Pupils trace families in roll books from 1870

THE children of a parish steeped in history have been finding out about their ancestors from old roll-books as they settle into new rooms added on to their Famine-era school.

Dromleigh National School has pupil records going back to 1870 showing that about 300 children from the mid-Cork parish of Kilmichael were on the register at one point in the 19th century – all fitting into two tiny classrooms.

The 71 boys and girls now enrolled include many who can trace their family trees all the way back through the musty roll books.

Sixth-class pupil Liam Murphy, and his younger sisters Kate and Niamh, for example, have found their great-grandmother who was living in the Cooldorrihy townland in 1886. The register reveals farmer’s daughter Kate Bradley was eight years old in that year when she transferred from infants’ class.

Principal Anne Bradley said the Murphys are among many families who have remained in the parish in the generations since the school opened its doors in 1840.

The current roll book, however, has been swelled by families moving to the area in the past decade.

Although they were well integrated within a new €600,000 extension funded by the Department of Education, the renovated original classrooms were small and cramped, but still managed to accommodate 260 children within two years of opening.

But the onset of the Great Famine meant a swift fall in pupil numbers, as set out by letters of Fr James O’Driscoll, the Kilmichael parish priest who set up the school.

“They provide chilling testimony to the effects of the Famine on the Dromleigh area. He mentions visiting the home of the Manley family at Cooldorrihy who were wiped out,” Ms Bradley reveals.

But the school’s records also provide links to another key event in Irish history, the November 1920 ambush at Kilmichael of a lorry-load of British Black and Tan soldiers that proved a turning point in the War of Independence. The ballad recalling the Boys of Kilmichael was sung with gusto by the pupils when local TD and Enterprise Minister Batt O’Keeffe opened the new extension yesterday.

But while the actions of Tom Barry’s IRA flying column, 6km away, make for a rousing song, the school roll-book shows the killing of 17 soldiers had consequences for the pupils who were taught here 90 years ago.

“There were 34 children in the school at the time but only eight turned up the day after the ambush, a Monday morning,” explains the principal.

“The men who staged the ambush weren’t locals but a house just up the road was burned out that week in reprisal. The school was closed for a few weeks because people were afraid to go out,” she said.

Although they were probably not yet in the school at the time, two local children on that day are now aged 95 and believed to be Dromleigh National School’s oldest past pupils.

They, too, still have families in the parish and Peg Murphy’s great-grandniece Lorraine Dromey is now a fourth class pupil, while Thade Daly’s great-grandchildren Anna and Barra O’Leary are also enrolled.

These children’s living relatives or those who are no longer around to see the extended four-classroom school with a spacious general purpose room and new playground would find it hard to believe it is the same site where they once learned.

But they might also take heart that little else has changed around the parish’s tree-lined roads, about 50km west of Cork city, since Tom Barry’s men scoured the local hills.