Polynose Genealogy

When I think of family lore, I think of a story that has been passed down from generation to generation about a certain family member or situation and has stood the test of time.  Sometimes these stories get embellished or altered in some way through time but at their core, they remain a constant part of the folkloric fabric of the family.  Whether these stories are TRUE or not, or whether they can be proven through family records or other official documentation, is a whole other ball of wax which some of us spend our lifetime working on.  

When I saw this week’s 52 Ancestors prompt of Family Lore, there was only one obvious choice for me to write about; that’s the Origin Story (I know that’s next week’s prompt) for my Power family’s arrival in Newfoundland from Ireland in the late 1700s / early 1800s.  

Newfoundland – A Rock and a Hard Place

As a bit of context before I delve into the twists and turns of my family lore story, I was born and grew up in Newfoundland, a large piece of rock located in the Atlantic Ocean on the east coast of Canada.  It is so small and yet so distinct, it even has its own 1/2 hour time zone.  On my Dad’s side of the family, I am the 5th or 6th generation of the Power family to be born on that rock.  In fact, for almost 5 generations, the family lived on an even smaller piece of rock called Bell Island (see Reverend William Grey’s sketch of “Bell Isle Beach,” 1858 above) which is now a 20-minute ferry ride from the main rock and part of the city of St. John’s.  This beautiful part of the world has gone through many iterations of ownership throughout the past several hundred years.  While I was born a Canadian, my father was born a proud Newfoundlander.  This 10th province of Canada didn’t become so until 1949 when, as most Newfoundlanders would say, “Newfoundland was dragged kicking and screaming into Confederation with Canada” through a secret ballot which resulted in a very, very extremely thin majority.  However, when our original ancestor arrived on this rock, Newfoundland was only a seasonal fishing outpost for Great Britain’s valuable cod fishery, not yet even a colony.  So, although my Power family has been on this side of the ocean for 5-6 generations, I am 1st generation Canadian, if you know what I mean.

Special Powers – A Life for a Life

From my earliest memories, I have been told that our first Newfoundland Power ancestor, Michael Power, was an Irish convict on a ship bound for Newfoundland.  If his crime was known, it has unfortunately been lost to time. What wasn’t lost, is the fact that he was a 7th son of a 7th son who carried special powers according to Irish lore (there’s that word again).  During the long voyage from Ireland, the Captain’s wife went into labour with a difficult birth.  She was in great distress and about to lose the baby and her own life in the process.  The Captain asked his crew if there was anyone onboard who could offer some sort of help.  Someone must have known about my ancestor’s special powers and he was brought on deck to help.  He miraculously saved the mother’s and baby’s lives and as a result was given his freedom.  That story, word for word (pretty much), has been passed down through 5 generations to me and my generation.  I have tested it with my Aunt Yvonne, the eldest of my father’s family and she said that’s what she heard. Once I became interested in genealogy and the family tree, back in the 1990s, my own grandfather had passed away but his younger brother Matt was still alive and in his 70s.  He confirmed that was the same story he’d been told as a young boy from his father or grandfather.  This story is so strong in the family that my first cousin Joanna wrote and recorded a song (using some creative license in the details) called Michael Power. You can take a listen here: https://joannabarker.bandcamp.com/track/michael-power

(Note: If you want to learn more about 7th son lore, check out this link: https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/truth-behind-ireland-seventh-sons-of-seventh-sons). 

Like Finding a Needle in a Haystack

When I was old enough to start researching this story, and had gained an interest in genealogy,  I was studying at Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN for short).  They have a great collection of records on campus at the Centre for Newfoundland Studies (CNS) and more specifically the Maritime History Archive (MHA).  Since I had the birth record for our first Newfoundland-born Michael Power, son of Michael, from 1848, I thought I should start looking for shipping records to find out if there was a Michael Power anywhere in the local ship records in the early 1800s.  The MHA has very old ship passenger lists but I quickly learned that searching these would be futile.  Do you have any idea how many Michael Powers were coming from Ireland in that timeframe?

