The Costigan Family of Preston 1790’s to 2007 – by Adrian Costigan (and earlier, Eileen Costigan)

THE COSTIGANS

“FORTIS SUB FORTE FATISCIIT”
(The Brave Will Yield to the Brave)

A short distance from the entrance to Sovereign Hill, Ballarat, but far in space and time from the ‘Roaring Forties’ and the potato-blighted famines and epidemics of 1840’s Ireland, is the full-sized model of a small timber cabin designed for the sailing ships which brought to Australia tens of thousands of convicts, soldiers, remittance men, free settlers, the Hibernian ancestors of around 35% of Australians – and the great-great grandfather of the children of Joseph Aloysius Costigan, Francis Eugene Costigan, Eugene Costigan and Anne Monica Costigan-Tobin.

The cramped living area, not much more than six feet high and eight feet wide, contains a wooden table above which are suspended a hurricane lamp and netting bags for storage of provisions such as onions, flour, salted meat, tea and several other comparatively non-perishable foods. Fixed benches run each side of the table, and behind them, raised above table height, run horizontal, box-like cavities between two and three feet square containing simple bedding- these seem to be the ‘bunks’ in which the occupants of this cabin sleep during the three-months voyage from Liverpool. Accommodation for compulsory ‘settlers’ was, of course, far less comfortable. But our ancestors were free immigrants.

Famine

The tragic 1840’s Irish famines were caused by failure of the potato crop. They killed one million people and caused the emigration of another two million- at a time when the whole population was only around eight million. Ireland was still exporting corn to England during the famine, from estates usually owned by absentee Englishmen. In some areas the suffering was alleviated when landlords distributed part of their corn instead of exporting it. Daniel O’Connell, whose statue stands in the grounds of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, had fought hard for Catholic emancipation before the famine. In some years typhus and cholera also ravaged the people.

According to the Irish ambassador to Australia (February, 1996) the experience of that famine has left current Irishmen with a sense of vulnerability and marginalisation.

A “Great Famine Concert” was held in Melbourne on 12/3/96 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the famine; it celebrated the dominance of the spirit over adversity with music and the story of a young couple marrying when O’Connell was at his most influential (around 1829), and then when the famine came having to farm out their children while they emigrated, later returning to be reunited and then the whole family emigrating.

Australia is the most Irish country in the world, outside Ireland itself. Over 35% of our people have Irish blood. The children of Joe and Ileen Costigan are of 75% Irish stock and 25% Scottish. Walter Martin, who arrived several decades after our Irish ancestors, provided the Caledonian component whilst the Hibernian portion derives from the Costigan, Sullivan, Bergin (Berrigan), Doran, Dunfie, Doyle, Scully, Byrnes and Mescall families who arrived in Australia in the 1840’s and 1850’s. Since most of our ancestors- certainly the Costigans, Sullivans and Dorans- emigrated in the 1850’s, it seems reasonable to assume that the push of the famine was a major motivation for the move, maybe the pull or lure of gold was another incentive.

The population of Tipperary Co. peaked in 1841 at 436,000. Between 1845 and 1850 70,000 died (especially from 1849 to 1850) and 190,000 emigrated from 1841 to 1891. By the 1860’s the population was reduced to 173,000, 134,000 of whom lived in rural areas. Our Costigan and other Irish ancestors were part of this great movement. Tipperary’s population in 1988 was even lower- 135,000.

Costigan name

Several versions of the name “Costigan” have been used over the years, according to Edward MacLysaght’s “More Irish Families” (1960), and the following excerpt from his research surely refers to our family, since he has placed on a map the name “MacCostigan” in south-western Leix (now “Laoise”) just a few kilometres north of Templetuohy (Co. Tipperay). As he did with our name, MacLysaght often bracketed the prefixes ‘Mac’ and ‘O’, they were obviously dispensable; as I noticed when researching the Sullivans – in successive volumes of the Directory of Victoria, Eugene of Gower St. Preston was surnamed “Sullivan” or “O’Sullivan”, and some, but not all, modern descendants use the prefix.

“(Mac)COSTIGAN This name which is now rare was formerly both numerous and important in Co. Leix and all the references to it I have met are to people in that or adjacent counties, the furthest away being Naas C., Kildare, where in 1540 Patrick MacCostykyen was a juror. MacCostigan, the present form, was used as early as 1544 when it appeared in a list of Irish kern mustered by the Earl of Ormond. The variant spellings of the name such as MacCostigane (Queens Co. 1562) and MacCostygn (restor of Durrow 1516) include O’Costigan. This is an example of the not unusual substitution of O for Mac in names which in the Gaelic form begin with a vowel; in this case it is Mac Oisticin, the C of Costigan being carried over from the Mac (cf. Costello, Coulihan etc.). The confusion of Mac and O is evident as early as 1602 when both forms occur side by side in a Queen’s Co. Fiant. In a deposition of 1650 we find Dermot O’Costigan, a dispossessed gentleman turned raparee, accused of acting as a “tory”, a term which was introduced officially at that time. The family was unaffected by the attempted plantation of Leix and Offaly and retained their main seat at Grange, Queens Co. (Leix) until the debacle of the seventeenth century.”

