A County Roscommon Wedding, 1892: The Marriage of John Hughes and Mary Gavin

At the end of the nineteenth century, Clonown in the Barony of Athlone, County Roscommon, was a rural townland consisting of small holdings. It was in this townland that John Hughes and Mary Gavin married on 15 February 1892. Drawing mainly on folklore, oral evidence, church registers, valuation records and census returns, this book is an attempt to recreate events surrounding the wedding, with special emphasis on practices, customs and traditions that were the norm at that time. Rural weddings were often the result of long drawn out negotiations over the dowry and many rituals surrounded the process of matchmaking. Features of the wedding included the appearance of strawboys, the lighting of bonfires and the hauling home of the bride. The lives of John and Mary in subsequent years are followed as they established their family. This book, however, embraces more than marriages in the narrow sense as it discusses how a community arranged for its social regeneration by ensuring family continuity through marriage and the transfer of land from one generation to the next.