Much of my work on the County Mayo Famine Deaths Database has focussed on inquests. Dr John Atkinson was the Ballina District coroner when the Famine took hold. Atkinson threw himself body and soul at the increasingly grim workload.
He attended several inquests each day and worked a seven-day week. Reports of these inquests record the names of hundreds of victims, profound suffering, and countless unimaginable death scenarios. Atkinson wrote letters to Dublin and London outlining what he witnessed and pleading for relief for the starving.
Coroners were overwhelmed by the scale of the task thrust upon them. The subjects of inquests were often little more than skeletal remains. In many instances, corpses were recovered from the roadside, fields, or cabins, days after death, when time, the elements, and animals had taken their toll. Inquests were conducted in the most terrible settings and attended by those, who coroner Richard O'Grady described, as 'moving skeletons.' Between 13 and 17 January 1847, Atkinson presided over eleven inquests. A verdict of 'death from starvation' was returned in all instances. The dead included children Sibby and Catherine Hoban of Palmerstown and Ballycastle, father and son John and Thomas Jordan. Atkinson recorded that an aged woman was 'gazing at the emaciated skeletons of her dead husband and son'.
The writings of Atkinson and O'Grady evidence the traumatic effect the inquests had on them. O'Grady wrote that the coroner's office was not an easy vocation for anyone with feelings. He listed some of the terrible scenes he had witnessed, including a dead mother embracing her dead child in a bed; a mother dead beside a corn kiln with her three-year-old living child lying on her; a nursing infant dead at its mother's depleted breast; and a whole family dying together in a single day. As coroners, these men need only have concerned themselves with the dead, but they were also heavily invested in, and preoccupied with, the fate of the living.
When you search for deaths in a time of famine, you find deaths. So it was that I found a death notice for John Atkinson. He died of paralysis on 2 November 1847 at fifty-six. My first reaction was one of disbelief – his name appears in the database hundreds of times as 'Coroner'. I had followed this man for months on his travels around North Mayo. I tentatively added him to the list of victims – was he a famine victim? Did acute stress and overwork cause his paralysis?
In January 1848, Charles Atkinson of Rehins, Ballynahaglish, was appointed coroner for the Ballina District. This Atkinson also threw himself selflessly at the role. On a morning in early June 1849, he was reported to have made an 'Extraordinary Journey' with his horse and gig. He left Ballina at dawn to attend inquests in Erris. By sunset, he had reached Croy Lodge, Aughness, Ballycroy, a trek of eighty miles – (Image: Croy Lodge, www.buildingsofireland.ie ). The journey took him along poor roads and tracks, across hilly areas, and over extensive strands. He crossed a stretch of sea in a boat with his gig, the horse swimming after him.
Though famine deaths dominated the daily routine of coroners, they were not the sole focus. On Monday, 13 August 1849, Charles Atkinson was tasked with conducting six inquests at Coolcronan, near Foxford. The previous evening, James Healy, Thady Hoban, James O'Hara, Francis Keane, Winny Monnelly, and Biddy Dempsy drowned while attempting to cross the Moy near Bonnifinglas in a flat-bottomed boat. They were using a short pole and plank of wood to propel the vessel when water entered at one end. Their instinctive flight to the other end caused the boat to sink. At that time, cholera was taking many lives in Mayo. Somewhere on his travels that week, Charles Atkinson contracted cholera and died. Another famine victim for the database.
At a time when Mayo men of wealth and power reneged on their obligations to humanity, remarkable men such as the Atkinsons and Richard O'Grady chose a different path. Today, reports of their inquests are a vital source for objective accounts of the terrible fate suffered by many during the Great Famine.
