In July of this year the National Library of Ireland launched their website of Catholic parish registers showing baptism and marriage records for parishes across Ireland, previously only available on microfilm onsite in Dublin (http://registers.nli.ie).  This treasure came with some drawbacks – none of the names in the registers are indexed, so finding an entry means paging through the register for the relevant years looking for a familiar name. And some of the pages themselves are deeply unreadable, splodged or obliterated by ink marks, with entries written in close, crowded script.

Nevertheless I had a happy time looking for Molloys in the parish covering the locality of Brownstown or the Curragh, the locations given by the Molloys in Australia as their place of origin.  This parish turned out to be called Suncroft, in the Diocese of Kildare and Leighlin.

The Curragh, according to Wikipedia, is a flat open plain of 5,000 acres of common land, comprising well drained sandy soil ideal for horse breeding and training.  It hosts the premier race course in Ireland and the National Stud is located close by, on the outskirts of Kildare town.  The Curragh Camp has been a site of military training and barracks for centuries, historically for the British army and more recently for the Irish Defence Forces.

Brownstown lies to the south of The Curragh, and to the south east of the town of Kildare. In terms of the townland system of civil divisions, there were a number of variants of Brownstown –  Lower, Upper, Great and Little.

Registers for Suncroft parish in the National Library collection run from 1805 to 1880 for baptisms and from 1805 to 1881 for marriages. I located the baptismal record for Patrick Molloy, my great grandfather, recorded on 5 August 1840.  HIs parents’ names are given as John Molloy and Sarah Byrne, and baptismal sponsors were Pat Walsh and Eliza Doyle.  His parents’ abode was given as Brownstown.

His parents, John and Sarah (also known as Sally), were married in 1839, on 23rd April in Suncroft parish, with witnesses John Keegan and Mary Fitzgerald.

Patrick was obviously their eldest child.  He was followed by two Molloy children I had not previously known about:

• Mary, baptised 27 May 1842; sponsors were Garrett Byrne and Mary Coman. Parents Jno. & Sally Byrne. Abode Brownstown.
• James, baptised 27 April 1845; sponsors were James Keegan, Mary Byrne. Parents John & Sally Byrne. Abode Brownstown
• John, baptised 6 August 1848; sponsors were Patrick Molloy and Cath. Byrne. Parents John & Sally Byrne. Abode Brownstown
• Eliza, baptised 6 March 1851; sponsors were Martin Doyle and Mary Molloy. Parents John & Sally Byrne. Abode Curragh
• Peter, baptised 8 July 1855; sponsors were Edward and Jane Byrne. Parents John & Sarah Byrne. Abode Brownstown

All siblings except for Mary and James are known to have migrated to Australia (their migration story is in this post).  I have not yet been able to find further information about Mary or James.  In the parish records, there is a Mary Molloy marrying a Patrick Fitzgerald in Suncroft parish in 1876, when she would have been 34, but I don’t currently have any further information to verify that this Mary Molloy is from our Molloy family.

John Molloy’s occupation was given by his children on their marriage and death certificates in Queensland as either a labourer or farmer.  His name doesn’t appear on Griffiths Valuation as a tenant farmer in any of the Brownstown townlands at the time it was published for County Kildare in 1853.

My mother spent a happy time with friends visiting the Curragh area of County Kildare in March 1983, knowing that her Molloy ancestors were from Kildare, a time made even happier by news of the birth of her first grandchild, far away in New Zealand.

In Memory of Veronica Buchanan, nee Molloy (1923 – 2015)