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THE COLGANS OF KILGLASS PARISH, COUNTY ROSCOMMON
A Colgan (Colghan, Colligan) - Riley Genealogy: From Kilglass to New England.
Michael and Ann Colgan Riley had at least seven children born in Kilglass Parish in County Roscommon between 1822 and 1838: John, Bridget, Mary, Ann, Hugh, Michael, and Alice.
It is far easier, of course, to come down from that family to present time than it is to go backwards to generations before them. Neither Michael's nor Ann's parents have been identified, although written records show Rileys in the Kilglass area in the mid-18th Century and even 100 years earlier, including four men whose given names were Hugh. And there were many Colgan or Colligan families in Kilglass townlands in the mid-1800s. The Tithe Applotment
Books for Kilglass in the late 1820s show two Patrick Colgans in Ballykilcline and Ballymilan and two Peter Colgans in Ballymilan and Dooslattagh about 1830. Griffith's Valuation, about 20 years later, documents three Michael Colgans, two in Killegan and one in Dooslattagh; and a Patrick Colloghan and John Colloghan in Dooslattagh. Ann Colgan Riley's specific family ties, however, have not yet been established.
Nor do we know certainly the townland where the Michael Riley family lived when their children were born in the 1820s and '30s, and later, although there are possible clues. The TAB shows only one Michael Riley there. He lived in Ballyfeeny, just down the road from Ballykilcline. In April 1847, when the Bishop of Elphin wrote to The Freeman's Journal protesting Denis Mahon's tenant evictions, he listed the heads of households of evicted families and named a Michael Riley and a Michael Riley Jr. who were ousted from Kilnordan
More.
Early in 1848, Michael and Ann Colgan Riley's son John left for America. He emigrated soon after the evictions from Ballykilcline, the worst year of The Great Famine, and the assassination of Major Denis Mahon of Strokestown. John apparently was the first in his family to leave. He arrived in New York City in April 1848, according to statements he made in his U.S. naturalization
papers. What ship and route he took are not known. It is possible though, as Robert Scally suggested in The End of Hidden Ireland, that he went camouflaged among the Ballykilcline emigrants some of whom arrived in New York aboard the Channing the same month that John said he landed there. It is also possible that he is the John Riley listed on the manifest of the Aurora which came into the port of New York from Liverpool in April 1848. A Mary and a Hugh Riley also are listed on that ship, giving added plausibility.
In any case, John's known siblings either traveled with him or quickly followed him out of Ireland. Nothing is known of the fates of their parents Michael and Ann, although a Michael Riley is listed on the Mahon manor payroll in 1851. He earned about a shilling shoveling hay on oats that April, working with a man named Philip Reilly. An 1864 civil record for Kilglass shows that a Michael Riley died in Legan, adjacent to Ballykilcline, and the death was reported by a son named Thomas who himself apparently lived in that townland until 1897 and whose own death was reported by a cousin named Kelly. Family folklore from the Riley immigrants to the United States said that John had written to a brother in Ireland in the later 1800s, and maybe to his father, in care of the Kilglass Post Office.
The immigrant Rileys in America all headed to Providence, Rhode Island, where many Kilglass natives were making a home. Peter Featherstone was one. He was the son of Thomas Featherstone, hedge school master in DuSlattagh in Kilglass, and was a widower with three small children: Maria, Bridget, and Luke. James Dockery also left Legan for America in 1845. Dockery, who went t0 Rhode Island and then to Connecticut, may have been a cousin of the Rileys, judging from bequests in his will; his wife was Mary Foley of Killegan in Kilglass. John Riley's children called her "Aunt Mary."
In Providence and then in Pascoag, R.I., the Rileys married and started families. Nearly all of them chose mates who also had fled with the famine- time exodus from around Strokestown. Michael's wife was Catherine Elwood of Roscommon immigrants Thomas and Bridget Elwood; there were Elwoods around Elphin. Bridget's husband was James O'Reilly, son of Edward and Ellen O'Reilly
of Kiltrustan. Mary married James Henry, son of Patrick and Catherine Henry, probably from Bumlin. Ann married Peter Featherstone, and after his death, she married Frank Henry, who likely was James' brother. John married Catherine McNally, a refugee from Latton in southern County Monaghan, who was the daughter of Owen and Mary Hand McNally. Hugh married Ann Sweeney and Alice's
spouse was Frank Smith, but their origins have not been identified. In Pascoag, many of their neighbors had Roscommon origins: people with such names as Hanley, Flanigan, Finnegan, Fanning, Dockery, Lenihan, Hayden, Coleman, Logan, and others.
