Just like everyone in the area our family held few records that could be in any way way be described as archival. In our case the one document of any great age that was kept safely ( in a secret compartment of a wooden clothes chest) was an old and tattered document folded and refolded so many times in its history that it had come apart at the folds and eventually consisted of three separate sheets of legal folio paper.
The document was a lease dated 2nd November 1865 between one Samuel Jagoe, gentleman and one Daniel Wholey, farmer. The lease was over three lives and the annual rent was £40 sterling (about £6000 today). Daniel Whooley occupied a farm of about seventy three acres described as “more or less what was currently in his occupancy” in other words the lease was covering a portion of land that was already the extent of the farm that Daniel was farming.
As was normal in these agreements Samuel Jagoe asserted his continuing rights to any possible found minerals , and to any trees and timber on the land. He also maintained a right to use the land for “hunting, hawking, fishing and fowling”. Jagoe was a new landlord for the people of Lissaclarig East who had in their lifetimes and that of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents known only one landlord, the Beechers of Aughadown.
These were times of great uncertainty, all the adults in the area had direct experience of the Great Famine which had been at its height less than twenty years previously. The Famine bankrupted many landlords as was the case for the Beechers who sold their land through the Encumbered Estates Court a body that was set up by government to sell off bankrupted estates. In times of uncertainty of course some people saw opportunities. Samuel Jagoe did and acquired new estates. In a smaller way though so too did Daniel Whooley.
Daniel was born in Lissaclarig forty three years previously. About five years before this lease was signed he married a small woman called Kit Duggan from Foilmuck near Ballydehob. Kit was thirteen years younger than Daniel and by all accounts was the driving force in their relationship. When one of the Collins family were unable to keep up the rent on a new house that had been built a few fields away from Daniels home and emigrated to America Daniel, with support from Kit bid to take on the house. They might have moved in at the time of their marriage around 1860.
The lease was for a period of three lives, that of Daniel Whooley, his son and grandson. As it turned out the lease never held for that time, Michael died in his bed in Lissaclarig in 1887 and his son Dano who lived until 1943 bought out the lease to the farm in 1923 soon after the establishment of the Irish Free State. Kit Duggan, the indomitable little woman from Foilmuck lived on until 1931 having subsequently made deals to acquire other farms in Skeagh and Greenmount for her son and nephew
The Front Field 