Irish Roots »

• The Weird and Wacky World of Civil Registration

  January 27, 2013 @ 11:09 am | by John Grenham

  More news from the weird and wacky world of civil registration. In a move rumoured to be masterminded by anti-Gathering supremo Gabriel Byrne, the HSE website certificates.ie has just increased the cost of purchasing a birth, death or marriage certificate by 125%, to a whopping €20 (plus postage). A source close to Mr Byrne said, “Just feck off and leave us alone”.

  Meanwhile, bizarrely, public availability of the General Register Office birth, marriage and death indexes continues to grow. These indexes are the paper volumes which it is still necessary to pay to search as part of the GRO’s only official research access, the Search Room in the Irish Life Centre in Dublin. Forty years ago, the Mormon Church microfilmed all of them up to 1958. Six years ago they digitised the full set and made it free to search on their site familysearch.org. They licensed this digital transcript to ancestry.com two years ago and have now also licensed it to FindMyPast.ie. The two commercial sites charge for subscriptions, but have seriously improved access, in particular allowing reverse marriage index searches. And FindMyPast has also provided a great set of research supports and finding aids.

  But the GRO continues to insist officially that the only legal route of access to its records is via the Irish Life Centre facility. So what has been its response to such outrageous, flagrant illegality? As ever, complete silence. This is the approach familiar from the Ostrich School of Public Administration: if you don’t admit it exists, it can’t be a problem, can it?

  Step through the looking-glass into Northern Ireland, and an uncanny normality prevails. Their GRO (groni.gov.uk) has just received the Council of Irish Genealogical Organisations‘ 2012 award of excellence for the completion of the digitisation of all records for the six counties. The plan to make them all searchable online by 2014 is on schedule and under budget. How strangely sane.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• O’Connell Street, Ennis

  January 20, 2013 @ 12:32 pm | by John Grenham

  I was recently sent a book called O’Connell Street, Ennis, written by Larry Brennan and published late last year. (Sending me books is always a good way of getting my attention, by the way). It contains some of the usual features you would expect– a chronology of the town, accounts of some of its most famous events, a collection of 19th-century photographs. But by far the biggest section is an extraordinary house-by-house account of the street itself.

  The author has painstakingly reconstructed the life story of every single building on O’Connell Street, using a wonderful range of sources. He takes a description of the current physical structure, apparently from the local council planning department, matches the present O’Connell Street address to the pre-1911 Jail Street address, adds any mention of the building from historic local newspapers, lists all the inhabitants, working from the register of electors in the year 2000 back 180 years though census records, commercial directories, and valuation revisions, and then tops the entry for each building with a vintage photograph. It is obviously a labour of true love and stands as a model of genealogical and local history. For anyone who knows the present street, an entire new dimension must be made visible.

  The co-publisher, the ever-energetic Clare Roots Society, is also running a conference the week after Easter, nicely titled “Gathering the Scattering”, with a stellar line-up of speakers including Catriona Crowe, Steven Smyrl, Fiona Fitzsimons, Michael Gandy and Peter Higginbotham. Peter is the man who knows more about the history of workhouses than anyone on the planet (see workhouses.org.uk) and his talk on its own would make it worth attending. And if my experience of last year’s conference is anything to go on, the social side of things will be also be a big attraction. The conference brochure is at tinyurl.com/b4r8t6u.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• The Industry Standard

  January 13, 2013 @ 11:21 am | by John Grenham

  During the first dot-com bubble, about 14 years ago, an American magazine called The Industry Standard (“The Internet bible”) did a feature on online genealogy. They decided to cover The Irish Times ‘Irish Ancestors‘ website, because it was one of the first commercial family history sites. The article involved flying over an American journalist and photographer and deploying a large expense account. I remember little apart from having to drape myself seductively over monumental sculptures in Mount Jerome cemetery for the photographs.

  From the interview I can only recall a single question and answer: “Surely when all the records are online, a site like yours that offers detailed guides, but no original records, will be completely redundant?” My response, invented on the spot, was that Irish records were special: the fragmentation of sources would mean there was always a role for a broker to direct people to relevant records and help interpret results. What I actually thought was “You’re probably right.” But in the dot-com crash a few months later, the journalist and photographer (and, sadly, the expense account) were the ones made redundant. The magazine closed. Fourteen years on, the Irish Ancestors site is still going.

