The Great Ferriter Family

For the Feirtears, no doubt those years of famine, and the longer decades of poverty and degradation came enshrouded in grief and loss. Beyond that there was the family. For twenty generations perched at the tip of the peninsula, itself on the edge of the island, on a windswept and sometimes harsh landscape, a landscape possessed of a raw grandeur and sweeping beauty. Home.

Home. From Mount Brandon, westward down to the sea, along the rocky shore, with the small coves and harbors, and for some centuries the abandoned fortress, once the family’s seat and symbol of power. All lost, yet lingering in memory as an echo, replete with names and memories of some small greatness – Eoghan, Muiris, Eamon - names of vanished Feirtearaigh, or Ferriter chieftains, yet still given to the babies of the family at birth, generation to generation. And then the glory of Piaras Feirtear, the last Irish Chieftain to surrender to the English, martyred at the hands of the Cromwellians – only memories.

What do we know now of the lives of these people – tenants of Lord Ossory and of Lord Ventry going into the period of the Great Famine? While the 15th century may have been a time of prosperity and even of joy for the Irish of Corca Dhuibhne, the times thereafter offer a spectacle of gradual and sometimes sudden decline – for the area, and for the fortunes of the Feirtear family.

When the great Lord FizGerald, Earl of Desmond, went to war against the crown in defense of his prerogatives as the Palatine Lord of South Munster, the Feirtear Family must have been in his service, at least at the beginning. That the Feirtears would bear arms in Desmond’s service extends from the enfiefment granted by the FitzGeralds of the lands inhabited by the family since the Norman incursion. As the fortunes of the FitzGeralds of Munster waned, so did the fortunes of the Feirtears. Despite efforts to remain aloof from the final act of Desmond’s fall, at the close of the 16th the family was of much reduced circumstances.

The two great wars fought in Ireland during the 1600s, first the Cromwellian War, and finally the Jacobean War completed the denouement of the old Irish, and of the Hiberno-Norman families who did not renounce Catholicism. In each of these conflicts, Feirtears fought on the Irish Catholic side and lost both times. How many male members of the family left with the 10,000 who followed Sarsfield to Europe after the Treaty of Limerick was signed, we do not know. That any Feirtears who remained on what had been family lands were poverty stricken and largely dispossessed is certain.

The Catholic tenant population in Ireland following the Jacobean defeat lived lives of grinding poverty and unrelenting misery, this we know. Introduction of the potato as a food staple allowed population to increase, as the amount of land required to support life diminished with this crop. Tenant plots became smaller and smaller with each succeeding generation.

Excerpt from a description of his tour in Ireland by Gustave de Beaumont (1830s):

"Imagine four walls of dried mud (which the rain, as it falls, easily restores to its primitive condition) having for its roof a little straw or some sods, for its chimney a hole cut in the roof, or very frequently the door through which alone the smoke finds an issue. A single apartment contains father, mother, children and sometimes a grandfather and a grandmother; there is no furniture in the wretched hovel; a single bed of straw serves the entire family.
Five or six half-naked children may be seen crouched near a miserable fire, the ashes of which cover a few potatoes, the sole nourishment of the family. In the midst of all lies a dirty pig, the only thriving inhabitant of the place, for he lives in filth. The presence of a pig in an Irish hovel may at first seem an indication of misery; on the contrary, it is a sign of comparative comfort. Indigence is still more extreme in a hovel where no pig is found... I have just described the dwelling of the Irish farmer or agricultural laborer."

And one might wonder why anyone stayed. Home. So, many did leave, in singles and in small groups. Fathers hoping to later bring their wives and children, bereft wives with children, in search of men since departed, since vanished. Men, women and children – across Ireland, in their millions, and of these millions, some dozens of Feirtears. Lost from home, forever.
Some came to Boston, some to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans. All great entry points for the Irish. Some were sent to Quebec, and some died in the coffin ships outside Grosse Isle, at the port of Quebec. The Ferriter name is there, carved into the memorial along with thousands of others.

