Sarah Ruddle was my grandmother’s grandmother. She lived in County Kerry, Ireland. The line from her to me goes like this:

Sarah Ruddle (m. George Byrne) -> George Byrne (m. Susan Hickson) -> Gertrude Byrne (m. George Simmonds) -> Gwen Simmonds (m. Ian Holford) -> David Holford (m. Maria Berggren)

Birth

Born 1834 or 1835. Date calculated from her marriage record which indicates that she was 22 when she married on 24 Feb 1857. Location of her birth is uncertain. No birth records found. Father – Thomas Ruddle, parish clerk at Killarney Church of Ireland – “COI” (recorded on her marriage certificate). Her mother may have also been named Sarah – see below. Siblings?

Early life

Marriage record says she was resident in Killarney at the time of her marriage. But whether she was born and grew up there is uncertain. It is possible her family moved to Kerry from England, or elsewhere in Ireland.

Sextoness

Sarah’s marriage record states her occupation as sextoness. The Oxford Dictionary defines a sexton as “a person who looks after a church and churchyard, typically acting as bell-ringer and gravedigger.” I can’t imagine that Sarah was just a female version of this. I suspect she was more of an administrative assistant. One duty which I know she performed was that acting as witness at marriages, because Kerry Church Records record her doing just that.

Marriages which mention the name Sarah Ruddle in Killarney COI 1835-1900 (Irish Genealogy) can be found here. They show 10 marriages, the first of which is Sarah’s own marriage to her husband George Byrne. In all the others she is a witness.

Of the nine marriages in which Sarah Ruddle was a witness:

• The first was in September 1847 which is odd since Sarah was only 12 or possibly 13 at the time. This raises the possibility of whether it was really her mother who witnessed that marriage and that they both had the same name.
• Two of the marriages are in 1848, and one in 1849. Two more took place in 1851 and two in 1855. The last under the name Sarah Ruddle is in September 1857, which is odd since Sarah had by then changed her name to Sarah Byrne.
• In fact, Sarah Byrne appears as witness to two marriages in 1857, in May and August, and Sarah Burns, who may well have been the same person, is the witness to a marriage in October 1857. Neither Sarah Byrne nor Sarah Ruddle appear in any marriages after 1857.
• All of the marriages at which Sarah was a witness took place at the Killarney COI.

Other Ruddles in Kerry

A search in the Church Records on irishgealogy.ie for other Ruddles in Kerry between 1800 and 1900 gives 45 records. All records are either in Killarney or Aghadoe, and give the following information:

• Ruddle marriages: Apart from Sarah’s marriage to George Byrne in 1857, there is only one other Ruddle marriage listed: Francis Ruddle married Jane Martin at Aghadoe in 30 November 1843. It is not clear how Francis Ruddle is related to Sarah, but he may have been an older brother.
• Ruddles as witnesses: Robert Ruddle, Joseph Ruddle, and Francis Ruddle all appear as witnesses in Aghadoe Church marriages, Robert by far the most frequent. What relation Robert and Joseph were to Sarah is not clear.
• Thomas Ruddle, who was the parish clerk at Killarney COI, is frequently listed as a marriage witness at that church. Only once, in 1845, was he a witness at Aghadoe COI.

Churches

These two COI churches in Killarney were clearly central to the life of the Ruddle family – Killarney and Aghadoe. A very helpful history of the COI in Co Kerry (see below) was published some years back, which is welcome, since a good many of them have now closed down, as the Protestant population of Kerry has dwindled almost to the point of disappearing. It contains entries on Killarney and Aghadoe COI (see below). Killarney was the older church and is still a functioning church though the current building was erected in the 1870s. Aghadoe COI was built in 1837 when Sarah was 2 or 3 years old. The building still stands but it has been closed since 1989.

Marriage 1857

Sarah married George Byrne on 24 February 1857 at age 22. He was 26. They married in Killarney COI. She is listed as sextoness on her marriage record, while her husband, George Byrne, was a nailer. Her father is Thomas Ruddle, parish clerk. George’s father is William Byrne, nailer. Edward Herbert was the rector of Killarney who married George and Sarah, Witnesses were Francis Le Hunte, curate, and Nathaniel Carter. There are brief descriptions of these clergy in the book on COI in Kerry p131 and 135 respectively.

Children

Children: Hannah (1859), George (1860), James (1866), Richard (1870). There are baptism records at Aghadoe Church for the first two of their children (Church Records) who were both baptised by Thomas Hudson, curate. Aghadoe Church had no vicar at that time. There is no birth or baptism record for James. The birth record for Richard is in the Civil Records available at irishgenealogy.ie. Interestingly it records the birth as taking place at the Killarney “Lying-in institution” which has been the subject of a recent blog by Kay Caball (see below).

Residence

George and Sarah lived in Chapel Lane, Killarney, according to the baptism record for Richard (1870) and the death certificate for George (1872). The address listed on Hannah and George’s baptism records is simply “Killarney.”

