Meet the Reeves Family of Tramore House, Douglas

Rachel Finnegan will give an illustrated talk on the Reeves family who occupied Tramore House, Douglas, during the nineteenth century. She will focus on the Reeves women, particularly the matriarch, Mrs Rebecca Reeves, who was a reclusive figure known for her religious fervour, and her three more exuberant spinster daughters, Susanna, Henrietta and Mary Reeves, who inherited Tramore from their father in 1868 provided they should remain unmarried and in residence. Their gifts and memorials beautify St Luke’s Church interior, while their graves surround the building.

The information on the Reeves family comes from memoirs written by their female relations, Judith Chavasse (neé Fleming) and her younger sister, Hats Haythornthwaite (neé Fleming). These unpublished memoirs are now annotated and transcribed by Dr Rachel Finnegan in her new book “Memories of Gentry Houses in Skibbereen and Douglas, County Cork”, which will be launched in St Luke’s. These memoirs detail the childhood homes of the Fleming sisters: New Court, in Skibbereen, and Tramore House, in Douglas.

The Tramore memoirs were written from the perspective of two mothers in late middle age recalling the astonishingly independent lives of their talented and unconventional maiden aunts, one of whom, Miss Mary, was a noted artist whose works were exhibited in Dublin and London. As reflected in the memoirs, the lives of their aunts, unencumbered by the burdens of marriage and motherhood, were deeply intertwined with philanthropic and parochial endeavours that have left a lasting mark on the exterior and interior fabric of St Luke’s.