Brian de Breffny’s “Irish Family Names” (1982) states that the name derives from the Ossary sept MacCostagain (MacOistigin). The name is still mainly confined to Leinster and is most prevalent in Co. Tipperary, although it is not in the most common one hundred names. (“Sept” is a clan or branch of a family. Probably a corruption of “sect.”’)

Nothing is known about Keiran Costigan and Kate O’Connor, except that they were Irish, were probably born between Captain Cook’s discovery of Australia’s eastern coast and Captain Arthur Phillip’s landing at Sydney Cove, and that they were the parents of James Costigan, who brought his family to Australia in the 1850’s.

James Costigan & Mary Bergin

James Costigan was born in 1803, the same year as William Smith O’Brien, an Irish Protestant nobleman and landowner descended from King Brian Boru, who became a leader of the Young Ireland movement and who for his patriotism was sentenced to death but transported to Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania) in 1849. James must have been very aware of his contemporary’s fight for justice, as he would have been aware of the frightful conditions of life of most Irish at the time; scurvy, famine, dropsy – causing the distended bellies seen during the 1980’s and 1990’s in starving African children- cholera, typhus and sheer starvation were rampant when Eugene Sullivan and Damiel Costigan were children and adolescents. An eyewitness wrote to his sister im Australia: “They are dying like the choler pigs as fast as they can bury them and some of their remains does not be buried for ten or fifteen days and the dogs eating them some buried in mats others in their clothes.” (ref. “The Great Shame” p.128) Sometimes families would die together of starvation or typhus, and when neighbours got no response when passing food on the ends of sticks through the windows, the thatched cottages would be set alight and the walls pushed in- cremation in situ for fear of ‘the plague’.

In 1856 the aforesaid James Costigan, with his wife Mary Bergin (or Berrigan?) whom he had married at Templetouhy on 4th March, 1832, four of his six children (Patrick, Mary, Catherine and Anne) in the company of the Farrell, Kennedy and other families, embarked at Liverpool in the “Guy Mannering” for Victoria. On 20th May, 1857, Daniel and Jane aged 23 and 21, joined the “Titan”, also at Liverpool, and arrived at Melbourne on 31st August, 1857, to be reunited with their family. It is not known if they had travelled more or less directly from home or if they were some of the Irish who earlier fled to Liverpool there to remain and to be described by Friedrich Engels as “…The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten doorposts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench … must really have reached the lowest stages of humanity.” (“The Great Shame” p. 136)

Templetuohy, the parish of Tipperary County where both James and Mary probably lived and worked, in 1837 contained 2653 inhabitants of whom 602 were in the village. The parish covered 6193 acres of generally good quality, most of which was under tillage. However, there was also a large portion of bog which could easily have been reclaimed and almost certainly would have been by 2001. No doubt the Costigans would have attended some of the nine fairs held each year chiefly for the sale of pigs and may have used the recently-established penny post. According to “XXXXXXX” both the church and the “R.C.” chapel, a “neat building”, were situated in the village. According to Fr. Meagher P.P., to whom I spoke in October 1999, the location of the old ‘chapel’ is no longer known. The current parish church, a large 19th century bluestone edifice not unlike Victorian bluestone churches of similar vintage, stands on slightly higher ground just outside the village itself. Coincidently or not- maybe Irish families stay close to their bog over many generations or live a long time- “Joseph Bergin” was a witness to the marriage of James and Mary and the parish priest of Templetuohy in 1988 was also one “Joseph Bergin”’.

Having left a small farm in Tipperary, and having a similar-sized amount of money, the Costigans eventually settled on a small farm at Bald Hill, South Muckleford (near Castlemaine). At times the younger Costigan men worked on the building of the Melbourne-Bendigo railway line. James died on 12th December, 1886 (surviving his famous comtemporary Smith O’Brien by twenty-two years) and is buried in the Campbell’s Creek cemetery in Castlemaine. The Higgins family also had a farm in this area, and members of this clan, which intermarried with Costigans, much later had farm properties at Deniliquin (N.S.W.) when Kitty and Ettie Higgins married the Maw brothers.

In the same year as the emigration of the Costigans, Mary Scully left Ireland with her families of Doyles and Conroys- for she had married twice, having, presumably, outlived the first husband. To circumvent restrictions on assisted passages, whereby no more than four could receive assistance, her thirteen years old daughter Anne Doyle and her sister were sent with a different couple, whose ship was unexpectedly swift and arrived in Melbourne several weeks before their parents. The ‘protecting’ couple dumped the girls in Melbourne, where they fended for themselves until Mary Scully’s ship berthed. Unfortunately, how they survived in the rough, unsewered frontier town is not known.

