Fenian’s grave found in the US

After many years of searching, the grave of the West Clare Fenian John Deloughery has been found in a little-known Catholic cemetery in the state of Connecticut, USA. Deloughery led the Fenian atttack on the Kilbaha Coastguard Station on Shrove Tuesday night in 1867.
One of his colleagues, Thomas McCarthy Fennell, wounded in the attack, was arrested and tried in Ennis by Judge William Keogh, found guilty of treason and transported to the penal colony of Fremantle, in Western Australia. On his release, he made his way to Elmira, New York State, where he became a successful businessman and in later years sent a substantial amount of money, collected from West Clare people living locally, to Jack Dwyer towards the cost of erecting the Manchester Martyrs’ Memorial – popularly known as the Maid of Erin – in the Square Kilrush. The contractor for the job was JK Bracken, one of the founders of the GAA – and a Fenian. The Kilrush monument is regarded as the finest of its kind in Ireland.
Members of the Bermingham family in Ballykett had long known that John Deloughery (Delohery in America) had settled in Danbury in Connecticut and that members of his family had some connection with a hat factory in that city but had failed to make any connection with Delohery’s descendants for 144 years. In 2011 however, John’s great grandson, Dave, made contact on the internet with Matthew Bermingham, Delohery’s great grandnephew, who now lives in Dublin. Having established they were third cousins, they proceeded to pool what they knew about their famous Fenian kinsman.
Dave was overjoyed to learn that the stories he had heard from his father as a child were authentic and that documents in the National Archives in Bishop Street, Dublin, giving detailed accounts of the attack on the coastguard station in Kilbaha on Shrove Tuesday 1867, confirmed the veracity of the stories Dave had heard.
Dave learned for the first time that with the help of a local curate, Fr Patrick White, John Delohery had escaped to America on board a ship from the Shannon Estuary.
Fr White had organised a collection in the two western parishes and succeeded in collecting £5, a substantial amount at that time, to pay a ship’s captain to take the fugitive to safety. Fr White remained a committed nationalist in the years ahead. He gave an oration three years later in Kilcloney Wood, where the County Cork Fenian Peter O’Neill Crowley had given his life in 1867; he addressed a monster amnesty meeting in Kilrush on September 5, 1869 demanding the release of all Fenian prisoners; was the author of a History of Clare, served as parish priest in both Miltown and Kilrush before he was finally transferred on promotion to Birr, where he was laid to rest.
While in Miltown, he was instrumental in getting Charles Stewart Parnell to visit the ancient parish of Kilfarboy. An interesting account of this historic event in authentic North Clare Irish is contained in Leabhar Stíofáin Uí Ealaoire – recorded by Professor Delargy.
Little was known about Delohery’s life in America until Dave Delohery started his research in the Danbury area of Connecticut. We now know that John became the first editor of the weekly Newtown Chronicle in 1880 and held that position for two years until the paper was taken over by Reuben Hazen Smith, who owned the Newtown Bee.
In 1876, Delohery was elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives as a delegate from the Newtown constituency and served for one term.
His contribution to the house is now being studied by Dave, whose research in Connecticut has led to the discovery of the old Fenian’s grave at St Rose’s cemetery in Sandy Hook. The headstone reveals that John died in 1897, 30 years after the Kilbaha Rising, at the early age of 51.
It is hoped that Matthew’s extensive research on the Clare Fenians – including the Clunes, Slatterys, O’Donovans, Donnellans and Broughtons of East Clare – combined with Dave’s research in America will eventually lead to the publication of a book on the Clare Fenians or Irish Republican Brotherhood covering the period from 1858 to 1922.