Gabriel Sheridan writes ........
My great great grandmother was Jane Sargeant (various spellings). She was born in 1800 in Clonmel. This was almost a century after the last of
the Bagenals ruled in Newry – but the extended family had still a foothold in
other regions of Ireland.
Her family is quite interesting. She became a Catholic when she married John
Coumans. They had seven children, five
of them who were born in New Brunswick, and the last two were born in Ellice
township, North Easthope, Huron (now Perth County), Ontario. This is located right outside of Stratford, Ontario.
I and my siblings are descended from
their fifth child, Elizabeth Coumans who was born on May 28, 1836 outside of Fredericton, New Brunswick,
and who was baptised at St. Dunstan's Catholic Church in Fredericton.
When Elizabeth was just one, the family moved to a one hundred acre farm
in Ellice township next to Thomas Sargeant, Jane's brother, who himself had a
two hundred acre farm there. What is fascinating about the
Sargint/Sargeants is that Jane, her brother Thomas, and her brother, William
Beauchamp Sargeant/Sargint all married Catholics, even though they were raised
Church of Ireland/England. William Beauchamp Sargeant (the Beauchamp is
from his mother's maiden name, she was Catherine Beauchamp) was the first
resident of Stratford, Ontario, and he started a tavern there which
he named the "Shakespeare Inn". He and his wife, the former Alicia Reeves of
Youghal, County Cork,
had married in Ireland,
and she was the first Catholic in the area formerly known as "The Queen's
Bush"!
Taking a hint form the tavern, the village name was changed to Stratford, and it is now the home of the largest Shakespeare
Festival in Canada
(strange how little things can make quite a difference).
Jane's brother Thomas Sargeant
married Margaret Anglin, also a Catholic, and also from County Tipperary. Both brothers had left Canada and returned to Ireland to
marry their wives. My great great grandmother, Jane Sargeant was
the daughter of John Sargint/Sargeant and Catherine Beauchamp. John Sargeant's parents were Richard
Sargint/Sargeant and Mary Bagenal who had married in May 1771, at Ardfinan, Cahir,
County Tipperary in the Chruch of Ireland
there. I think that the Beauchamp's descend from John
Beauchamp of County
Carlow, a Protestant who
would claim to be from an English family (obviously Norman) that fought on both
sides of the War of the Roses.
This family of County Carlow intermarried with my family of Sargeant's and
are of Dunleckney
Castle there. The
Beauchamp's are from Warwick Castle in England,
not too far from Stratford on Avon.
This is likely the reason for the naming
of the Shakespeare Inn in what is now Stratford,
Ontario.
Jane Sargeant Coumans died at
age 90 on March 2, 1890 and is buried with her husband at St. Mary Immaculate's
Church in Chepstow, Bruce County, Grenock township, Ontario. The land for the church and cemetery was
given by my family. It is a beautiful Catholic Church designed by
an Irish cousin named Mullins. Ironically, in Canada,
the seven children of John Coumans and Jane Sargeant each were able, as Catholics,
to acquire at least one hundred acre farms, at a time when this was against the
law in their own native country of Ireland. Most of the children then immigrated to the United States, to the states of Michigan, Illinois, and Kansas, with their
families. Their daughter, Elizabeth Coumans married
Patrick Toohey, Jr, who had been born outside Crossmolina, County Mayo, Ireland
in 1832, and had immigrated with his parents in 1840 to South Burgess,(about 30
miles outside of the present Ottawa, Canada, in Ontario. They married in 1857 in Guelph, Ontario
at St. Mary Immaulate Church, and their daguther, Jane Toohey was my
grandmother.
She married Timothy Patrick Sheridan, and I descend from their son,
Thomas Michael Sheridan who married Beatrice Trudeau.(yes, cousin of the former
Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Elliot Trudeau). I am one of fourteen children(number ten),
and my sister, Margaret Mary(always called Fudgie) is at present the Mother
General of the Sisters of Mercy of Alma, Michigan, and her name is Mother Mary
Quentin Sheridan, R.S.M. I am an
attorney practicing in both Oregon and Washington States.
