Family ties
Connollys have headstone for family members.
The Connolly motto non sibi is Latin for “not for self.”
And true to the family’s dictum, some descendants of one particular Connolly clan from the Morell area put those Latin words and more on a new headstone for 15 family members for whom there was no memorial to mark their spot — in some cases for a century or more.
“They’re in here; every one of them,” Bob Connolly of Charlottetown says of the formerly unmarked 15, which include Patrick and Matilda Connolly who emigrated to Prince Edward Island around 1847.
Research leading up to the first-ever Connolly reunion in the summer of 2013, that included a celebration in Morell, a visit to the St. Lawrence O’Toole Church and its cemetery, determined there were numerous members of the Connolly family buried in unmarked graves in the same St. Lawrence O’Toole Parish church cemetery in Green Meadows, near Morell.
After searching the parish records, Bob and his cousin Les Connolly from Fredericton, N.B., with extensive research assistance from fellow Connolly descendant Anna Lee Hogan, discovered that 15 of their ancestors were on the missing-a-headstone list.
With support from other relatives, plans were made to do something to remedy that.
“We thought it was something (we should do) — put a marker up for someone who’s been buried for over 100 years. And I don’t think it was out of disrespect (that there were none). It was just that back then a lot of people couldn’t afford headstones. No doubt there would be something at the time (like a wooden cross), but it would eventually rot away,” Bob says.
A communal gravestone was chosen to commemorate four generations of Connollys, including Patrick Connolly and Matilda Steinson Connolly, who eloped from Ireland in 1846/47.
During this process some Connolly family folklore came to light, including stories that indicated that Matilda was English and came from the House of Stewart. Paddy was supposedly a farm hand that worked at Matilda’s father’s farm.
Matilda’s father did not approve of their relationship so they eloped.
“(The story goes that)
when Matilda’s father and the farmhands were chasing them they hid in a pigpen and they had to rub the belly of a pig just to keep them quiet so they weren’t found,” Les says.
It is not known what ship carried the couple to the New World but it is believed they arrived in the spring/summer of 1847 after a long and arduous ocean journey.
“On the trip over apparently they ran out of drinking water and they used some linen sheets when it rained and they would wring those sheets out to get water to drink. It’s hard to imagine what they went through,” Les says.
In July 2014 more than 80 Connolly descendants descended upon the graveyard for an unveiling ceremony of the headstone, which bears the Celtic cross, the Connolly coat of arms and a full spread of names of the earliest generations on the front, with names of the more recently deceased on the back.
“We just wanted to show some appreciation for all the troubles that they went through for us,” Les says.
“We found that we were losing the family history and we thought by having the headstone there it might help preserve it because (in the future) there could be somebody like me in their mid-50s who all of the sudden decides they want to learn about their ancestors and it may not (have been) available to them if we had not done this.”