Edward Kirwan Snr - On The North West Frontier

A Dublin Labourer's Son

Edward Kirwan was born in Dublin in late 1863 or early 1864, the son of Patrick & Catherine Kirwan, and grew up in the parish of St Catherine’s in the densely populated inner city. His early life was shaped by the working-class environment of Dublin in the mid-Victorian period, where labouring work was common and military service offered one of the few structured routes to stable income and travel. By the age of 18, he had enlisted in the British Army, joining the 1st Battalion of the 22nd Regiment of Foot (later the Cheshire Regiment) in Dublin on 26 August 1878. At enlistment, he was recorded as 5 ft 5½ in tall, with a fresh complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes, and minor scars on his forehead and forearm. His profile is consistent with the broader pattern of Irish urban recruitment into the British infantry during this period, particularly from Dublin's working-class districts.

Soldier of the Empire

After initial training in Buttevant, Co. Cork and home service, Kirwan was deployed to India in October 1879. This placed him within the North-West Frontier military system at a time when British forces were consolidating control following the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880). His service record situates him within a network of interconnected cantonments rather than a single fixed garrison. These included Peshawar, the principal frontier headquarters and administrative hub; Nowshera, a forward staging cantonment exposed to malaria-prone lowlands; Cherat, a hill station used primarily for convalescence and recovery from illness; Ambala, a major rear-area cantonment and depot; and Allahabad, part of the wider imperial logistics system through which troops were processed into and out of Indian service. Within this system, soldiers were routinely rotated between stations, often in response to operational requirements, climate, and health rather than formal combat deployment.

Life on the Indian Frontier

Kirwan’s medical record reflects the realities of frontier service. He suffered repeated bouts of “ague” (commonly recorded at the time for malaria or malarial-type fevers), particularly at Nowshera and Cherat, as well as isolated incidents of venereal disease, injury, and rheumatic illness. These conditions were typical of British infantry life in northern India, where disease and environmental hardship were far more significant causes of hospitalisation than battle injuries. His ability to recover and continue service without lasting disability suggests he remained medically fit throughout his Indian posting.

During his service in India, he received Good Conduct Pay and obtained a 4th Class Certificate of Education, reflecting steady discipline and participation in the army’s limited educational reforms of the period. These reforms aimed to improve literacy and administrative competence among enlisted men, particularly in imperial garrisons where soldiers were increasingly required to perform structured administrative and policing duties alongside military service.

Home Again

While soldiers with Edward’s record were often considered for promotion, his remaining a private likely reflected factors such as the realities of regimental life, periodic illness, and the availability of vacancies rather than any deficiency in performance, as his service papers consistently describe him as a man of good character and temperate habits.

He returned to Britain in February 1885 and transferred to the 1st Class Army Reserve, completing his active overseas service. After twelve years of total service, he was discharged on 26 August 1890 in Dublin, with his character recorded as “Good” and his conduct as “Temperate,” indicating a stable and satisfactory military career.

The Black Watch Tradition

Postcard of Cherat Hill Station

A family tradition associated with Kirwan describes him as “an invincible” who supposedly joined the army to avoid arrest, and also states that he served in the Black Watch. However, the documented service record does not support either claim. His enlistment appears entirely routine, with no indication of coercion or criminal custody, and his regimental affiliation is consistently recorded as the 22nd Foot (Cheshire Regiment). The Black Watch association is most plausibly explained by later oral conflation: Kirwan’s documented presence in Cherat coincides with a colonial landscape that included a feature known as “Black Watch Hill,” a place-name derived from earlier or commemorative regimental associations rather than indicating the identity of troops present during his service. Over time, this combination of place-name memory and fragmented family tradition likely merged into an inaccurate regimental attribution.

Husband, Father and Van Driver

After returning to Dublin, Kirwan worked as a van driver for Kernan & Co, a mineral waters manufacturer and wholesaler based at 88–89 Lower Camden Street. The firm, established around 1840, was a successful Dublin business and had gained recognition at the 1882 Dublin Exhibition for the quality of its production. Kirwan’s role as a driver placed him within Dublin’s expanding urban distribution economy, which relied heavily on horse-drawn transport for the delivery of goods across the city. His working life in this period reflects the common trajectory of ex-servicemen moving into physically demanding urban labour after discharge.

Kernan & Co, where Edward Kirwan worked

His civilian employment ended after he was invalided out of work following an accident while working as a van driver, leaving him with reduced capacity for manual labour. This marked a significant turning point in his later life, as injury-related loss of employment was a common vulnerability among working-class labourers in Dublin, particularly in transport and delivery trades.

