Today a bit about Claremorris and Gorteenmore, the ancestral home of the Cleary clan.
The main landlord family in Claremorris was the Browne family, one of whom, the Hon. Denis Browne (1760-1828), was High Sheriff of Mayo during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and acquired the nickname of “Donnchadha an Ropa” (Denis the Rope) as a result of his treatment of captured rebels. He was afterwards MP for Mayo in the UK Parliament. Gorteenmore is less than 15mi from Claremorris as the crow flies; about 20mi by road. The owner of the Cleary lands in Gorteenmore was Sir Robert Lynch Blosse, Bt.” [Bt stands for baronet, a title bestowed on commoners who reach a certain status]. The Lynch Baronetcy was created in 1622 for Henry Lynch, an Anglo-Norman. This happened under Charles I (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649) who was monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. His marriage to a French Catholic princess, sympathy for Catholics, and autocratic style were among the problems that led to him loosing his head. The Lynch family owned a vast track of land in Ireland [eventually over 18,000 acres]. The sixth baronet, Sir Robert Lynch Blosse, assumed the name “Blosse” after marrying a woman who was inheriting a fortune from an ancestor named Blosse. The owner of the land during the 19th century was Sir Robert Lynch Blosse, tenth baronet (1825–1893). When Grampa Michael Cleary’s grandfather, James Cleary, was a tenant farmer working the land, it was assessed.The value [for collection of the poor tax] was 4 pounds/10 shillings for use of 8 acres and 5 shillings for the buildings for a total valuation of 4 pounds/15 shillings. The house that Grampa grew up in was the same house that his grandparents, James Cleary and Mary Jeffers, and his parents, John Cleary and Ellen King, had lived in. I figured this out by comparing the list of neighbor family names found in the Griffith’s Valuation (1857), to homes in the Irish census of 1901 and 1911. The family names in the adjacent homes indicate that the Clearly family was still in the same home between the 1850s through 1911. In the early 1980s when Karen, Brian, Christina and I visited Gorteenmore, the land was still occupied by a Cleary relative although the house they lived in was relatively new. The foundation of the original house was nearby and was used as a pig sty.
Cleary Family History 