From Moneylane to Garrynew: Following Joseph Davis Back to 1807

For years, the Irish side of the Davis family history only reached back to a single document. In an 1824 lease from the White Family of Peppard's Castle papers at the National Library of Ireland, Henry White of Clonganny leased the lands of Garrynew to Joseph Davis of Moneylane. One of the lives named in the lease was Joseph Davis, aged five, son of the lessee. That was a rare gift -- a land record that explicitly named a father and son, and placed them in County Wexford at a specific moment in time.

But "Moneylane" opened as many questions as it answered. Where exactly was it? Was it a real townland, a variant spelling, a mistake? And what came before 1824? Those questions sent me back into the Registry of Deeds.

Finding Moneylawn

The first thing I had to sort out was the place name itself. "Moneylane" wasn't a mistake -- it was one of several spellings for the same townland. Depending on the memorial, it appeared as Moneylane, Monemalane, Monemalone, Monenalayne, and similar forms. Once I started treating those as variants of one place, the records began connecting.

One memorial records a lease dated 1 May 1807 from James Darcy and John Darcy to Joseph Davis and William Davis, farmers of Monemalane, County Wexford. That pushed the Davis presence at Moneylawn back seventeen years before the Garrynew lease. Another memorial described the lands of Moneylawn as in the tenancy of John Darcy, Arthur Darcy, Joseph Brownrigg, Joseph Davis, and William Davis, placing the Davis pair firmly in the local lease network alongside their landlords.

Then I found the record that pulled everything together. An 1830 assignment described Joseph Davis and William Davis as late of Monenalayne but now of Garrynew. That single phrase settled the question I had been circling for weeks. The Moneylawn records and the Garrynew records were not two disconnected families. They were the same Joseph and William Davis, shifting their leasehold interests between the two townlands.

The William Davis Problem

Joseph Davis never appears alone in Moneylawn memorials. From 1807 onward, William Davis is beside him -- as co-lessee, as co-assignee, as the other name in the transaction. But the records never state their relationship. Joseph is usually named first, but not always, suggesting that they were at least equals in the partnership, rather than father and son.

Then a separate 1807 memorial turned up showing William Davis holding another piece of Moneylawn on his own. And a later 1833 boundary description, recounting the history of a nearby parcel, referred to land held by William Davis and Sons.

That phrase suggests a father with at least two sons farming alongside or nearby him. Joseph and the younger William are the natural candidates -- brothers, co-lessees on the adjacent piece from 1807, and the same pair who moved together to Garrynew in 1830. Senior William doesn't appear at Garrynew at all, and after the 1807 mention, he vanishes from the record entirely. A William Davis who surfaces in later Garrynew documents is almost certainly Joseph's son, possibly named for his grandfather.

What the 1831 Tithes Don't Say

When I searched the 1831 Tithe Applotment for Moneylawn, I found no Davis entries at all. That looked like a problem at first, but the 1830 assignment had already shown that Joseph and younger William were gone before the survey. Their absence makes complete sense.

As for senior William, the 1833 reference to "William Davis and Sons" describes the history of that piece of land, not who was living there in 1833, possibly reaching back to 1807 or earlier. After that single 1807 mention of William as a separate tenant, he simply disappears from the record. Whether he died shortly after, moved away, or just became invisible as an informal occupier, I can't say. The absence of the 1831 tithe tells me nothing either way. He may not have shown up in that record type regardless of whether he was still alive. He remains the most elusive figure in this part of the research.

Catherine Butler and the FAN Club

The Moneylawn research also helped with a question Davis family historians had been debating for years: who was Catherine, the woman Canadian records identify as Joseph's wife and the mother of his children? John Davis's 1910 Ontario death registration names his parents as Joseph Davis and Catherine Butler, both born in Wexford, Ireland. That's late evidence, but it's direct.

What the Irish land records add is context. A George Butler appears as a Moneylawn neighbour in 1807, and again in an 1833 boundary cluster near the William Davis and Sons reference. That doesn't prove Catherine was from Moneylawn, but it puts the Butler surname exactly where you'd hope to find it -- in the same townland, in the same period.

By contrast, Bell appears in many online trees as Catherine's maiden name, but I haven't been able to find a source for it anywhere. Until someone can point to where that name originated, Butler remains the only candidate with an actual record behind it.

Where Joseph Stands Now

Pushing the Davis records back to 1807 does more than extend the timeline. It gives me a much clearer picture of who Joseph Sr. was. An established leaseholder at Moneylawn by 1807, moving to a significant new holding at Garrynew by 1830, named in a White estate lease with a five-year-old son in 1824 -- this was a man probably born somewhere in the 1770s or 1780s, with roots deep enough in the Moneylawn area to suggest he grew up there as the son of a local farming family.

Where the Davis family came from before Moneylawn is still a genuine mystery; the parish registers thin out quickly before 1800, and senior William's informal tenure left almost no paper trail. The White estate papers, Valuation Office cancelled books, and any surviving Darcy estate records are the next places I plan to look.
But the picture has grown considerably from where I started. What began as one man and one lease in 1824 is now a farming household across two generations, a FAN club of neighbours and co-tenants, and a community -- Davis, White, Hopkins, Darcy, Butler, Brownrigg, and others -- that makes those leases intelligible.

A single lease gave me a father and a son. The surrounding records gave me the family behind them.