Kirwan married Maria Teresa Kavanagh on 3 July 1887 at the Chapel of SS Michael and John in Dublin. The couple lived in the Camden Street and Camden Court area and raised a large family of eight children between 1887 and 1902, including Maria Agnes, Kathleen Mary, Margaret Teresa, Augusta Mary, Edward (my grandfather), Stephen, and Josephine, alongside children who died young. The household remained rooted in the same inner-city Dublin environment in which both Kirwan and his wife had been raised. In later years, Maria ran a small shop on Old Camden Street, reflecting the modest commercial strategies often adopted by working-class families to supplement income.

Death, Burial and Remembrance

Edward Kirwan died in Dublin on 27 December 1914 from asthma at approximately 50 years of age. He was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. His grave remained unmarked for many years before being identified and marked in more recent times. His life thus spans three connected worlds: the working-class streets of Victorian Dublin, the imperial frontier military system of British India, and the precarious urban labour economy of early twentieth-century Dublin.

Gravestone at Glasnevin

Father and Son: Two Generations of Irish History

In his memoir of the Irish revolutionary period, my grandfather (Edward, 1898- 1959) reflected on the political outlook of his own father, writing that “my father, though a good Irishman, firmly believed in the might of the British Empire and belonged to that school that placed its faith in the flowery speeches of politicians and English statesmen.” The passage captures a generational divide that existed in many Irish families before independence: an older generation that hoped constitutional politics and Home Rule would succeed, and a younger generation that lost faith in parliamentary promises after the upheavals of 1916–1922. My grandfather would go on to serve in the struggle for independence and later in the National Army during the Civil War, rising to the rank of battalion quartermaster sergeant before resuming his civilian career as a storekeeper in Dublin and later with the Ormond Garage and the Irish Aluminium Company (later Castle Brand) in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary.

Taken as a whole, his life reflects the broader experience of many Irish enlisted men of the period: migration from urban poverty into imperial service, sustained exposure to the harsh environmental realities of frontier India rather than combat, and eventual return to civilian life marked by physical strain, unstable labour, and close-knit urban family survival in Dublin.

Witches in the Family: The Tragic Fate of Bartle and Waldburga Faller

Family history often brings unexpected discoveries. While tracing my Faller ancestors from the Black Forest region of southwestern Germany, I came across a darker chapter from the 17th century: two members of the family —  Bartle and Waldburga Faller, the brother and sister of my 9th great-grandfather Jakob Faller — were executed after being accused of witchcraft in the Freiburg area during the height of the European witch trials.

Their story came to me only in fragments (see the graphic "Hexenwahn im Schwarzwald" below), but it offers a haunting glimpse into the fear and uncertainty of life in early modern Germany.

The Faller Family in the Black Forest

The Faller family lived in the rural Black Forest communities northeast of Freiburg im Breisgau, in what is now Baden-Württemberg. Life in this mountainous region was difficult even in the best of times. Families depended heavily on farming and livestock, and survival could be threatened by harsh winters, poor harvests, disease, or war.

Fallengrund

The early 1600s were especially turbulent. Europe was in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War, and communities across the Holy Roman Empire were suffering from famine, economic hardship, plague, and religious conflict. In many places, fear and suspicion found an outlet in accusations of witchcraft.

Urban Dold: The First Accusation

The tragedy in my family appears to have begun with Urban Dold, the stepfather of Waldburga and Bartle Faller. Urban married Veronica Marckhin, the widow of a Faller farmer, and became part of the household in the Fallengrund area of the Black Forest.

According to surviving family histories, Urban Dold was accused of witchcraft and executed in Freiburg around 1620. One account states that he confessed under torture and was beheaded rather than burned — a distinction sometimes made by courts when an accused person cooperated during interrogation.

A family tradition recorded centuries later tells of Urban speaking shortly before his execution. As he was led away, he reportedly said that if he went “where God is,” he would ask for his young child to join him. The story continues that the child died only weeks later, a detail that later generations interpreted with fear and superstition.

Whether the story is entirely accurate or shaped by folklore over time, it reflects the atmosphere of terror that surrounded witchcraft accusations during this period.

Hexenwahn im Schwarzwald

Waldburga and Bartle Faller

The accusations did not end with Urban Dold. Years later, his stepchildren were also caught up in the persecutions.

My 9th great-grand aunt, Waldburga Faller, was reportedly executed for witchcraft around 1630, and my 9th great-grand uncle, Bartle (Bartholomäus) Faller, met the same fate in 1636.

Like many victims of the witch hunts, they were ordinary rural people whose lives became entangled in fear, rumour, and judicial systems that accepted torture and coerced confessions as evidence.

In small farming communities, accusations could arise from almost anything: livestock illness, failed crops, unexplained deaths, or even tensions between neighbours. One local tradition connected with the area claimed that an accused woman’s cows produced unusually good milk while neighbouring cattle suffered — the kind of everyday suspicion that could escalate into deadly charges of witchcraft.