The Story’s Moment of Truth

The next thing I became curious about was the fact that Michael Power was a convict yet I had never heard, in our mandatory Newfoundland Folklore course in high school (or anywhere else for that matter), that Newfoundland was a British penal colony like Australia.  The fishery was too important to Britain, I thought, to have a bunch of criminals being dropped off to disturb the peace.  However, with the help of internet searches, when I started researching Convict Ships to Newfoundland, I came upon a well researched paper called: “Convict Transportation and the Colonial State in Newfoundland, 1789” by J Bannister of Memorial University.(https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/acadiensis/article/view/10845/11667).  In this paper it highlighted the fact that some merchants did “illegally” bring convicts to Newfoundland in the early days of the fishery as indentured servants but there was no wide scale ‘transportation’ (as the courts used to call the sentence back in the day) of convicts to Newfoundland, prior to the accidental arrival of 97 aboard The Duke of Leinster on July 15, 1789. Thinking this was the missing piece to finally fulfill my family lore story, alas, my ancestor was not listed as one of the passengers.  But could it have been possible, if Michael Power was given his freedom, that maybe Michael was scratched from the list of passengers somehow?  

(This convict ship story is now so widely publicized that it made it into Newfoundland’s version of Reader’s Digest, called Downhome Magazine, in 2019 entitled “Newfoundlandia: The Last North American Prison Ship.”  See this link if you’d like the more concise story: https://www.downhomelife.com/article.php?id=2040)

The Last Resort & The Lucky Find

In an effort of last resort to uncover whether maybe the family lore was just a common myth, I tried asking about other people’s stories of their Irish immigrant ancestors’ arrivals in a ‘Newfoundlanders and Genealogy’ Facebook group to see if anyone would mention anything about 7th sons.  While there were a number of stories about convicts, many referred me back to research mentioned above and nobody mentioned this 7th son theme.  When I had given up hope of ever finding some inkling of substance for my story, one person privately messaged me and relayed his story about the arrival of his Lahey family to Bell Island.  I post it here altered for brevity:

“The Lahey family are one of the original settlers of Bell Island, NL. I understand that the first man, Martin Lahey, was from Tipperary, Ireland, arriving here in the mid- eighteenth century.

I was told this story by a Mr. Ray Lahey, now deceased, that his ancestor was a freedom fighter for Ireland against England.  He was captured and sentenced to serve a life sentence in New South Wales, Australia.  The trip to Australia at the time would have taken months. My great-grandfather went there in 1845 in a schooner on sails alone, and he was gone from Newfoundland for 2 years.  Accordingly, the families of the sea captains sometimes accompanied them. In this case the Captain’s family was aboard the prison ship on which Martin Lahey was an unwilling passenger, awaiting in irons a trip from Waterford City, Ireland to Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. While this prison ship was moored in the Suir River…, a small, female child of the ship’s captain fell into the water and nobody then on deck could swim. Martin Lahey screamed to the crew to cut his chains and when it was done, he jumped overboard and saved the small child’s life. That evening, after dark, the captain and some of his trusted crew took Martin Lahey from the prison ship and placed him as a free passenger on an itinerant fishing vessel enroute to St John’s, Newfoundland. He moved with one Dwyer formerly of Stradbally, County Waterford, Ireland and settled on Bell Island, NF as a farmer-fisherman. The soil was good there and it was isolated enough from the officials who might recognize him. It was easy for the captain to report, upon reaching Australia months later, that Lahey had died on the way there from Ireland. So, but for this heroic act, your maternal grandparents would have been Australians rather than Newfoundlanders and you might today be planning a trip down under.”

Closer to Closure?

Now you might be thinking that this is a really winding story for someone’s Family Lore when it has nothing to do with the original story above.  Well, that would be only half of it.  You see, my great-grandmother Power in this small place called Bell Island, was actually a Lahey. As it turns, her gg-grandfather was none other than this Martin Lahey, making him my 5th great-grandfather.  Was the Power family lore actually about the Lahey branch of my Power tree, but somewhere along the way it just got embellished and misattributed to the Power ancestor over the generations? Are both stories just similar and both happened? Or is it just a commonly used trope for Irish immigrants trying to spin a tale to cover their tracks of misery and/or criminality to survive back in their home country.  We may never know! 

Photos and article © 2024 Bob Power unless otherwise attributed.