Daniel Costigan & Anne Doyle

On 24th May, 1865, Daniel Costigan and Anne Doyle were married at Castlemaine and, through their son James (who was born at Muckleford on 24/12/1868 and later married Johanna Sullivan) established the line of Costigans with whom we, in 1999, are most familiar. Another son, Joseph Michael Costigan, died unmarried in 1922 at the age of 51 or 52 after a life of some eccentricity, being accustomed to giving away to the poor he’d meet coming home from St. Francis’ church in the city his own clothing literally ‘off his own back’- a pious habit which may have been the cause of pneumonia and later the tuberculosis of which he died. Various daughters married, to propagate cousins with the names of Mussett, Fitzgerald, Harper, Kupsch and Eilers, and doubling up through “Lil” (Elizabeth) who married Johanna Sullivan’s brother Eugene.

A couple of years after the Costigans disembarked, a 23-24 years old Irishman, Eugene Sullivan arrived from America and eventually became so well aquainted with the former family that two of his children married Costigans. Also in the early 1850’s arrived the Doran family, one of whom was to marry Eugene and to bear his fourteen children. Around 1879, a young Scot, Walter Martin, arrived from Glasgow as the last of the immigrant forebears of part of the family, although in the 1970’s Michael Evans, an Englishman, married Marie Costigan and, as an ancestor of the future, fathered two sons.

Little is known of the origins of other immigrant contributors to branches of the family such as Mescalls, Byrnes, Kinirys, Tobins, Aylewards, Mussetts, Higgins, Crowleys, Serongs, Harpers etc., except that they would have settled in Australia well before 1900.

According to Eileen Costigan, Daniel and Anne Costigan eventually worked a small farm in Preston, on the Darebin Creek; this address is recorded in Sands & McDougalls Victorian Directory (1913 and 1919) as Albert Street East, South Preston, between Raglan Street and Bell Street, but the farm itself was probably between Chifley Drive (formerly Princess St.) and the Darebin creek. Anne had a small dairy round and used to leave some of the produce at the Sullivan/Costigan farm, where there would always be a meal ready for her. Later- certainly by 1919- Daniel and Anne were living at 29 Penders St., Northcote (now Thornbury), a short walk from the junction of High St. and Plenty Rd.

‘Francie’ Harper (Mary/Maud Costigan’s daughter), however, doesn’t remember the farm, but remembers often being sent as a young girl to Ralph’s Junction Hotel at the Plenty Rd. and High St. corner to lead her grandfather Daniel home, for he was ‘always’ drinking. She recalls that Daniel was always dressed like a gentleman, stiff white collar and tie, and says that he tended to leave all the work to his sons (when they were on the farm) and his wife. The Costigans lost their substantial farm at Muckleford when an inebriated Daniel, on the way home from the pub which one of his sisters used to run- and helped to supply Daniel- sold the farm for a song to the Conroy family! Next day Anne pleaded with the Conroys not to complete the transaction (because of Daniel’s state) but they declined, saying “a bargain’s a bargain’! For a while the family stayed with the Eilers family in Pender Street as they had no home. Grandmother Anne (“a dear little thing” according to Francie Harper who lived for a while with her grandparents in Thornbury) was a delightful person with a sense of humour who enjoyed dancing and describing herself as “Anne Doyle from Aberfoyle”. However, in Francie’s opinion, Daniel had been spoilt rotten by his adoring sisters.

In 1898 Daniel apparently had a dairy produce business at 154 High Street, Northcote, whilst his son, James (and daughter-in-law Johanna), lived at 10 Mitchell Street just three doors from Frederick St and not very far from his father’s business.

Eileen once had a photograph of over one hundred members of the combined Costigan and Sullivan clans on the occasion of the wedding of Eugene Sullivan and Lil Costigan, in September, 1903, and fuzzy enlargements of the Costigan and Sullivan parents taken from this lost treasure are in Adrian’s possession. Daniel and Anne Costigan died within a week of each other in 1922 aged 88 and 81 respectively and were buried in the Coburg cemetery, although they lived at the time in Northcote, where, in a cemetery near the old Separation St. quarry, at least one of their children, Julia (Fitzgerald) is buried. Their son James Costigan was born on 24/12/1868, baptised January 1869, and died at Northcote in 1937 when four of his children were enjoying the cricket- the only time the name Costigan has appeared on the M.C.G. scoreboard during a test match!!! Don Bradman’s name was also there, as he made 270 runs- a description of which feat was heard by young Adrian Costigan as he listened to the wireless at 275 Bell Street, Preston.