Thomas David was born in Mallow, his father a military surgeon. HIs Fathe died when the family were young and his mother Mary nee Atkins from Doneraile moved the family to Dublin. His brother John became a doctor like his father. Apparently his passion was family genealogy and he was able to avail of the records of the Public Records Office all destroyed in 1922.
Luckily all his work is in the National Library.
On Thoms David mother side she is the granddaughter of Mortai Og O’sullivan Beare
Burkes Landed Gentry:
Thomas Davis
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Mount Jerome Graveyard, Dublin:
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Dr. Thomas Davis Surgeon Royal Artillery, Mallow. Will witness Charless Franks attorney, Mallow “DAVIS Thomas Osborne 1831 16 James Medicus Cork Irish Bar 1838”
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Mixed school
She did so with the aid of her family in Mallow, but with the death of her own mother in 1817, she promptly left for Dublin. It was here that Thomas spent his childhood, first in Warrington Place, before moving to Baggot Street in 1930, which was also the place of his ill-timed death in September 1845, at the age of thirty, due to scarlet fever.
‘THE NATION’
One day in the spring of 1842 he was walking with Gavan Duffy and John Blake Dillon in the Phoenix Park. During that walk they decided to found a newspaper, and on Davis’s suggestion it was decided to call it ‘The Nation’. The object of the new paper was- ‘To create and foster public opinion in Ireland, and to make it racy of the soil.’ And so was founded ‘The Nation’, the paper that was destined to carry the gospel of Davis and the Young Irelanders to the four corners of the land and to raise a broken and subject people out of the deep slough of slavery into which they had sunken, giving them courage and dignity and making them strong and self reliant and firm in their demands for justice and freedom.
The rousing poems and ballads of Davis were recited and sung everywhere. Soul stirring compositions like ‘A nation once again’, ‘Clare’s dragoons’, ‘My land’, ‘Fontenoy’, ‘The bridge of Finae’, ‘The west’s asleep’ and ‘Tone’s grave’ gave back the old proud spirit to a lifeless nation. The people found themselves taking pride in the past, and taking hope for the future. Thomas Davis had touched a responsive chord in the torpid hearts of his countrymen.
In the first year alone he published over two hundred essays and editorials, as well as a wide variety of poetry and literature.
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Sept. 8, 1945
(By “AN MANGAIRE SUGACH”)
‘When boyhood’s fire was in my
I read of ancient freemen,
For Greece and Rome who bravely stood,
Three hundred men and three men.
And then I prayed I yet might see
Our fetters, rent in ‘twain.
And Ireland long a province, be
A nation once again.’
– Thomas Davis
Samuel Ferguson’s beautiful lamentation for his friend and fellow worker is well known –
‘I walked through Ballinderry in the spring-time,
When the bud was on the tree;
And I said in every fresh ploughed field beholding
The sowers striding free,
Scattering broadside forth the corn in golden plenty
On the quick, seed-clasping soil,
Even such this day among the fresh-stirred hearts of Erin,
Thomas Davis is thy toil.’
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From and O’Sullivan researcher:
Yes,
Anne Sullivan of Ballyandrew Doneraile was John William’s (Mortai Og’s) sister. She always described herself as a “Glanrought Protestant” Dr Davis worked with James Hampston and Murtai’s daughter Kate on the Davis/McCarthy trees.
The Davis’s were very proud of their links back to John William.
Ballyandrew today is borderline derelict, the farmer who lived there died a few years ago and left 2.5 million, no one knows where he got it.
(I wonder if he dug up a Jacobite chest?)
West Cork History 