The Gaelic inscription reads: "Children of the Gael died in their thousands on this island having fled from the laws of the foreign tyrants and an artificial famine in the years 1847-48. God's loyal blessing upon them. Let this monument be a token to their name and honour from the Gaels of America. God Save Ireland."

At that time, and for decades thereafter, Irish Ferriters left their homeland for America. Once ashore, and recovered from travel, these men and women struck out, in the manner of the times, to establish themselves in the new land. During the early years, from the 1830s to the 1860s, most were barely literate, if literate at all, and most spoke Irish as their first language. So off they went, in the company of other immigrants, at least some of whom spoke their language. If not family, at least countrymen. Off to the mills of New England and New York, to the mines of Pennsylvania, to the docks of Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans.

We – that would be us, the followers in time, the successors, have pieced together some of the travels, some of the pathways taken by our lost and scattered ancestors. From the forests of Maine, the mills of Massachusetts, the dark and dangerous coal mines of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois, some found safe have westward on farmlands in Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. Onward - westward to the mines of Montana, and to the shimmering possibilities of California. Within a succeeding generation or two, Ferriters are appearing in positions with the railroads, as lawyers, as politicians, and as people of property, on the land.

For most of these people, up until the dawn of the next century, the 20th, there would be little contact with other Ferriter family groups, save for when by chance there might have been settlement in the same town. Many Ferriters settled in the factory areas of the Connecticut River Valley, from Hartford up through Springfield, and Brattleboro Vermont. Surely some of these people knew of one another, and as successive waves of immigrants arrived, renewed a certain familial sense. Not so for most, scattered afar, and out of touch, clinging to their Catholic faith, and with a sense of their past, but with no knowledge of their lost kin.

For six generations, the earliest Ferriter Immigrants have lived this way. Sometimes in the same cities with cousins they knew nothing of. The tiny families and small kinship groups that formed after the Diaspora, grew, and in a few case became extended families in their own right: witness the Farritors of the Nebraska Prairies, who struggled and prospered, now numbering in some dozens of families, or the famous Butte Ferriters, hardrock miners who have been a feature of the Montana landscape now for generations.

With each wave of emigration, a greater possibility of retaining contact with extended families existed, sometimes seized, sometimes not. With the coming of the 20th century, the means for reliable and consistent communication with the homeland came to be, and at last the terror and grief of immigration was relieved. Irish Ferriters arriving after 1900 often kept in touch with those back in Ireland, and brought over relatives when circumstances permitted. For these people, an active contact with Kerry and the villages of the Dingle Peninsula has often been sustained.

The 21st Century has arrived, and with it, easy and commonly accessible means to communicate across vast distance and to locate people virtually anywhere have come into being. Seven generations after the first great wave of emigration, and after the first exodus from the family’s Irish Homeland, Ferriter Family members have the ability to consider where the collective experience of their ancestors have taken them, and to take sure and certain steps to understand the relationships that have all along existed between their families, and other families who share the same name.

The fact that we have Farritors, Ferreters, Ferritors and Ferriters is incidental. These spelling variants are accidents of translation, bureaucratic mistakes, and pronunciation – nothing more. Like some Irish who use the Irish spelling, Feirtear or Feiritear, and the Anglicized version Ferriter interchangeably, the choice exists to honor the past by sustaining the spelling that has been given, but also to freely accept that this is, in fact one family.

That the past not be forgotten, for the summary of the lives of all of those who have gone before us sums up to form the ground of experience upon which we tread. From Sybil Head to Grand Isle, to the mines, the mills, and the factories of the Americas, and thence to where the Ferriter Family stands today. All a part of one thing.

Archived comments:

michele said...

    Great essay, George!!! In a few words some Historians have used...it is also called, THE IRISH EMPIRE.

    3 August 2008 14:19

During the 1950s and 1960s, my family lived in a house with a formal sitting room, across an entry hall from a formal dining room. The sitting room was something of a repository for certain heirloom items, and a number of family portraits hung upon the walls. In the far corner of the room stood a walnut étagère, with graduated display shelves, largest on the bottom, getting smaller higher – five shelves total. The middle shelf was the most prominent, and upon this shelf were several items of family historical importance: a small flat stone, a chunk of peat with a green silk ribbon tied around it, and a black and white photograph of a stone ruin, taken across a foggy expanse of grass. Ferriter’s Castle.

