James and Annie Beazly Family

by Ethel Beazly Meredith, June 1980

My parents were born in County Cork, Ireland.  This was in the south of Ireland, about 50 miles from the coast where I think the Lusitania ship was sunk at the beginning of World War I.

They were married in Ireland in August 3, 1892 (?).  Mother, Dad and I went back to Ireland in December 1907 to see their families.  Mother's father and mother were still living at the time.

The summer of 1907 we built a new two story house.  While it was being built we lived in the garage, about the size of a single garage.  The boys had their springs and mattresses on the joists across the top of the buggy shed.  All the other beds were on the floor along with a place to eat and cook.  the house was built on the same ground as the old one.  There was an old dug well included in the basement of the new house.  Kept food hung in the well to keep it cool until we had electricity for a refrigerator.

There were soft maple trees planted around the east and south side of the yard.  He planted evergreens on the north side but they all died.  They planted many fruit trees.  Always had fruit to east.  Before the days of glass jars they dried fruit on top of the bay windows.  Dried apples an peaches were our winter fruit.  While in Ireland he grafted a rose onto a currant bush and produced a blue rose.

My father had sold his family farm before he came to America.  The house the Webb family lived in was solid stone.  There were fire places in many of the rooms, even upstairs.  The barn was attached to the house.  They must have milked a good many cows, to a small child they had a churn that in my eyes was more than a 10 gallon.  There was a big garden, with patches of berries and grass in-between.  This is where the clothes line was.  Mother looked like her mother except the way she combed her hair.  Ernest says I looked like my mother.

He never saw her mother, and only one sister, Aunt Janie Moore and Uncle Willie.  That is another story of problems when they were forced to leave Ireland with the revolution in 1922.

The Beazly family can trace to a Lord Beazly in the house of Lords in England.  At the time of William the Conqueror this land that had belonged to James Beazly ancestors had been given to them when he was in the House of Lords.

Father was the only son of Geoffry Beazly.  He had two sisters that were married to Batemans.  Their descendants are mostly living in Canada.