Site Map for The Ferriter Gathering

View Ferriter Family Gathering 2009 in a larger map

O.K., What you see here is the Google Earth satellite view of the Gathering Place, with key features indicated. As noted, there is camping, nature walks, a swimming and fishing pond, a natural spring that ultimately flows into the Mississippi, plenty of parking, and a big tent for the presentations. Of course, there is much more! Pull out on the shot, and you will see, at roughly equidistant plases east and west, the Green Frog Bar, and St. Patrick's Church. We live in balance here.

Caislean an Fheirtearaigh

During the 1950s and 1960s, my family lived in a house with a formal sitting room, across an entry hall from a formal dining room. The sitting room was something of a repository for certain heirloom items, and a number of family portraits hung upon the walls. In the far corner of the room stood a walnut étagère, with graduated display shelves, largest on the bottom, getting smaller higher – five shelves total. The middle shelf was the most prominent, and upon this shelf were several items of family historical importance: a small flat stone, a chunk of peat with a green silk ribbon tied around it, and a black and white photograph of a stone ruin, taken across a foggy expanse of grass. Ferriter’s Castle.

As a child, that shelf seemed to me to hold the keys to and the evidence of a secret history: the history of my family from a far distant point in time. This history seemed secret, because there were no encyclopedia entries to describe it and no textbooks that mentioned it, yet people who had my last name all knew about it. A family secret. Our family had once held title to large tracts of land, and great offshore islands. Our family had resisted the onslaught of alien invaders, and had produced a great hero, who not only held out against the enemy for longer than the other Irish, but who wrote great poetry, and played the harp with unsurpassed mastery. Pierce Ferriter.

This history, (a history that I gave up trying to explain to anyone outside the family because I could never quite explain why it was not in any book that could easily be found), was central to my sense of family, as I grew up. My father could tell tales of Pierce’s greatness, and of his deeds. As my father was a man who at times seemed embued with his own qualities of greatness, and who seemed to have vast and certain knowledge of all manner of things, I never doubted any portion of any story that he told regarding our family. Underwriting all of this was the picture of the ruin, and the stone, (a Castle fragment), and the peat, (from the sacred ground). Real things, supporting the otherwise ephemeral stories of the distant past.

So all of my life, I have carried the image of that fragmentary ruin in my memory, an icon of familial faith - faith in the reality of the stories that my father recounted, and faith in the kernel of greatness that always seemed nearby, somehow.


Lately, I have been conducting some topical investigations into Ferriter’s Castle. At some point, I’ll try and produce a more or less thorough write-up of what I have learned. My purpose here is not to describe the Castle in terms of it’s likely date of origin, orginal function, likely size, strength, or what it might have been like to live inside it, but simply to state what the image and notion of Castle Ferriter has meant to me, in this life.

I’d also like to thank all of the people who have visited the Castle in the digital age, and who have taken so many wonderful photographs. These images are proving very valuable in my researches, and promise to hold even more value, as I work on a special project for the All Ferriter Family Gathering. I’d also like to give a special nod to my daughter Angela, who during her semester abroad in Ireland in 1998 not only trudged out to Castle Ferriter, but took away a nice sized stone, to replace that much smaller one, so important to my sense of “Ferriterness” as a child.


George Ferriter, USA

An American Ferriter Story

What follows is a bit of history and a bit of background, for the greater understanding of our collective family. First, please understand that I am not a genealogist. While I have always cherished a love of family history, and an interest in learning more about our past, I have neither the discipline, nor the patience to execute the hard and detailed work necessary in genealogical research. A fair analogy would be found in my love of maps – while not a cartographer, I love to pore over maps, envisioning places and terrain features, and imagining what being there might be like – in similar manner, I love family trees, wondering about the lives of the people identified, and what those people lived and felt.

My father was Charles Arthur Ferriter, deceased now these past 37 years. Since those who knew him well are diminishing in number, I will offer a snapshot of what I know, such that the cousins he never knew might have some understanding of his role in history, and of his place in our family. C.A.Ferriter was the son of the son of a Ballyferriter area Irishman. His father, John Patrick Ferriter was raised in the Midwestern United States, amongst people who were themselves immigrants, or the sons and daughters of the same, many of them still speaking the Mother Tongue. John Patrick passed along to his son a firm sense of what it meant to be an Irish-American, and to be a Ferriter. Romantic by nature, my father conserved and passed along those famous stories involving the early Ferriters, the FitzGeralds, of Pierce Ferriter’s brave fight against the Cromwellians, and of his martyrdom at the hands of the English. When I was small, he would bid me good night and lights out with the sign of the cross blessing recited in Irish.

Commissioned as an officer in the United States Navy as a member of the United States Naval Academy Class of 1924, C.A Ferriter, (nicknamed “Thug” during his midshipman years), went on to serve 30 more years in the service. Thug Ferriter served first in submarines, then in cruisers, followed by command and staff duties in a variety of surface vessels.

He married my mother Ann Patricia Flanigan in 1932, and began a family, which grew to four sons, (Pierce, Charles, John, and Nicholas), by 1941. When WWII began, he was on duty with what was then called the Asiatic Fleet, commanding the U.S.S. Whippoorwill at Cavite Naval Base, on Manila Bay, in the Philippines. During the initial Japanese attack on Cavite, which followed Pearl Harbor by about 48 hours, Lt. Commander Ferriter, at the helm of the “Whip” was instrumental in saving a crippled destroyer and her crew, and action which earned him the Navy Cross, for valor.

Under orders to leave the Philippines ahead of the Japanese, Thug took the Whippoorwill and sailed alone across a thousand miles of enemy controlled seas to the Dutch East Indies, and then to Australia, where surviving U.S. forces regrouped. During these months in early 1942, my mother did not know if he was alive or dead.

C.A. Ferriter served continuously at sea for the entire war, in the Pacific. He was the Executive Officer, (second in command), of the heavy cruiser “Indianapolis” during many of her key engagements, debarking for a new assignment prior to her ferrying the first atomic weapons to Tinian Atoll, and her tragic sinking. He set foot in Japan prior to the formal treaty signing ceremonies.

Following WWII, Thug returned home, and my sister (Sue) and I were born.

As the Captain of the U.S.S. President Jackson, my father participated in the Inchon Landing, the key amphibious operation of the Korean War.

Charles Arthur Ferriter retired from the United States Navy as a Rear Admiral in 1955. Post-retirement, he returned to school, and obtained a Masters Degree in Education from the University of New Hampshire in 1958, and completed a career in the employment of the State of New Hampshire as an administrator at a state hospital.

Once fully retired, my father devoted himself to his family, to writing, historical research, and religious activities. When my mother passed away in 1966, he became more fully focused on spiritual matters, becoming actively involved as a lay brother, 3rd Order of Franciscans. He died on August 13, 1970, and is buried next to his wife in a small military cemetery on the U.S. Naval Shipyard, Kittery Maine.

As an epitaph, I would like to provide a clear understanding that my father lived a rich and complete life, and was successful by almost anyone’s standards. For all of his tremendous service under the Stars and Stripes, he never parted company with his “Irishness”, and passed this sense along to his children. He represents a fine example of the fruition of an immigrant family in America, and his life should be recognized as having been a stout cord in the cable that is our collective heritage, across time.

George (Seoirse) Ferriter, Wisconsin U.S.A.