucrative diversification into pork products... My cousin James also recalls discussing trips to Ireland with Pop (Harold, b1920) and that Harold had visited a church hall in Cork to look for parish records. The priest said it was fine for him to have a look, as long as he put the stage back together afterwards (the ledgers were being used as bricks to prop the stage in the church hall up)! [NB: Auntie Vera, Pop's second wife, thinks that this story actually took place in a church hall in Bedwellty and not in Ireland!]

Finally, in terms of the family name, the family legend was always that Cornelius was too poor to afford a trip across the Irish Sea and had used the O as a life ring to float across. Joe tells me that he made this story up to impress his friends at Grove Park Grammar School in Wrexham.  So although I always thought we had originally been O'Keefe or possibly O'Keeffe, Uncle Joe thinks we've always been Keefe / Kiefe / Keeffe and never had an O'.  Joe also informs me that another family legend, that we're direct descendents of the Royal Family of Munster, was another attempt to impress his class mates at Grove Park (although the O'Keeffe's did, apparently, once hold this crown we cannot claim any direct link... just yet)...

Finally, i have also attached a picture of my 3 children from when we visited castletowroche in the Summer of 2013