The Connor/O'Connor Family of Ballybricken and Connorville

The Connors/Conners were an ancient Munster family, who intermarried with various branches of my mother's family.  Actually, we probably would have died out years ago without their genetic contribution....

The earliest documented member of the family was Cornelius O'Connor whose father was murdered by soldiers of Cromwell's army.  His widowed mother settled with the infant Cornelius at Gallow's Hill Street in Bandon, Co. Cork, where she took the politically-motivated decision to drop the Irish 'O' from the name, hoping that this would make them more acceptable to the predominantly Protestant inhabitants of the area.

Cornelius had a son, Daniel Connor, a wealthy merchant of Bandon Bridge, who, in 1698, bought the confiscated estates of Justin McCarthy, and, in 1702, bought the confiscated estates of Donough McCarthy, Earl of Clancarty.

The children of Daniel Connor, merchant of Bandon, were:

• Daniel Connor who died in 1737.
•  George Connor, who married Elizabeth Southwell, and who settled at Ballybricken, Monkstown, Co. Cork  - these were the parents of Mary Anne Connor who married, in 1778, John Lysaght, 2nd Lord Lisle.  ( John Lysaght was the brother of Mary Lysaght who married Kingsmill Pennefather - these were our maternal 6 x great-grandparents.)   A son of George Connor and Elizabeth Southwell, Daniel Connor of Ballybricken, married Mary Pennefather, the daughter of Mary Lysaght and Kingsmill Pennefather.
• Jane who married Mr. Lapp, merchant of Cork.
• Mary who married Mr. Thomas of Carlow.
• Hannah who married Mr. Delahoyde.
• Elizabeth who married Richard Gumbleton, Esq., of Castlerichard, Waterford.  (The same Richard Gumbleton of Castlerichard featured in deed 548-195-362169, of 1802, which dealt with the administration of the will of Rt. Hon. Joseph Lysaght of Cork - he died in Buxton Wells on August 8th 1799;  he had named as his executor, his nephew, Rev. John Pennefather of Newpark, who was the son of Kingsmill Pennefather and Mary Lysaght.  Also named in this deed were William Gumbleton, Richard Edward Gumbleton, Richard Boyle who was the Earl of Shannon and his daughter, Juliana the Countess of Carrick and her husband, Somerset.)      The children of Elizabeth Connor and Richard Gumbleton were - Richard Gumbleton of Castlerichard, William Gumbleton of Fort William, Robert Warren Gumbleton, George Gumbleton of Marston, Henry Gumbleton of Curriglass House, Jane Daunt, Mary Peard, Ann Rashleigh, Eliza Walton and Catherine Gumbleton.
• William Connor who was MP for Bandon in 1765, and who married, in 1721,  Anne Bernard, the daughter of Roger Bernard.  William Connor founded Connorville in 1727.   

The children of William Connor and Anne Bernard:  Daniel, born 1723;  Arthur born 1724; Cornelius born 1727;  Roger born 1728 who married Anne Bernard;  William born 1731.

Children of Roger Connor and Anne Longfield:
The Longfield family of Longueville family recur in this genealogy - Anne Longfield was the daughter of Robert Longfield and Margaret Geering;  her brother was Richard, Baron Longueville of Longueville, Co.Cork.    Anne's aunt, Mary Longfield, the wife of William Longfield, was accidentally buried alive; her butler decided to break into the Longfield family vault in St.Peter's, Cork, to steal her ring but, the moment he cut into her finger, she awoke, frightening the thief off.  She then walked home to her home in Patrick Street and lived for many years afterwards.
Another member of the Longfield family, the Rev. Mountiford Longfield, Vicar of Desertserges, Cork, married, firstly, Grace Lysaght, the daughter of William Lysaght of Fort William who was a relation of the Lysaghts of Mountnorth;   he married, secondly, Mary Anne Conner, the daughter of Colonel William Conner.

Roger Connor and Anne Longfield had, amongst others, Robert Connor of Fortrobert, a demesne adjacent to Connorville, both near Dunmanway, Cork.   Robert Connor was a fierce Orangeman, loyal to the crown, who commanded his own corps of militia; he threatened to invade France and bring Napoleon back to Ireland to be displayed in a cage.  Not surprisingly, Robert Connor was popular with the Ascendancy administration in Dublin Castle.  Robert even attempted unsuccessfully to have his own brother, Roger, arrested on charges of treason.
His brother, Roger O'Connor, was born on 8th March 1763, and entered Trinity in 1777.  His wife, who he eloped with on the day that he met her, was Louisa Anna Strachan, the eldest daughter of Colonel Strachan of the 32nd Regiment of Foot.   Both Roger, and his brother, Arthur O'Connor, assumed the earlier spelling of the family name, both men being ardent nationalists. Strongly influenced by the French revolution, Roger O'Connor bought Dangan Castle in Meath with the intention of entertaining Napoleon there, following the expected French invasion of Ireland;  this never happened and the castle subsequently burnt down which netted Roger £7000 in insurance. Following the loss of Dangan Castle, Roger's three sons, Arthur, Feargus and Roger, went to live with their Orange uncle Robert at Fortrobert, where they were later married to Robert's daughters.