Our line of Bagenal/Bagnals come from George Bagnal, son of Dudley, through his son, Thomas Bagenal. Thomas along with his wife, five children, and
his invalid brother Nicholas, were all banished to Conaught (To Hell or Conaught),
and Thomas's brother Walter was hanged, and his brother Dudley fled to France, where
he died there. (His sons however, descended into Dunleckney Castle
- see their brochure there for information on this line).
They had all supported the Catholic cause, and James II. Through
the help of Ann Mathews, who was a Catholic and Jacobite, and niece of George
Baganel, the family was able to leave Galway, and enter into County Tipperary.
Thomas was banned from returning to the
kingdom of Leinster, where his family castle was
located, in the village where the John F. Kennedy family originated. He died in County
Tipperary, and is buried at St.
Michan's C of Ireland Church in Dublin.
From this line of Thomas Bagenal, I descend from the Butler's (the Earls
of Ormonde), through Joan Butler, and from the Fitzgeralds, and even the
Cavanaugh's who had killed the first Bagenal to leave Newry and come to County
Carlow (‘Be careful who you hate, your children will marry them’ --that's the Irish
phrase I think of!).
On the Sheridan
side, my great grandfather, Patrick Sheridan was a gardener for the late Edwin
Quinn, Lord Dunraven, at Adare,County
Limerick. Edwin became a Catholic - much to the horror
of his wife and son at the time my family lived there. Patrick Sheridan married Ellen O'Brien, from
the townland of CastleRoberts, near Adare. She had come to the United
States in the 1840's and worked as a maid in West Chester, New
York for one dollar per week. She was able to bring her brothers, Patrick
and John O'Brien, and her sister Mary, to the United States. They all are buried in Gagetown, Tuscola County, Michigan
at St. Agatha's Catholic cemetery, next
to a beautiful church also designed by the same Mr. Mullins from Chepstow,
Bruce County, Ontario. Ellen O'Brien and
Patrick Sheridan were married by Archbishop LeFevre at S Peter’s and S Paul's Catholic
Church, still standing, on East
Jefferson St. in Detroit, Michigan
on April 10, 1855. Our family had a mass
and celebration for their 150th anniversary two years ago there.
The Bagenals in Counties Tipperary and Carlow are all my family, and all
descend from Nicholas Bagenal from Newry. The O'Brien's all descend from Brian Boru, and
my Sheridan's, through my DNA analysis, it turns out, are mostly closely
related to the Fitzpatricks. This is believed to come from the Shera's or
McShera's who are really MacGuillopadriac's from a line of Sherade
MacGuillopatrick and all out of County
Offlay. They are all Catholics on my side.
The Griffiths's, wife of Nicolas
Bagenal, are Welsh and related to the Tudors, and such connections probably
worked well for Nicholas Bagenal and his Protestant descendents. Tudor
was utilized as a first name for one of the lines of the Griffith's family.
I have found on line at google, type in Jebb, John A
speech on the characters and deaths of the Rev. John William Reid and John
Sargint, Esq. It is about my great
great great grandfather, delivered on Wednesday the 12th of December 1798 at
the Historical Society for the University
of Dublin. He was a
lawyer like I am. I do not know the circumstances of his death during the
rebellion of 1798.
It may be interesting to look into the families of
Beauchamps, Bagenal/Bagnals and Harveys of Dunleckney. These
Bagenals, all descended from George Bagenal as I do, inherited the County Carlow
property of Dudley (killed by the
Cavanaughs). However, almost all the
family was Catholic, even with a Mother Superior of the Sisters of the Poor
Clares. To inherit property, one son
became a Protestant, but even this did not prevent his heirs from fighting for
Irish freedom in the Uprising of 1798, where his descendant, Beauchamp Bagenal
Harvey was executed. He was a
Protestant, and one of the founders of United Irishmen. There are all sorts of Catholic Bagenals
descended from this line of George, including my family. I hope to find out if John Sargint, also
descended in this line, died Nov 9, 1798, had joined his cousin in this 1798
revolt. GS
History 
