This my Granny, Bridget Mary Hickey. She was born on 1 February 1905 in Celbridge in County Kildare. I am wondering what life was like then and there.
The great thing about Ireland is that you can freely search their registers and censuses. My great-grandparents got married in the St Patrick’s Church in Celbridge. That was on 7 October in 1900.
Next clue is the 1901 census. Peter and Bridget lived in Kellystown in County Kildare, together with Mary, Bridget’s sister. I can feel a story there…
But. let’s take a minute to look at the census. It’s fascinating. I wonder why they put all that time and effort into doing this… What I found out from the census is that it apparantly was required to know the number of windows, the amount of rooms, if it was a stone house, and the ‘class’ of the house, which was determined by it’s size. Peter Hickey, my great-grandfather and three other families lived in seperate houses in Kellystown, all owned by Christopher Doyle who had a first class house, the others all lived in second class houses.
Peter was a ganger and moved to Leixlip later, but unfortunately the next census does not give us any information about his time there as he dramatically drowned in 1909, whilst trying to rescue my grandmother who was four at the time. We will get to that.
For now I’d like to know how life was in 1901 living as a garger in Kellystown… As the map shows Kellystown is a small townland in north Kildare. It covers about 85 hectares of fertile, undulating lowland. Not so different to where I live in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands
Google tells me that for centuries, Kellystown sat right at the edge of The Pale—the region around Dublin under direct English rule. Because it was a “marcher zone” (a frontier borderland), the area was heavily fortified. The imposing, medieval Maynooth Castle sits just over a kilometer to the east of Kellystown’s fields. The castle served as the formidable stronghold for the Fitzgerald family (the Earls of Kildare), who effectively ruled Ireland from this area during the Anglo-Norman and Tudor eras.
Interesting, but how was it to be living as a ‘housewife’ as Bridget did in that time… I only have a photo of my great-grandmother as an elderly woman. Here she is, I asked chatGPT to colour it in.
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