Ellen + Patrick Flynn

"Some time in the years before the Battle of Waterloo a Dublin merchant named Patrick Flynn opened a factory for making starch and blueing at 53 Back Lane, in the parish of St Nicholas-without-the-City-Walls... he was James Joyce's maternal great-grandfather. It was from the Flynn family that Joyce was to derive most of the details for his long story 'The Dead', in which he describes these ancestral Dubliners of his under the name of Morkans - that name being taken by him from a spirits and tea merchant on Arran Quay in the Dublin of his own day.
City directories of the period show that by 1818 Patrick Flynn was running a spirit store at Back Lane address. The starch and blueing factory had been removed by Patrick and James Flynn (who I take to be his sons, or a son and a brother)... The city valuation of 1830 shows the Flynns resident at what was later number 16 Ellis Quay on the north side of the Liffey. Patrick and James Flynn continued in the starch and blue business at various premises in Francis Street. James eventually retired in the 1830s, but Patrick continued the business into the 1850s at 79 Thomas Street, dying about 1954. It was of this Patrick Flynn, James Joyce's grandfather, that family tradition related the story of Johnny the mill horse. After his death, Patrick Flynn's widow Ellen kept up the firm for a time, but eventually sold out. The whole family now resided at 16 Ellis Quay, where the widow's son Patrick is listed variously in the late 1950s as a starch and blue merchant, an accountant and a book-keeper. When he died at the end of May 1896, aged 60, he had been living in a room in nearby Queen Street and was described simply as a clerk. His several sisters, the Misses Flynn, ran a small school for teaching singing and pianoforte. "
Miss Elizabeth Flynn,
seems also to have run a school in Harcourt Street.		 Annie Flynn,
born in 1845, was for a time a governess - perhaps in France.		 Julia Clare,
born about 1829, married a man named Martin Lyons, then a commercial traveler. Martin Lyons died on 2nd February 1871 at his home from liver disease and dropsy.
 		 Ellen Mary,
the youngest sister, married Matthew Callanan, sometime secretary of the Irish Farmers Club.		 Margaret Theresa Flynn,
in about 1856, than 23 years old, had married John Murray, James Joyce's grandfather
After the early deaths of their husbands and the decline of their brother Patrick, the sisters (including those who were unmarried and also their aunts) moved back south of the Liffey at the beginning of 1882, leasing the upper stories of an eighteenth-century house overlooking the Liffey quays at 15 Ushers Island, in the same area where late Mr Lyons had run his hide business. Here in the large gracious rooms, the sisters continued to advertise their music classes still under the stile of the Misses Flynn. Here they gave the annual Christmastime parties for their pupils and musical friends which Joyce's parents attended and which inspired the setting of his story 'The Dead'. The Misses Flynn had been pupils of the famous Dublin composer Michael Balfe (so Joyce claimed) and, as their great-nephew put it, 'trilled and warbled in a Dublin church on the south quays popularly known as Adam as Eve's.
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