A marriage took place in Cloughogue Church on 19 May 1897 between Thomas Rice and Eliza Short of Ballymacdermott. Thomas was a farmer and the son of Owen also a farmer. Eliza was the daughter of Patrick Short, farmer, deceased. Less than four years later at the 1901 census this couple was living at 5 Monaghan Row Newry. A further six years later when Elizabeth was born they still lived there, just a few hundred yards along the same thoroughfare from the two Bridgets at Monaghan Street.
Eliza’s brother Thomas was staying with her. Eliza was then forty-six years old and her husband forty. His father’s farm had been too small and poor for sub-division so he had to find work in town as a coal porter. This was difficult, dirty and low-paid work but better than no work at all. Probably they longed to return to Ballymacdermott. They were childless and clearly destined to remain so. But they longed for a child.
In 1907 they adopted a daughter Elizabeth and immediately moved back to the country. This child, I am certain, was my aunt Elizabeth. She was thereafter reared at the foot of the Bernish Mountain, overlooking the main Belfast-Dublin road above Cloughogue.
How could my grandparents have done this? It can’t have been easy and I must conjecture.
Illegitimacy was considered a much more shameful thing in those times. The church authorities would have expressed special shock, as the mother was a well-known woman on account of her boarding house. I imagine that enormous pressure was brought to bear on her to “ hide her shame”.
I suspect the Church – which had enormous power and influence – suggested and may have facilitated the adoption of the illegitimate girl by the Rices. I suspect that it was the Church that decided on the Rices as adoptive parents without informing Bridget of their identity. I guess too that the church thereafter financed the Rices return to Ballymacdermott to prevent the true parenthood from being inadvertently revealed. It is, I suspect likely, that her aunt (and now her employer and now also her guardian) Bridget O’Brien was instrumental in persuading the young widow that there was no other option. Had she done it surely she would later have made contact. (I know of several similar cases. The Catholic Church is careful not to let natural and adoptive parents know of each other. - Note that in March 1996 records were unearthed in the National Archives of 1500 infants born to unmarried mothers in Ireland in the 1950’s-1960’s who with Church-State connivance were sent to the USA for adoption by Catholic couples. Can we doubt Church complicity from the previous generation?
Bridget never learned who had adopted her child.
One presumes that Patrick McCullagh came to live at Bridget’s new home 43 Monaghan Street shortly after – along with his friend Peter Quinn also from Ardboe. For the next thirteen years Patrick lived there with her – as man and wife: they were a devoted and loving couple, and had three children Francis (1910), Patrick (1912) and Dorothy (1914): then in 1917 Patrick (Senior) contracted tuberculosis, suffered for three years and died in 1920. Bridget never had another partner, even up to her death in 1946.
Bridget, being of a religious family, was determined to have the child baptised in the faith. Patrick was not prepared to accept paternity and accompany her to the Cathedral for the baptism. She went along with the child and an acquaintance (I presume) by the name of Mary Magee.
When the result was told to Patrick McCullagh - who had failed to claim paternity - he could scarcely protest too much. The church would have made it plain that the natural parents were to have no further contact with the girl. This condition would have come as a great shock and a blow to Bridget and later to Patrick. It was the worst mistake of their lives and would not be repeated. It forever coloured their attitudes to the church. Their love for each other however lasted the rest of their lives.