The O'Dea Families

     Line One (John the Elder) was born circa 1735 in County Clare. He was the son of Pater Familias O'Dea.
     Although there is no definitive proof, the person at generation 8 whom we have called "Line One" may be John O'Dea. We know this from a series of documents in which his name not only appears, but also contains a map of the land he was renting at the time from the Woilfe family.

“The Wolfe family were settled at Forenaghts and Bishopsland, county Kildare, since the late 17th century. In 1753 Philpot Wolfe of Forenaghts married Mary daughter of Thomas de Burgh of Dromkeen, county Limerick. Although her brother left Dromkeen to his cousin Walter Hussey (Hussey de Burgh), Mary must have inherited some property in county Limerick, which became the Wolfe estate in that county. One of her grandsons was the Reverend Richard Wolfe who succeeded his brother John in 1816. In 1831 the Reverend Richard Wolfe married Lady Charlotte Sophia Hely-Hutchinson, sister of John 2nd Earl of Donoughmore and died without heirs in 1841. The Ordnance Survey Field Name Book shows that Thomas Disney was agent to the Wolfe estate in county Limerick. At the time of Griffith's Valuation Lady Charlotte Wolfe held an estate in the county Limerick parishes of Caherconlish, Dromkeen and Inch St Lawrence, barony of Clanwilliam.” (NUI Galway, Landed Estates Database, Wolfe Family.) In County Limerick alone, the family owned 1,365 acres.

The Thomas Disney mentioned above, as agent for Philpot Wolfe, undertook in 1778 to identify and map the land that the Wolfe family held at that time. (See the accompanying map which shows the extent of the family’s holdings.) It is in this document that we first meet John O’Dea.

Thomas Disney's estate maps in one place shows three plots of land, Bracklown, Rathkipp and Filory, next to one another. The map indicates that John Day and Thomas Looney together rented a little over 112 acres overlapping parts of these three divisions, that the lease was signed in 1770 and that it was for a term of 31 years. See the linked map which shows Disney's original pages inset and identifies on a map from the 1850's the land that was being rented at the time. On the large estate map above, you will see Miltown (the traditional home of the O'Deas, at the bottom of the map and these three plots of land in yellow immediately north).

Disney indicates in his ledger that the farm which Day and Looney occupied in 1778 was “very improvable” by applying lime to the soil that was “worn” and then planting a rotation of crops. He says that there were a number of “cabins” on the property, that “the tenant  should be obligated to plant a number of apple trees” in an enclosure and that he should build himself a house.

Note that at about the time Disney was making his estate map, John O'Dea would already have had a family--we estimate that he had at least two sons, John and Darby, were working on the farm with him at this time. Because he came to inherit the land later, it is likely that John was the older.