As a child, that shelf seemed to me to hold the keys to and the evidence of a secret history: the history of my family from a far distant point in time. This history seemed secret, because there were no encyclopedia entries to describe it and no textbooks that mentioned it, yet people who had my last name all knew about it. A family secret. Our family had once held title to large tracts of land, and great offshore islands. Our family had resisted the onslaught of alien invaders, and had produced a great hero, who not only held out against the enemy for longer than the other Irish, but who wrote great poetry, and played the harp with unsurpassed mastery. Pierce Ferriter.

This history, (a history that I gave up trying to explain to anyone outside the family because I could never quite explain why it was not in any book that could easily be found), was central to my sense of family, as I grew up. My father could tell tales of Pierce’s greatness, and of his deeds. As my father was a man who at times seemed embued with his own qualities of greatness, and who seemed to have vast and certain knowledge of all manner of things, I never doubted any portion of any story that he told regarding our family. Underwriting all of this was the picture of the ruin, and the stone, (a Castle fragment), and the peat, (from the sacred ground). Real things, supporting the otherwise ephemeral stories of the distant past.

So all of my life, I have carried the image of that fragmentary ruin in my memory, an icon of familial faith - faith in the reality of the stories that my father recounted, and faith in the kernel of greatness that always seemed nearby, somehow.

Lately, I have been conducting some topical investigations into Ferriter’s Castle. At some point, I’ll try and produce a more or less thorough write-up of what I have learned. My purpose here is not to describe the Castle in terms of it’s likely date of origin, orginal function, likely size, strength, or what it might have been like to live inside it, but simply to state what the image and notion of Castle Ferriter has meant to me, in this life.

I’d also like to thank all of the people who have visited the Castle in the digital age, and who have taken so many wonderful photographs. These images are proving very valuable in my researches, and promise to hold even more value, as I work on a special project for the All Ferriter Family Gathering. I’d also like to give a special nod to my daughter Angela, who during her semester abroad in Ireland in 1998 not only trudged out to Castle Ferriter, but took away a nice sized stone, to replace that much smaller one, so important to my sense of “Ferriterness” as a child.

Archived comments:

michele said...

    Very dramatic place, on many different levels. A must see for all Ferriters/Farritors. Michele Farritor McMurray

15 June 2008 18:55

A few months ago, I posted a piece that focused upon certain events early in the life of my grandfather, John Patrick Ferriter, (1873 – 1957). In that first story, I described his early military service, as a Private in the U.S. Army on the high plains during the early 1890s. Subsequent to that experience, “Pop” as my cousins called him, took advantage of his skills with codes and electrical devices and became a telegraph operator. By account, his abilities were “first rate”, and he made his career working as a telegrapher during the two decades leading up to the U.S. involvement in WWI.

When wartime came, John Patrick Ferriter, although now in his forties, joined the U.S.Army. Review of his military files suggests that he may have taken certain liberties with his educational background, claiming several years of study as a student of law. To our knowledge Grandfather Ferriter had benefited from little formal education, but was a man of powerful intellect, and was self-educated to a considerable extent. No doubt he had studied some law also, but not at law school. At any rate, in 1917 he was commissioned into the Army Signal Corps as a lieutenant, and sent to the battle front in France.

After returning from the War, John Patrick was given the opportunity to retain his commission, and stay on active service, which he did, not retiring until the mandatory age of 60, in 1933, as a Major. During his Army career, my grandfather travelled widely, being stationed at various times in the Philippines, in China, as well as at several domestic postings. He was also an expert in signal transmission, and codes. He held several early patents involving telegraphy and signal handling, and during the early 1930s pushed unsuccessfully for deciphering of the codes used by Japanese forces in China.

In 1924, as a Captain, John P. Ferriter became involved in what may have been the very first serious and concerted effort to receive information from intelligent life forms extraterrestrial in nature. Eighty-four years ago, the first serious attempt to listen to “off planet” voices was made by a few imaginative Americans using the new technology of radio.