Coincidentally, another branch of the same extended family later became associated with a place whose very name echoes these earlier tragedies. My 3rd great-grandmother, Salome Hummel — a descendant of Waldburga and Bartle Faller’s brother Jakob — married Vitus Zimber and lived in the Black Forest valley of Hexenloch near Neukirch. The name Hexenloch translates literally as “Witch’s Hole” or “Witches’ Hollow,” a striking reminder of how deeply the memory and folklore of witchcraft became woven into the landscape and culture of the region.

Witch Trials in Southwestern Germany

Although places like Bamberg and Würzburg became infamous for mass witch trials, the entire region of southwestern Germany experienced waves of persecution during the late 1500s and early 1600s.

Witch-burning at Bamberg

Authorities at the time believed witchcraft posed both a spiritual and social threat. Courts often relied on torture to obtain confessions, and once one person confessed, they were pressured to name others. Entire networks of accusations could spread through villages and families.

Women made up the majority of those accused, but many men were prosecuted as well — especially in German-speaking regions.

Today, historians view these trials as the result of a combination of religious conflict, social anxiety, superstition, and legal systems that lacked meaningful protections for the accused.

Remembering Their Story

Researching genealogy usually connects us to stories of survival — migrations, marriages, and new beginnings. But sometimes it also reveals tragedies that remind us how fragile life could be for our ancestors.

Bartle and Waldburga Faller were not legendary witches or mysterious figures from folklore. They were real people, members of a farming family in the Black Forest, who became victims of fear and persecution during one of the darkest periods in European history.

More than 390 years later, their names are still remembered. 

Methodism and the Holmes family

The story of Methodism in our family runs through two very different worlds: the rural midlands of Ireland and the villages of the Black Forest in Baden. Yet these two traditions — one shaped by Irish Primitive Methodism and the other by German Lutheran Pietism — eventually converged in the marriage of my great-grandparents, John Holmes and Albertina Zimber. Their shared Methodist faith may well have been one of the strongest influences drawing them together.

My grandfather Tom came from a Methodist family, though the Holmes family itself had originally belonged to the Church of Ireland. The transition can be seen clearly in the Irish census returns of 1901. In it, his grandfather John Holmes is recorded as Church of Ireland, while John's wife Anna Maria Lee and their children are listed as Methodist. It seems likely that, through marriage and family life, the Methodist tradition of the Lees became the faith of the Holmes household.

Methodism itself originated as an evangelical revival movement within the Anglican churches of Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth century under the leadership of John Wesley and his brother Charles. It emphasised personal faith, disciplined Christian living, Bible study, and active involvement by ordinary lay people. Ireland played an important role in Wesley's ministry. He first visited in 1747 and returned on twenty-one subsequent occasions, travelling extensively throughout the country and establishing Methodist societies that would become a lasting feature of Irish religious life.

The Lee Family and Irish Primitive Methodism

The Methodist tradition in the family came primarily through Anna Maria Lee, whose family were deeply connected with the Primitive Methodist movement in the Midlands.

Anna Maria Holmes (née Lee)

Her father, George Lee, and his brother William were born in Rahugh, County Westmeath, into a family already steeped in early Methodism. George Lee's obituary records that his parents belonged to the Primitive Methodist Society. This specific Irish movement emerged from an 1818 schism, aiming to preserve loyalty to John Wesley's original ideals, including remaining within the Church of Ireland for sacramental purposes. During the nineteenth century, Rahugh and nearby Tyrrellspass formed a crucial geographic network for this Primitive Methodist activity. By the late 19th century, both branches of Methodism had reunited into the Methodist Church we know today.

The groundwork for this community was laid much earlier. During his April 1748 Midlands tour, John Wesley established a vital foothold for Irish Methodism in the region. In Tyrrellspass, his preaching sparked a rapid spiritual revival that eventually culminated in the building of the 1814 chapel on the village green. While Wesley found the wider Midlands crowds challenging—likening his early preaching in nearby Athlone to "striking hot iron upon an anvil"—he successfully secured Rahugh as a permanent base, linking it to his regional headquarters at the nearby Coolalough estate.

The Lees were a substantial local family, with several branches becoming pillars of this local Methodist network. Decades later, a distant relative, Edward Lee, became well known as an unusually progressive employer and philanthropist in early 20th-century Dublin. Notably, he took a principled stand against William Martin Murphy and other Dublin merchants by supporting his workers during the bitter 1913 Dublin Lockout.

Anna herself was also born in Westmeath, but at some point, George and William Lee moved south-east to Clonsast, County Offaly, where they established themselves as farmers and became central figures in the local Methodist community. Their importance was not merely as attendees at chapel services: according to family tradition and Methodist accounts, the brothers helped establish the Methodist meeting house at Clonsast on land associated with the family itself. In rural Ireland, where small dissenting congregations often lacked wealth or formal structures, this kind of contribution was essential to the survival of local Methodism.

