By Martin Morris
Dr John F. Keenan (S.F. Ó Cianáin) was one of Longford’s great local historians. Longford County Library and Archives hold a collection of his papers, mainly consisting of notes on a range of subjects, including place-names and families. Keenan published numerous articles and there is evidence of his correspondence with antiquarians/local historians in different parts of the country.
John Francis Keenan was born near Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, in 1867. His father, Edward, was a farmer. His mother, Anne (née Doogan), had a brother, Patrick Charles Doogan, who later served as MP for East Tyrone, representing the Irish Parliamentary Party. Keenan’s curriculum vitae (preserved in the collection because he wrote notes on the back of it) is impressive: he was awarded a BA from Queen’s College, Galway, having obtained a scholarship in each year; he proceeded to study medicine and was qualified in various branches of it, including surgery, mental health and midwifery. He worked as medical officer, public vaccinator and registrar of births, marriages and deaths for Carrickmacross Poor Law Union, Co. Monaghan, in 1897–8. Over the following two years he was resident assistant master of the National Lying-in Hospital, Dublin. In 1902 Keenan arrived in Ballinalee, Co. Longford, where he served as dispensary doctor until his retirement in 1938. He died in 1945.
Among the most important items in his papers are two notebooks—Book B and Book C—which contain notes on many topics. Book A, unfortunately, is lost. The books contain details of places, important families and people of authority in Longford and Westmeath. In some cases Keenan sketched family pedigrees, and he also transcribed, in full, deeds and other archives in private hands to which he was given access. He compiled lists of grand jurors for Longford (1759–1806); high constables (1759–74); sheriffs/high sheriffs (1653–1816); commissioners of the peace (1662–1768); MPs for County Longford (1585–1768), for the borough of Longford (1692–1776), for the borough of Lanesborough (1665–1771) and for the borough of St Johnstown (Ballinalee) (1634–1727); and officers of the Longford Yeomanry (1811).
Another very significant part of the collection is a series of notes on most of the civil parishes of Longford (unfortunately, Abbeylara and Rathcline are missing). The notes were written on the blank sides of booklets of order forms for medical supplies, which tells us something about Keenan’s modus operandi! In each case the townlands are given in alphabetical order, and he extracted information on each from key sources such as the Ordnance Survey (OS) Name Books, the Down Survey, the Books of Survey and Distribution and James P. Farrell’s History of the County Longford (Dublin, 1891). Keenan commented on, and corrected where he thought appropriate, the OS translations of names. In some instances, sites of importance, including archaeological monuments, are described, based on his own fieldwork.
The small amount of correspondence in the papers indicates that Keenan had contacts with kindred spirits. Of particular interest are two letters to him from Michael J. O’Rahilly (1875–1916), better known as The O’Rahilly, who was killed during the 1916 Rising. Written in 1910, both letters refer to the importance of gathering information on local history and topography. In the first (26 July), O’Rahilly agreed with Keenan on the importance of publishing tombstone inscriptions and spoke of ‘the difficulty in obtaining assistance to do this or any other work for Ireland’. He proposed the creation of the position of Irish Herald and signed himself ‘Ua Rathghaille (the Sinn Féin Herald)’.
The collection includes several of Keenan’s articles, which were published mostly in the Longford Leader and the Journal of the Ardagh and Clonmacnoise Antiquarian Society. In 1927 the Leader published his articles about two important branches of the O’Ferrall family, who were lords/chiefs of Annaly (which was shired as Longford in 1570). ‘The story of Camblisk and its owners’ concerns an O’Ferrall branch that held onto its lands through the turbulent seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘The downfall of a great family—how the O’Ferralls of Mornin lost their estates’ recounts the decline of a branch through protracted legal action. In both cases Keenan had access to family archives that were (and remain) in private ownership. His article ‘In the days of the planters’, published first in the Longford Leader (1923) and reprinted, with alterations, in the Journal of the Ardagh and Clonmacnoise Antiquarian Society (1935), was the fruit of research in two manuscript books of the County Longford grand jury, covering 1759–1907. They were then in Longford Courthouse and are now in Longford County Library and Archives. All the articles in the collection are pasted into notebooks and annotated by the author.
Keenan also contributed to the Journal of the Association for the Preservation of Memorials of the Dead. His papers contain eight very fragile ‘rubbings’ of monuments and gravestones, the earliest of which is dated 1633. The remainder of the collection includes a small amount of correspondence, a notebook with contents of general interest and two scrapbooks. Earlier this year we unexpectedly acquired a quantity of objects of Keenan’s, including a small, exquisite chess set. The papers of his friend Patrick Greene (Pádraig MacGréine) (1900–2007), the distinguished folklorist, include some photographs taken by Keenan.
Alas, the collection has almost nothing of a personal nature—with one notable exception. He corresponded with the radical writer and activist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington (1878–1916) in early 1907. Sheehy-Skeffington sent Keenan copies of his new (and short-lived) periodical The National Democrat. In what is probably a draft reply, Keenan spoke of the need for a journal ‘with the courage and honesty to face the facts of Irish life, to grapple with the tyrannies which oppress us, and to tell us the truth about ourselves’. He continued to develop that point and concluded by saying that anyone who would provide such a publication would become ‘a national necessity’.
Keenan was unmarried. Patrick Greene recalled an austere man who did not suffer fools gladly. Keenan was truly a Renaissance man, and his papers are important and underused sources for many aspects of Longford’s history.
Martin Morris is the Longford County Archivist and a member of the Local Government Archivists and Records Managers.