Over more than 20 years in Rhode Island and Hampton, Connecticut, the Rileys gave birth to more than 50 children, including three sets of twins. A number of their children, of course, died young of the diseases common at that time -- typhoid and diphtheria, for instance. Six of the seven known Riley immigrants named a son Thomas; John named his only two sons Thomas. Why that
name was so important to them remains a mystery. Speculation has it that perhaps Thomas was the name of the brother who remained in Kilglass. And, while the Colgan line remains a mystery, two women -- Ann and Elizabeth Colgan -- were godparents to some of Michael and Kate Elwood Riley's children when they were born in Burrillville, R.I. Indeed, there were a number of Colgans in R.I. records of that period. Some of the Rileys worked for a time in the mills at Pascoag and Warwick, R.I., but most of them turned again to farming around
Hampton. John, Mary, Ann, Hugh, and Alice and their families all lived near each other in Connecticut for years. Michael lived briefly in Connecticut and then settled in Warwick, R.I.; Bridget and James remained in Rhode Island, in Providence and Pascoag.
In the late 1860s, a young Thomas Riley moved to Hampton with his wife, Ann Colgan. Both were born in Ireland in the 1840s; Thomas was the son of Luke Riley, according to his death certificate. Other evidence suggests his mother's name was Elizabeth. Ann was the daughter of Michael and Ann Colagan. Thomas accompanied Hugh Riley to a court in Hartford in 1868 where they took their oaths as citizens together. Thomas and Ann eventually had 12 children and moved to Providence in the late 1880s. Thomas and Ann were godparents for some of the other Rileys' children. It is tempting to speculate on their relationship to the seven Riley siblings -- whether it was on the Riley side, the Colgan side, or perhaps both.
What do the immigrant Rileys' lives in America tell us about their values and priorities? What was typical or atypical about their immigrant experience? They lived quietly in the farming and mill communities of northern Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut, within about 30 miles of their first home in the U.S. They did not move far, and they moved together, a testament to the bonds of Irish kinship. In the 1880s, when Hugh and his wife both died leaving
young children, John became their childrens' legal guardian, further evidence of the strong familial bonds. Unusually, many of the Rileys took up farming again rather than stay in the congested cities for ready jobs in the mills. One of John Riley's primary crops on his Hampton farm, ironically, was potatoes. He grew 711 bushels of them in 1860. None of the Rileys served in the Civil War which drew so many immigrants, sometimes just as they stepped off the boat.
John and Michael Riley could both read and write. John's only son to survive childhood went west to Ohio for college in the 1880s, another departure from the usual patterns of the Irish in that time. The Rileys also remained strong Catholics. They helped build the first Catholic church in Harrisville, near Pascoag. John's daughter, Katie, became a nun in a French order and helped found St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, where she served for the rest of her life. She headed its nursing school for decades.
Alice O'Reilly O'Brien, a daughter of James and Bridget, appears to have been a sharp businesswoman. She and her husband, Thomas, lived most of their married life in Westerly on the southern RI coast near the famous turn-of-the- century summer resort of the well-to-do called Watch Hill. They ran a summer boardinghouse in the shore community (it was blown into the ocean in the Hurricane of 1938, long after the O'Briens died) and eventually they owned
several properties there. Her name alone is on several deeds. A granddaughter of the Featherstones, Mary Featherstone Prendergast, became the second wife of a wealthy textile mill owner, a self-made man whose family also was immigrant Irish, and, in the 1930s, Mary was the first woman to run for alderman in the city of Providence.
Bridget and Hugh Riley died fairly young; she in Pascoag in 1876, he in Hampton in 1884. The other Riley siblings all lived into their 80s, long enough to see their families prospering. But they never forgot Ireland. The family gravestone proclaims John Riley a native of Roscommon. And family members who paid attention to such things passed on the name of Kilglass Parish as the native home of the children of Michael and Ann Colgan Riley in
Roscommon.
Compiled by Mary Lee Dunn, great great great granddaughter of Michael and Ann Colgan Riley.
Contact her at MaryLDunn@aol.com
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