Clonsast Methodist Church c1900

The obituaries of both brothers reveal the depth of their religious commitment and the role their homes played in Methodist life.

George Lee’s obituary, published after his death in 1881, describes the household in which he was raised as “a sanctuary for Methodism, and a home for its preachers.” Although deeply religious throughout his life, the obituary records that he underwent an especially profound spiritual experience only months before his death. The account reflects the strongly evangelical character of Primitive Methodism, with its emphasis on personal conversion, assurance of salvation, and heartfelt religious experience. During his final illness, George was described as bearing suffering patiently and finding comfort in Scripture and Wesleyan hymns read aloud by his wife.

William Lee, who lived until 1914, was remembered somewhat differently: less for dramatic conversion than for constancy of character. His obituary presents him as a pillar of the local Methodist community — hospitable, upright, cheerful, and deeply respected across denominational lines. Methodist itinerant preachers regularly stayed in his home, and he was praised for his generosity, reliability, and public spirit. Particularly striking is the obituary’s emphasis on his broad goodwill toward both Protestants and Catholics, suggesting a type of practical rural ecumenism that was often necessary in small Irish communities.

Together, the brothers embodied many of the defining characteristics of Irish Primitive Methodism: lay leadership, hospitality, disciplined personal religion, and strong local networks centred on home, chapel, and community. Their faith was not simply private belief, but something woven into everyday life and expressed through service to neighbours and fellow believers.

The influence of the Lee family appears to have carried into the next generation through Anna Maria Lee, whose Methodist identity remained strong enough that her children were raised within that tradition, even while their father retained his Church of Ireland affiliation.

Her daughter Pamela Anna Holmes (1876–1947), sister of my great-grandfather John Holmes, was highly likely (though not yet absolutely proven by a primary record naming her in full) the “Miss P. Holmes of Dublin” recorded in the 1910 Methodist Conference as one of the first women admitted to participation in the governing structures of Irish Methodism.

The Zimbers, the Hummels, and German Pietism

If the Lees brought Irish Methodism into the family, the Zimbers brought something remarkably similar from Germany.

Albertina Zimber was the daughter of a Black Forest clockmaker who settled in New Ross, County Wexford. The family originated in the Neukirch/Furtwangen region of Baden, an area famous for its clockmaking industry. Although this part of Germany was predominantly Catholic, the Zimbers belonged to the Lutheran tradition, apparently influenced by Albertina’s great-grandfather, Josef Hummel.

Family tradition holds that Josef Hummel encountered Protestant ideas during his clock-trading journeys to England and brought Lutheranism back with him to the Black Forest. He became an important figure in the evangelical community around Neukirch and Furtwangen and is remembered locally as a founder of the Lutheran congregation there. His son, also Josef, served as mayor of Neukirch before being removed from office in the political turmoil that followed the Baden revolution of 1848.

A Pietist prayer meeting

Josef Hummel’s religious outlook was likely shaped by nineteenth-century Lutheran Pietism, a movement that emphasised personal conversion, disciplined devotion, Bible reading, moral seriousness, and active participation by lay believers. Pietism placed less emphasis on formal theology and more on inward religious experience — what many Methodists would later describe as “heart religion.”

Because of this, the Zimber family’s eventual connection with Methodism in Ireland may have felt entirely natural. Methodism itself had been deeply influenced by German Pietism and by the Moravian movement that shaped John Wesley’s own spiritual development. Many of the practices and ideals of Methodism — small-group fellowship, practical holiness, personal testimony, and the expectation that faith should visibly shape daily conduct — would already have been familiar within a Pietist household.

In this sense, the Zimbers’ attraction to Methodism in Ireland may not have represented a major religious change so much as a continuation of an already existing spiritual culture in a new country.

After the death of her father, Albertina went to work as a draper’s assistant in Merrick & Ruddell’s department store in Dungarvan, County Waterford. Significantly, the Ruddell family were themselves Methodists. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, Methodist communities often formed close social and commercial networks, creating connections that extended beyond worship into employment, friendship, and marriage.

Faith as a Family Connection

Seen together, the stories of the Lees and the Zimbers reveal two parallel religious traditions that ultimately converged in Ireland. Though separated by geography and culture, both families were shaped by forms of Protestantism that valued personal faith, moral discipline, hospitality, lay involvement, and close-knit religious community.

For John Holmes and Albertina Zimber, Methodism may therefore have provided not only a shared church affiliation but a common spiritual language and social world. Their marriage united two families whose religious traditions, though originating in very different places, had evolved in strikingly similar ways.

The result was a Methodist inheritance that would continue through later generations of the Holmes family — an inheritance rooted both in the meeting houses of rural Offaly and the Pietist traditions of the Black Forest.