  The reason for telling the story is not schadenfreude. It turns out I was right, by accident. Week after week, constant piecemeal digitisation of Irish records is taking place. In just the last ten days, I’ve heard of the arrival of a single year, 1855, of the Dublin Evening Mail, a collection of Church of Ireland parish records for parts of Carlow, Wexford and Wicklow and a large compilation of gravestone transcriptions for the Arklow area. It is just not possible to keep track of what’s becoming available without the systematic pigeon-holes that the Irish Ancestors site provides.

  Unless, of course, your ancestors were Delgany Anglicans (tinyurl.com/bxsspup) who published their entire family history in the Dublin Evening Mail of 1855 (tinyurl.com/bjhumc4) and then went off to be buried in Barraniskey (tinyurl.com/aq2f9j2).

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• Tyrone House

  January 6, 2013 @ 11:07 am | by John Grenham

  Anyone who comes across Tyrone House outside Kilcolgan in east Galway will not easily forget the sight. A magnificent Palladian granite pile, built in 1779 to impress the gentry and intimidate the tenantry, it now sits gaunt, roofless and windowless, utterly out of scale in a tiny stone-walled field that is the last pitiful scrap of the huge estate that paid for it.

  The evidence of the eye alone tells you that these landlords were not well-loved. They were the St. Georges, seventeenth-century arrivals from Cambridgeshire who did very well for themselves. The Tyrone House family are now best known as the models for the Prendevilles in Edith Somerville’s The Big House of Inver (1925):
  “Five successive generations of mainly half-bred and wholly profligate Prendevilles lived out their short lives in the Big House, living with country women, fighting, drinking, gambling.” Somerville’s attitude to their Irish acquisitions is neatly summed up in the family motto she invents for them, Je prends, “I take”.

  In literary terms, the book is most valuable for its extraordinary portrait of the central character, “Shibby Pindy” (Isabella Prendeville), the illegitimate daughter of the last great landlord, Captain Jas, and her obsessive attempts to re-unite the Big House with its lost demesne. Somerville uses her to dramatise the ongoing decay of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, its slow absorption into the culture that surrounded it and which it despised.

  But the first four chapters, giving the historical background to the main story, are a masterpiece of family and local history. Somerville was thoroughly Anglo-Irish, but also an outsider. In these chapters she is utterly in command of her raw material, the intricate genealogies of the landed gentry of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Ireland, and she treats them with superb high irony and masterful storytelling. This is the complexity of Irish history as it occurred, told by a woman who knows her opinions are part of that complexity. And she never hid her opinions. When de Valera came to power in 1933, she wrote “the powers of Darkness have triumphed”.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• St. Patrick’s real home

  December 30, 2012 @ 10:08 am | by John Grenham

  One aspect of the myth of St. Patrick that always seemed peculiar to me was his early kidnapping and enslavement. Not the fact of it – Patrick’s Confessio is absolutely authentic, the fifth-century Irish enjoyed rich pickings in decaying Roman Britain, and they were enthusiastic slavers. What’s odd is the conflict between the general acceptance that Patrick was a Romanised Welshman and the place where he ended up herding sheep. Mount Slemish is between Ballymena and Larne, a long, long way from Wales and a fairly unnatural place for a low-value boy-slave to end up.

  Norman Davies’ wonderfully batty Vanished Kingdoms, (Allen Lane, 2011), suggests an explanation. The book aims to draw attention to European states that have disappeared virtually without trace, including such places as Burgundia, the Visigothic kingdom in Spain known as Tolosa and (weirdly) “Éire”. The most interesting is the kingdom of Alt Clud, “The Rock”, centred at Dumbarton just outside Glasgow and taking in most of what are now Kilbride, Kilmarnock and northern Galloway. In Davies’ account, the kingdom lasted from roughly the fourth century to roughly the ninth, and was North British in the original cultural sense, with its people speaking Cumbric, a p-Celtic language closely related to Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Part of the evidence is the only surviving authentic writing of Patrick’s apart from the Confessio. His Letter to Coroticus is a severe dressing-down aimed at a ruler identified by Davies as Ceredig Gueldig, the earliest king of The Rock. Who better for a bishop to wag his finger at than his own leader?

