A Visit to Ballymoney

On May 6, 2011 my wife Doris and I visited Ballymoney, Country Antrim, Ireland the ancestral home of William Edward Cramsie.  Ballymoney, in the Irish tongue, means city by the marsh.  It's a small and quaint but bustling little village in the north of Ireland about a one hour train ride northwest from Belfast.  Ballymoney rests within one of the famous Glens of Antrim.  A Glen, we learned, is a long valley that leads all the way to the sea.  The scenery and atmosphere are remarkable.

Our primary purpose in this visit was to determine if any relatives of Bill Cramsie might be interred at this place where his grandfather was born.  The first and most important clue was that the family was Irish Catholic, which is not the dominant persuasion in Ulster now and was not during the lifetime of Bill's grandfather and great grandfather.  In fact, there was at that time a Protestant branch of the Cramsie family living in Ballymoney as well.  There is, however, in this place a Roman Catholic Church with deep roots.  It is the church of Our Lady and St. Patrick. Adjacent to the church is a cemetery divided into three parts, mostly by chronology.  Within the oldest of these sections we located the graves of what we feel must be at least three members of Bill Cramsie's family.

When we arrived at the train station in Ballymoney, we asked if there was a civic information center.  It turns out that there is and it is also the home of a local museum, which we enjoyed very much.   The local historical society shares space in this building and the keeper kindly unlocked the cabinets with genealogical information.  We perused the many documents there with great interest.

Locating the Roman Catholic Church was relatively easy and it took only minutes for us to review all of the marked graves in the old section.  We located one grave belonging to a Patrick Cramsie who died in 1832 at age 57.  This same stone mentions an Edward Cramsie who died in 1886 at the age of 60 years.  This Edward would have been from the same generation as William Cramsie the grandfather of Bill.

Immediately adjacent to that grave was one of a John Cramsie who died in 1884 at the age of 84 years.  The headstone also mentions his son Edward (different from above) who was born in 1860.  It seems likely that this John Cramsie was perhaps an uncle to the William Cramsie who migrated to the gold fields of California in the 1850s

Yet a third stone mentions another member of the Cramsie family named John, who was apparently married to an Isabella McNeill.  The names Patrick, Edward and John are very common within Bill Cramsie's family and coupled with the Roman Catholic connection, there would seem to be little doubt that these are the graves of relatives.

The West Point ring of Bill Cramsie made this journey with us and I couldn't resist the impulse to introduce Bill to these early Ballymoney relatives.  The ring has always accompanied me on all of the related excursions from 416th Bomb Group reunions to New York, to West Point to Wethersfield and now to Ireland and many other places along the way.

The church of Our Lady and St. Patrick is currently undergoing extensive renovation and is surrounded by scaffolding.  It is a beautiful church in an idyllic rural setting—a fitting resting place and a direct link to the past.  In the foreground here are the first two headstones mentioned above.

This phase of our trip was all that it could possibly have been.  But that is not all of the story.  We flew from Ireland to the RAF Wethersfield base (now MOD Police) for a brief visit and I will share some aspects of that interesting visit soon.