Grandfather who left Cork City in 1916

YDNA testing and subsequent triangulation of autosomal DNA results have yielded spectacularly successful results for my family who had searched for my grandfather’s Irish family for forty years using conventional (now old-fashioned) methods - their own forensic investigative skills as well as professional genealogists. Mystery has always surrounded his Irish origins, though he is well attested in the Australian records (under a different name he was inordinately proud of).

Francis Joseph O’Sullivan left Cork, Ireland for Australia just after the Rising in 1916, though there is no evidence of this in the shipping record. Because there was no trace of his family in Ireland under the name O’Sullivan, some family members reluctantly concluded that the name he used in Australia was probably not his birth name. YDNA testing on Family Tree linked his closest direct male descendant, a grandson, to a name that was a complete surprise – Hart, one in Ireland and one in USA, but the holders of these accounts did not respond to our queries. However, when we put this surname with the maiden name of his mother (Hannah/Honora Doyle formerly of Kilnap, Co Cork) and the first name and occupation of his father (jeweller) nominated on his marriage certificate, Timothy Francis Harte emerged, and 11 siblings. What was more astonishing was that two names who came up independently on Ancestry (autosomal DNA) as close contacts (2^nd-3^rd cousins) and had previously been mysteries, were in fact descendants of his father’s brother, Peter. The case seems cracked, but some big questions remained.

The grandfather we knew as Frank cried every time he was asked about his family, and as far as we know, lost touch with them. The family we found indeed had a tragic history. Timothy snr Hart(e)’s parents, Patrick and Ellen (née Connell) came from Riverstown. Timothy snr appears to have moved to Cork, and became a jeweller’s assistant. Marrying in 1885, he fathered 12 children with Hannah Doyle from Kilnap. Timothy Francis (born 1892), our grandfather we believe, was his third son. Of his 11 siblings, 6 died in infancy; two brothers survived until the age of 40 and 23 dying of pulmonary TB, as had their father and mother. Timothy/Frank himself lived till he was 55 and Denis Raymond outlived them all dying at 69. Family lore has it that two of the girls (Kathleen and Christina Clara) became nuns in a ‘French’ order, but we’ve not been able to find them. If the Harte family are indeed Frank’s (and as more DNA contacts come forward, our conviction is that we have found them), they were merchant class, living in a first class dwelling at 15 Patrick St, Cork with servants and employees. Timothy senior was first a jeweller’s assistant and later a jeweller and Hannah his wife employed some of her children, a milliner, and another dressmaker in addition to Kathleen, in a store nearby which was variously described as a drapery, millinery or dress-making establishment. The family’s residence at 15 Patrick St and business in 14 Patrick Street were burnt by the Black and Tans in 1920.

But might there also have been an additional political burden on the young man who emigrated? Finding what we think is this man’s actual family has raised more questions than we had when we did not know. Frank told my father that he left Southampton in early May 1916. That was the period in which General Maxwell negated a treaty already arrived at with the non-combatant Cork Volunteers and began rounding up the Cork Volunteers (the shipping records are inconclusive – there are many T. Hart(e)s). Was he a Cork Volunteer? If not, what occasioned this precipitate departure? He expressed pacifist views, so did he feel pressured to join the war effort or the insurgents? Why would he need to change his name? Had he been involved politically in such a way as to required him to change his name? When he arrived in Australia, why did two Irish/Irish-identified Archbishops, Mannix and Duhig, each offer the newly named Timothy Harte a medical degree at church expense (he rejected them and did law at his own expense)? Did the churchmen know and collude in the change of name? If so, why? Why did he on arrival in Brisbane immediately get linked into radical republican politics of Ireland, defying the Defence of the Realm Act of 1918, which treated Irishmen who supported the nascent Irish state as traitors and jailed them? Is it a coincidence that he was educated at North Monastery School in a nationalist hot-house which prides itself as having Tomás Mac Curtain and Terence Mac Swiney among its alumni and welcomed and deployed the nationalist pedagogy of Padraig Pearse? Frank/Timothy was, in Australia, a committed Republican who wore Sinn Fein colours, refused to stand for ‘God Save the King’, and supported the nascent Irish state in the 1920s very vigorously by hosting and organising fund-raising delegations (including those of Fr Michael Flanagan, JJ O’Kelly, Kathleen Barry and Linda Kearns in 1924-5), some of whom were deported from Australia? How did he so quickly link up with those on the Republican side in Australia (notably D. M. O’Flynn and Mr Hegarty who met Frank at the train station when he arrived – could he have been connected to P.S. O’Hegarty)? Both O’Flynn and my grandfather remained lifelong friends, and Frank is buried alongside D.M. O’Flynn in plots they bought together. He was also given his first job by prominent Irish-Australian, Frank McDonnell (of McDonnell and East, a prominent Emporium in Brisbane), whose daughter he got close to marrying. What were the dynamics of existing Irish transnationalist networks in Australia and Ireland in the 1920s, which might include the firm of lawyers in Ipswich, Pender & Pender, to whom Frank was articled?

We’d be interested to hear from anyone who can help us to understand the situation on the ground in Cork. We’re also curious to know of the jewellery business in Patrick St that Timothy was involved with (and whether or not he may have been an associate of Barry Egan), or about Hannah’s drapery business and what impact the burning of their shops had on the family’s fortunes. But most of all we’re curious about theories as to why he needed to change his name.

Frances Devlin-Glass and Mary Jane Kerr

Grand-daughters of Frank O’Sullivan/Timothy Francis Harte.