The Crown Bridge

Several years ago, there was quite a flurry of piecing together my Crown genealogy, which is to say identifying five branches of children whose parents were Richard Crown and Sarah Meehan. We found DNA matches with descendants from four of the five branches, and then added family history notes that had been handed down to those descendants and which served to confirm knowledge of the other Crown sibling branches. It has been exhilarating to understand the Crown story better and to share it with modern-day researchers.

Now, in the course of corresponding with various Crown relations, I must share a little detail that has recently emerged. Here is an excerpt from a recent contact who described visiting her elder Crown relation last summer and going on a driving tour with him to the areas where the Crowns used to live. She wrote:

[he] brought us on a tour of the family locations in Leitrim - including a visit to tiny Crown Bridge (who knew we had a bridge named after our family?)

This brought to mind a correspondence I had in 2016 with a contact who belongs to my Crown family group:

[he] related a childhood memory. When he was a youngster ….. they would walk the 200 yards or so from their home to look at the night sky from a nearby bridge. It was known as Crown Bridge.

Could it be the same bridge? I asked Contact #1 for a photo, which was then forwarded to Contact #2 unlabeled to see if there was any hint of recognition. There was. There is indeed a common memory in both family groups of this same place, this unremarkable little wall that was built over a ditch and which today displays a small road marker: LM-R280-011.  See it from Google Earth.

For whatever reason, this bridge and its story move me in a way that locating records cannot. The Crown Bridge now represents to me a small portal into the time and place of the lives of several Crown families and generations. Descendants of those families are now scattered across the globe, but as we find each other now and attempt to look back, the roads leading to this little bridge can give us all a glimpse into the Ireland that our Crown and Travers families called home.