Today, whenever someone hears a radio station, it is safe to assume the signals originated on Earth. However, in the summer of 1924 there wasn't the same certainty. In 1924, Mars was in opposition, not in a strategic sense, but in an astronomical one. It was opposite to the sun in the sky, thus placing the Red Planet substantially closer to Earth than is usually the case: approximately 45 million miles away.

So, in the summer and early Fall of 1924 some experts and amateurs as well were carefully making last minute adjustments to their radio sets, hoping to hear signals from Mars. A day of world-wide radio silence was declared for that day when Mars and Earth would be in closest proximity to one another.

It was a fortuitous time to get in touch, and there was motivation to try. Since the end of the 18th century, Mars had beguiled astronomers with its clear atmosphere, dark markings, and icy polar caps. It was a world thought to be not only habitable, but inhabited. If so, then radio waves broadcast by sophisticated Martians could be traversing the empty spaces of the solar system and, if detected, would bring us proof of their existence and information regarding their situation.

Interpretation of the signals merited high level attention. A Martian broadcast might be in the form of a speech delivered in an alien tongue, or Earth might be serenaded by a harmonious Martian tune! Most serious investigators expected any transmissions to use a code based on some mathematical key, and some expected information of an advanced civilization. This had military significance.

William Friedman, America's premier cryptographer (he would later break the Japanese Purple Code), was on standby alert, in case the messages from Mars proved enigmatic - announcing that he was available to interpret any otherworldly codes. At this time, Friedman served as Chief of the Code Section in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer of the Army, and had already gained recognition by deciphering a series of messages between two defendants in the Teapot Dome scandal. Captain John P. Ferriter served on the staff of the Chief Signal Officer.

Monitoring centered on Saturday night in October, when the two planets were at their closest. However, strange signals were reported even before the nearest approach of the planet. Radio operators in Vancouver reported on Thursday that they were receiving a series of "four groups of dashes in groups of four". Both the form and origin of the strange signals were unidentified, and a close watch was promised. In London a specially constructed 24-tube set picked up "harsh notes" of an unknown origin. WOR engineers in Newark, New Jersey reported similar sounds at nearly the same wavelength. A Bostonian reported a strange ringing, ending with an abrupt "zzip".

On the day of radio silence, C. Francis Jenkins, who had invented an experimental television system, turned a crude TV camera at Mars’ closest approach. Jenkins pointed this camera at Mars on the day of radio silence. His camera filmed a signal containing a face and symbols coming from the planet. He and astronomer David Todd sent the film to the nation’s cryptology expert, William Friedman.

As noted, William Friedman was not only a cryptologist, he was also the Chief Codes Officer, and reported to the Chief Signals Officer of the U.S. Army. So, the military was contacted. The Army also admitted that on the same day they also had received signals from Mars. The following is a quote from Captain John Ferriter of the Signal Corps:

‘The signal consisted of dashes of 6 seconds duration, with intervals of 7 seconds followed by a voice repeating words of 1-4 syllables.’

The Jenkins/Friedman film disappeared and was not discovered until a few years ago when a reporter found it in the archives of the Virginia Military Institute. The film has been reviewed by at least one avowed UFOologist, Dr. Elaine Bickle. In interviews and lectures Dr. Bickle has stated:

"I have seen the original ‘film.’ It is beyond doubt a communication from Mars."

Unfortunately, the film has again gone missing, without explanation for the disappearance of the 1924 film or for the disappearance of papers reporting whether or not William Friedman ever deciphered the code.

Here is what I know. By any standard, John P. Ferriter was a remarkable man, of remarkable abilities. He was in the right place and at the right time to have made the statements attributed to him. I for one am secure in accepting that he may have identified signals as received during the day of radio silence as having been extraterrestrial in nature.

I also know that in today’s radio signal saturated world, the luxury of a day of radio silence will never come again. If hearing those strange voices depends upon such silence, then we will simply need to rely on John Patrick’s determination as to what he heard, remembering that no one will ever again be in a position to perfectly dispute them. That’s good enough for me.

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