Widowed 1872 

Her husband’s death certificate suggests he was 47 when he died, though this does not agree with their marriage certificate which suggests he was born in 1830, which would give him an age of 41 or 42 when he died, when Sarah was 37 or 38. Her children were 13, 12, 6 and 2 respectively at the time she became a widow. There is no suggestion that she ever married again.

Emigration

• What happened to Hannah Byrne is unclear. I have found no records.
• George (my mother’s grandfather) was apprenticed to a merchant in Killorglin named Roger Martin in 1876. In 1882 he migrated to Australia where in 1885 he married his childhood sweetheart, Susie Hickson, whose family had migrated to Sydney some years earlier. He eventually found long term employment working as an executive for IXL, an Australian food company. He had five daughters and a son, and died in 1929.
• James (Barbara Fromberg’s grandfather) migrated to Australia around 1890 and married an Australian girl Florence Ashmead in 1891. They had three children. Florence died and he married again, Jessie Lawrence, with whom he had three more children. James was a French polisher and worked for Anthony Hordern, a large sydney retailer, for many years. He died in 1942.
• Richard migrated to Australia in the early 1890s and after an ill-fated romance with a certain Alice Hickson,  whose father was also from Kerry, ended up marrying a girl from Kiama on NSW’s south coast, Victoria Gray, the daughter of Irish immigrants from Ulster. They had seven children and lived on Sydney’s North Shore. Richard was an accountant. Victoria died in 1941 and a few years later he married for a second time, to his first love, Alice Hickson, who had married another accountant and had a family of her own, and was widowed in 1939. Richard died in 1946 in Sydney.

Religion

Sarah’s early life was dominated by the Church of Ireland, which could also be called the Church of England in Ireland. As a young woman she apparently worked for the church. Her father was a parish clerk and various other Ruddles appear to have been involved in the church too. Her involvement was with Killarney COI, where she worked and was married, and Aghadoe COI, where her first two children were baptised. 

In 1861 there was a religious revival in Kerry which mostly impacted the Church of Ireland, and only to a lesser extent the Roman Catholic church. The people whose spiritual lives were awakened by this series of events began meeting in smaller more informal groups of believers, finding their place in a movement which had originated in Ireland some thirty years earlier, and which had become known as the “Brethren” or “Plymouth Brethren.” Although I have no documentary evidence to confirm it, I believe that Sarah and her husband George were caught up in this religious movement. Her three sons were all involved with the Brethren after they came to Australia, and I can only assume that this was carried over from their early experiences growing up in Kerry in the years after the revival. My grandmother grew up in a Brethren home in Sydney, an experience which, it seems, was a mixed blessing for various reasons. 

There is a summary of Brethren history by H.A. Ironside on www.wholesomewords.org – A Historical Sketch of the Brethren Movement. It does not mention the Kerry revival explicitly.

The only photograph that I have seen of Sarah Byrne (Ruddle) was unearthed by Barbara Fromberg in her research. It was taken in a studio in Tralee, and depicts a rather severe looking woman dressed presumably in black, befitting a widow whose life has been tough. Her face is blurred and it is hard to discern her character from that one picture. She did not have an easy life. Perhaps that is reflected in the photo. She carries an umbrella in one hand. Appropriate for Kerry weather.

Death

Barbara Fromberg found a death record for a Sarah Byrne. It records her death on 20 March 1890 at Church Street, Tralee, and notes that she was a widow and that her son Richard Byrne was present. Everything fits except her age which is recorded as 68, whereas our Sarah would have been only 55 or 56 at the most. However, ages on death certificates are notoriously unreliable, and often depend on the memory of the informant, which could be quite wrong. It seems likely that this record is our Sarah, and it is gratifying to think that one of her three sons was present when she died. But why was she living in Tralee at the time of her death? James’s marriage certificate in Australia in 1891 records his mother as deceased. George’s marriage certificate from 1885 does not specify whether his parents were alive or not, though we know that his father, George senior was deceased. In 1890 the third of George junior’s five daughter was born. I wonder if Sarah ever saw any photographs of her three granddaughters in faraway Sydney? She would never see any of James or Richard’s children. As for her daughter Hannah, well her fate remains a mystery.

References:

1. Church records available online at irishgenealogy.ie include transcripts with record-images for all surviving nineteenth-century Church of Ireland marriage, baptism and burial records in Co. Kerry. 
2. The Church of Ireland in Co Kerry, J Murphy and E Chamberlain, available online for purchase http://www.lulu.com
3. A Historical Sketch of the Brethren Movement, HA Ironside. Online
4. Legends of the Lakes; or Sayings and Doings of Killarney. Collected chiefly from the manuscripts of R. Adolphus Lynch Esq. H.P. King’s German Legion. By T Crofton Croker. Published 1829
5. Killarney Lying in Institution, My Kerry Ancestors, blog by Kay Caball