An April Wedding in Galway
On 30 April, 1901 a wedding took place at the Roman Catholic
church in Castlegar, three miles from the centre of Galway City. It would, perhaps,
have been unusual for that church to see such a fashionable wedding party,
accustomed as it was to the more restrained and plainer outfits of its parishioners,
most from humbler or middle-class farming families. The bride on this occasion
was Henrietta Kathleen Joyce, daughter of Pierce Joyce of Merview House. The
eagle-eyed reader will spot that this photograph was taken in front of
Merview/Mervue House, known to Galwegians in more recent times as Royal Tara
China.
Kathleen was marrying a “neighbour’s child”: Thomas David
Wilson-Lynch, of the Lynch family of Renmore House though at the time of his
marriage he indicated he was living at Kilcornan House in Clarinbridge, the family
home of his mother, Frances Redington.
Though he was the son of a family who had and still held a large landed
estate, it is telling that Thomas recorded his profession as “local government inspector”,
signalling the changing times that were then overtaking the landed gentry of
County Galway. The witnesses to the marriage were Dr. Edward Stapleton and Lily
O’Neill Power. Thomas and Kathleen had a daughter in 1906, baptised Catherine Anne
Mary Wilson Lynch, afterwards known as Maureen, and in time she inherited the
substantial archives of both the Wilson-Lynch and Redington estates. In the
later 20th century she took the decision to deposit this archive in
the James Hardiman Library where it is the collection known as LE6. While the
archive is not, as yet, available in digital format, the detailed list of its
contents can be accessed on the Archives Catalogue at
The descriptive list illustrates the breath of content of the collection,
covering themes such as estate administration, social and political life as
well as personal correspondence.
It is the largest of
our landed estates collection and has provided the foundation for a number of
studies including a monograph history of the Redington family of Clarinbridge
by Joe Murphy (reprinted 2017 ) and articles by Geraldine Curtin (Galway Roots:
journal of the Galway Family History Society, 1998) and Brigid Clesham (The
Other Clare, 2001). In 2019 the archive was augmented by the addition of
some photographs from the Redington family collection, including this splendid
photograph of a Galway wedding that took place 119 years ago today.
Comments