From a Farm in Carrigkilter
The Dorgan Family of East Cork:
Land, Migration, and Memory
A Documentary Family History
The story of the Dorgan family begins with a small agricultural holding at Carrigkilter in East County Cork and an unexplained land arrangement that appears to reach back toward 1817.
From Carrigkilter, the story moves through Ballybraher, Cloyne, Ballymacoda, Churchtown South and Garryvoe; across the Atlantic from Queenstown to New York; into Providence and Warwick, Rhode Island; and eventually back to East Cork through photographs, family memory and renewed research.
From a Farm in Carrigkilter is being written as a documentary family history. Parish registers, land records, census returns, passenger lists, newspapers, naturalization files, cemetery evidence, photographs and family recollections are used together, with uncertainties identified rather than concealed.
The chapters will be published here as their evidence is reviewed and completed.
The Family Story
Chapter One — Carrigkilter: The Place Before the People
A small East Cork townland, a farmer named Patrick Dargan, and an unexplained land arrangement reaching backward toward 1817.
Read Chapter One →
Chapter Two — Patrick and Johanna: A Family Takes Shape
Baptisms, sponsors, naming variations and the first family circle.
In preparation
Chapter Three — The Carrigkilter Holding
Valuation books, Griffith’s Valuation, changing tenure and the land that anchored the family.
In preparation
Chapter Four — Children of Carrigkilter
The family branches into Ballybraher, Cloyne and surrounding East Cork communities.
In preparation
Chapter Five — Patrick J. Dorgan and Mary Catherine Hartnett
The next generation and the joining of the Dorgan and Hartnett families.
In preparation
Chapter Six — The Last Years at Carrigkilter
Ownership, family change and the sale of the farm in 1896.
In preparation
Chapter Seven — Leaving Ireland
Queenstown, the Teutonic, New York and a family divided temporarily by the Atlantic.
In preparation
Chapter Eight — Providence
Work, addresses, citizenship and the establishment of an immigrant household in Rhode Island.
In preparation
Chapter Nine — The American Dorgans
William John Dorgan Sr., family change, work, separation and rediscovery.
In preparation
Chapter Ten — Service, Work and the Twentieth Century
William J. Dorgan Jr., wartime service, family life and public service in Providence.
In preparation
Chapter Eleven — Memory Returns to Ireland
A grandfather rediscovered, old photographs, East Cork friendships and the return to Carrigkilter.
In preparation
Chapter Twelve — The Search Continues
The questions still unanswered—and the records that may yet change the story.
In preparation