By Gretchen Keiser

The priests were laid to rest 100 or more years ago. But only in the last few weeks have the living relatives of Fathers Thomas O’Reilly and Thomas Cleary been able to have their own minds put at ease.

The discovery beneath the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception of a burial vault containing the caskets of the two pastors verified the belief of the two families that the priests had been buried within the church.

Among the relatives of Father Cleary, the story was nourished by the memory of Father Cleary’s sister, Mary Teresa, who had attended his funeral in 1884 when she was 26 years old. After her death in 1936, her son, Raphael Markwalter, kept the memory alive and passed it on to his children, who included John Markwalter, the editor of Savannah’s diocesan newspaper, the Southern Cross.

“It was family tradition that he was buried there under the altar because grandmother said so,” John Markwalter recalled. “But we were all thrilled that they’d found the crypt.”

Markwalter and his brother and sister grew up with a strong remembrance of Father Cleary because a charcoal portrait of the priest, apparently passed down to John’s father, always hung in the dining room. “All of us children knew him because of the portrait,” Markwalter recalled. “He had a place of honor wherever we went.” But the new generation of children had no knowledge of “Uncle Tom”, the young pastor of Immaculate Conception Shrine who died of tuberculosis at the age of 30, Markwalter said. When he called his sister and cousin last week to tell them the casket, clearly marked by a silver plaque, had been found, they discovered that their children didn’t know of their heritage. The charcoal portrait had apparently been given to the Shrine some 30 years ago by Raphael Markwalter.

The O'Reilly family did not have the handed-down memory of someone present at the burial of Father Thomas O’Reilly in 1872, but the restless searching that had been done in the past few years by family members in Ireland and the United States.

“Everything pointed back here. All the facts pointed to his being back here,” said Carmel O’Reilly, the wife of Father O’Reilly’s great grandnephew, Peter. The couple’s research had taken them to a graveyard in Savannah and to Conyers, but they concluded that Father O’Reilly had been buried in, and never moved from the church he pastored during the Civil War.

A doctoral student in electrical engineering, Peter O’Reilly came to Georgia Tech to study several years ago, completely unaware that there was a famous Father O’Reilly in Atlanta’s history. It was only when his parents came to visit from Ireland that they saw the plaque in the entryway to the Shrine, honoring Father O’Reilly from “Drumcora in County Cavan, Ireland.”

His father observed that there was no “Drumcora” in County Cavan, Peter O’Reilly recalled, but if it was “Drumgora” they meant, they might be referring to the Father O’Reilly from his family, since Drumgora was his hometown. Research in County Cavan and in Atlanta verified that the Father Thomas O’Reilly from Drumgora was the same Father O’Reilly who rescued the center of Atlanta from Gen. Sherman’s destruction, Peter O’Reilly said.

That began an interest for the Georgia-based couple, which mushroomed over the past few years into “a kind of obsession,” O’Reilly said. They had read material at the Atlanta Historical Society, the Savannah diocese and the state Archives, becoming increasingly fascinated by what they could learn of Father O’Reilly. “He was a wonderful man, a great humanitarian,” the research showed, Carmel O’Reilly said.

Despite stories that the priest’s remains had been moved from the church, their research kept pointing back to the Shrine, the O’Reillys said.

Older parishioners repeated a childhood story that rang true. Those now in their 60s and 70s said they had been afraid as children, to play in that corner of the church basement “because the priests were buried there.” They called it the “priests’ corner,” Carmel O’Reilly said.

But while they believed the burial site was there, they could not prove it. The discovery in November and December of the vault and the side by side caskets of the priests verified that conclusion the family had reached.

“I’m very excited about it and so is the family in Ireland,” Peter O’Reilly said.

The search for the burial site began as an attempt to verify or disprove, once and for all, the stories that the priests were buried beneath the church. After the discovery was announced, the relatives said that it had great worth for them in confirming their belief.

The O’Reillys “were just as confident as we were that the body was there,” John Markwalter observed, “but you want to have it proven to your own mind. It puts that question to rest in our minds once and for all.”