====== Twomey, John ====== (died 30 May 1914, aged 71 or 72), clergyman. (Very Rev. Dean Twomey) Born in County Cork, Ireland. He was educated in Ireland and in Canada. Ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1866 by Bishop Horan of Kingston, he was priest at parishes which included St. Alexander’s, Lochiel, and was appointed priest at St. Mary’s Parish, Williamstown, in 1892, on the death of the previous priest, Fr I. J. MacCarthy. At Williamstown, where he remained priest till the end of his life, Fr Twomey’s relations with his parishioners were at times stormy. The writer of the life of Bishop Alexander Macdonell of Alexandria in the //Dictionary of Canadian Biography//, Vol. XIII, speaks critically of the bishop’s inability to deal effectively with the strife at Williamstown. These troubled relations are also alluded to, if cautiously, in other printed sources. Decades later, an elderly woman remembered that Fr Twomey had forbidden his parishioners to attend funerals at the Presbyterian Church of St. Andrew’s at Williamstown, with the result that they had to gather outside the church fence to pay their last respects to Protestant neighbours and friends. After “a protracted illness,” Fr Twomey died at the Hotel Dieu Hospital, Cornwall. He is buried in the Williamstown parish cemetery, under an impressive Celtic cross that readily catches the eye of the visitor to Williamstown. ---- //Glengarry News// 5 June 1914 * //History of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church Williamstown, Ontario// (1997) 41-43 with portrait and picture of cross and inscription * //Sinnsearachd// 21, 52-53, 206 * Villeneuve 188, 195-196 * Fraser, //Gravestones//, I, 12, 39-40 (with picture of cross) [<6>]