Of the three sons of Roger O'Connor, the nationalist Feargus O'Connor was the most prominent.  He was educated by another of our maternal ancestors, our 4 x greatgrandfather, Thomas Willis, who ran a prominent school in Portarlington, and one of whose daughters - possibly Eliza Willis - Feargus attempted unsuccessfully to elope with.    One of Feargus's schoolfriends was the nationalist doctor, Richard Grattan of Drummin, whose daughter, Frances Grattan, married William Willis, the son of the schoolmaster, Thomas Willis of Portarlington, in 1826.
 At the height of the Tithe Wars in 1832, Feargus O'Connor was elected for Cork, carried into office by a wave of anti-union sentiment.  A fabulous orator,  he gained the support of the Catholic population but eventually lost it when he attempted to usurp O'Connell as the head of the Irish nationalists.  Falling out of favour at home, he moved to England and involved himself in the Chartist movement there, founding their newspaper ' The Northern Star' ; Feargus O'Connor  died insane in Dr. Tuke's Asylum near Chiswick in 1855.  His ghost is said to haunt the woods around his old estate of Fortrobert near Dunmanway, Cork.

Feargus O'Connor's sister, Margaret Matilda O'Connor, married a baronet of Cork, Richard Emanuel Moore of Rosscarbery, whose brother, Herbert Gilman Moore, had married Mary Courtenay, the sister of our maternal 3 x greatgrandmother Emily Pennefather, née Moore in Dublin in 1851.   Richard Emanuel Moore had earlier been married to another of the O'Connor family, Mary Anne O'Connor who was the daughter of an Arthur Ryan O'Connor of Kilgobbin. (I'm unsure who this Arthur Ryan O'Connor was.)

Another son of Roger O'Connor and Anne Longfield of Connorville was Arthur O'Connor, later General Arthur O'Connor (1763 - 1852), a prominent member of the United Irishmen, who was sent into exile in France due to his involvement in the 1798 rebellion.  A close association of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, he had tried to bring about a French invasion of England, which had led to his arrest and 18-month imprisonment in Fort George, Scotland.    Arthur, being forbidden to set foot in Cork again, sold Connorville to his brother, Roger, and entrusted his property to his nephew, Feargus O'Connor, who subsequently embezzled much of it.     Arthur settled in Paris where, in 1809, the First Consul gave him the rank of Lieutenant-General, then General of Division.   He lived at the Rue de Tournon for 16 years, but bought the Chateau de Bignon near Nemours where he died in 1852.
In 1807 Arthur married Alexandrine Louise Sophie de Caritat de Concordat, known as the simpler Eliza, who was the daughter of Sophie de Grouchy and the philosopher, Nicholas de Condorcet.  The Condorcets kept a salon which attracted the leading lights of the enlightenment, but, thanks to his opposition to the Jacobin administration, Nicholas de Condorcet lost his life during the Reign of Terror when Eliza was only five years old.  His wife, Sophie, reknowned as an early feminist, managed to survive the revolutionary era and became a celebrated translator of enlightenment literature, as well as the custodian and publisher of her late husband's writing.  Arthur O'Connor and Sophie's daughter, Eliza,  would take over this work following Sophie's death in 1822.



Connorville, the house built by William Connor in 1727, was later bought by James Lysaght Esq., and sold on again by him in 1858.   James Lysaght may have been a relation of John Lysaght, 2nd Lord Lisle, whose wife was Mary Connor, the daughter of George Connor of Ballybricken, but this is, as yet, unclear.

The Pennefather/Connor Connection:
Our maternal 6 x greatgrandparents were  Kingsmill Pennefather and Mary Lysaght, the daughter of John Lysaght, 1st Lord Lisle of Mountnorth, Cork. They married on 26th June 1754.

The daughter of Kingsmill Pennefather and Mary Lysaght,  Mary Pennefather, married Daniel Connor the son of George Connor of Ballybricken. (George Connor of Ballybricken was the brother of William Connor who founded Connorville in 1727.)