O’Callaghan clan celebrate wedding 150 years on

There were global family ties at a weekend gathering where an extended clan celebrated the anniversary of their shared ancestors’ wedding almost 150 years earlier.

More than 260 members of the O’Callaghan family travelled from around Ireland and six other countries to be in the Cork church where Daniel O’Callaghan and Ellen Leary were married on July 28, 1865.

The Mass featured a candle-lit ceremony in the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Farran. The offertory gifts included a piece of oak to represent the family tree, a ring from the wedding of Daniel and Ellen’s son Humphrey, and a potato to represent the family background.

“They were tenant farmers on the Ryecourt estate and they had lived through the Great Famine, which must have been horrible,” said researcher Noreen Murray. “At the end of the ceremony, a butterfly came into the church, so we felt that those who were no longer with us were there in reality.”

She began researching the family tree more than five years ago and was one of seven relations who formed a committee early last year to organise the gathering.

The clan travelled after the Mass to nearby Kilcrea Abbey in Ovens, where Daniel, Ellen, and their seven children are buried. A new headstone was unveiled to remember all those not already named on the existing stones.

The 263 people at Saturday’s event can all trace their roots back to the five children of the couple who went on to have families themselves. They travelled from the US, Britain, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and New Zealand.

John O’Callahan, 73, from Boston, travelled with representatives of three generations of his family, including his daughter Janet, grand-daughter Sheila Beach and great-grandchildren, Conor and Mitchell.

At a celebration in the Oriel House Hotel in Ballincollig on Saturday, Noreen’s father Humphrey O’Callaghan was honoured, having helped to organise the event until his death last September.

Broadcaster Pat Butler, who is also part of the O’Callaghan clan through his mother Bridie, was in charge of the proceedings, which included a talk by historian Michael Galvin on the times in which Daniel and Ellen lived.

For Noreen, the years of research, gathering documents and photographs all paid off with the culmination of the committee’s efforts on Saturday.

“As soon as you get any inkling of who was in the family, you can find civil records,” she said. “One thing leads to another, you build up a big picture over time, and leading in the end to an event like this makes it all worthwhile.”