Scott Fizgerald and Fermanagh


This woman looks at us across nearly two centuries. She links places, generations, and traditions of literature. Her great-grandson, Scott Fitzgerald, would become one of the writers who defined the 20th Century. This woman was born towards the end of the 18th: the picture was taken sometime in the later part of the 19th. Mary (Molly) Neeson was born in south Fermanagh. It is unsure whether it was Galloon, Clones, or Roslea Parish. From the age of her older children, we know she married into the McQuillan family as a young woman.

This is a picture of a a lucky woman. She left Ireland two years before the Famine was to destroy the population of Galloon Parish, where she lived. The death rate was similar to the worst areas of Mayo and West Cork. The population of Drumgallon townland fell 50% from 1841 to 1851. In 1843, she emigrated from Drumgallon, near Donagh to the USA with her sons, except John (we don't know if some stayed behind): her daughter (we don't know if there were other daughters who stayed behind): and her brother James Neeson. Of her husband, we know little. Did he die in Fermanagh, on the voyage, or in the USA? Philip was the youngest of the sons accompanying her.

Molly McQuillan's son John was already in Galena, Illinois. It was a lead mining centre on the Mississipi River, and a centre for immigrants from Fermanagh. These McQuillan emigrants were like the most Irish immigrants to the USA at the time: middling farmers, squeezed by the agricultural recession after Britain's wars against France.

The family settled in Galena. All except one didn't become rich, but the New World was better for middling farmers.

One son, Philip, die become rich. In his early teens, he began work in a shop. Half a dozen years after, he moved to the growing city of St Paul - and became one of its richest man. His daughter, Molly, was named after her grandmother.

This Molly's son was Francis Scott Fitzgerald, the chronicler of the USA in the 1920s. He wrote of the upper middle classes on the East Coast: then, when debt, drink, and literary fashion all conspired against him, of struggling screenwriters in Hollywood.

It was a life far different from the hill townland of heavy land three or four miles north of Newtownbutler where his great-grandmother raised his grandfather. A townland where his grandmother was part of the decision for the family to sail from Derry to the New World. That decision meant her youngest son became grandfather of the writer - rather than joining so many of his former neighbours in a Famine grave.