  Interpreting records from the period is notoriously problematic, akin to picking one’s way through a vast swamp using a few tiny, unstable stepping stones, but Davies’ performance is virtuoso. It is hard to resist the picture of the young Patrick on Slemish looking out across the narrowest stretch of water on the Irish Sea to his home in Alt Clud.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• The Os and the Macs

  December 28, 2012 @ 10:41 am | by John Grenham

  An axiom of all research is that absolutely no reliance can be placed on the precise spelling of surnames. So the reason I’m blue in the face is not apnoea or an impending heart attack, it’s from telling people over and over and over that it makes no difference whether your Quin family have been insanely fussy about spelling their surname with one N for the past three centuries. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the person writing the name down was not a Quin, and couldn’t give a hoot.

  And then look at what Irish research throws up: A family in Leitrim whose surname appears in a parish register as “Breheny” (from Mac an Bhreithiún, son of the Brehon lawyer or judge) in the 1830s and “Judge” in the 1840s; O’Sullivans recorded in the Beara peninsula as Bunow, Caobach, Bawn, Barrule, … ; Cadogans who are O’Driscolls and Caniffes who are O’Mahonys. Is it any wonder that Irish researchers’ insistence on surname variation can seem a bit hysterical?

  But useful information does exist in patterns of surname spelling, only not at the scale of individual families. The best-known Irish variation is the treatment of “O” and “Mc/Mac” as optional in English-language records. In Griffith’s Valuation in the mid nineteenth century, some 16,000 households were recorded as O’, but more than 100,000 as Mc. Evidently, O was more easily ignored than Mc. Look more closely at where the names are recorded, and it emerges that almost 70% of the Mc households are recorded in the nine counties of Ulster, while the eight counties along the Atlantic seaboard account for almost 60% of the O names.

  This is hard historical evidence. But what does it show? That, in Ulster, the last stronghold of Gaelic culture, people retained their grasp on

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column] surnames? That Ulster’s Scots Gaelic cousins encouraged a popular retention of Gaelic surnames? Or that Ulster people were (are?) just more stubborn than the rest of us?

• Chest-beating in order

  December 16, 2012 @ 2:35 pm | by John Grenham

  Trinity College is not an institution noted for its bashfulness. Any worthwhile TCD achievement tends to climb to the top of a tall building and loudly beat its own chest. All the more surprising, then, that the launch of Trinity Library’s Digital Collections (digitalcollections.tcd.ie) has been so low-key.

  The only way to convey the extraordinary range of its contents is to pick out a few plums. They include: The full manuscript expedition journal of the 1924 British Everest expedition (the one on which Mallory and Irvine died) kept by the expedition doctor, Major R.M.G. Hingston; Thirty-one maps from 1812 of the estates of Sir Nicholas Conway Colthrust in Cork and Kerry, with tenants’ names; Two hundred and forty-six (beautifully-imaged) pages of Annales Ultonienses, the fifteenth-century Annals of Ulster; The pocket diaries and literary commonplace books of J.M. Synge between 1892 and 1907; The entire Robinson Collection of 2,074 eighteenth and early nineteenth century political caricatures; The Arthur Warren Samuels Collection of printed ephemera (especially pamphlets and posters) of the 1916 Rebellion, World War I, the War of Independence and the Civil War.

  From the point of view of genealogy, the most directly useful items are the eighteen manuscript volumes of Trinity’s own admission and matriculation registers from 1607 to 1907. Much of the information is already published, but it is always worthwhile to be able to examine the originals. They have also added the original term examination books for the second half of the eighteenth century. Good to know that Senior Freshman Kenny was cautioned for his performance at Greek in the term ending December 15 1750.

  Perhaps the Library’s long-standing and unswerving defence of its precious holdings against the grubby-fingered hordes has left it a little unsure of its welcome as it emerges, blinking, into the light. But the digital collections are astonishing. Chest-beating is most certainly in order.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• Weirdos like me

  December 9, 2012 @ 5:10 pm | by John Grenham

  For more than a decade now (which is to say centuries in Internet time), individuals and companies have been making a living by scanning hard-to-find publications and putting them out on CD-ROM. The daddy of them all is Archive CD Books, with franchisees in the US, Canada, Australia, Britain and Ireland. The connections between the territories are fraternal but loose: local knowledge is absolutely vital to identify which titles might be of interest to researchers.

  In Ireland, the brand (archivecdbooks.ie) is run by Eneclann, a Trinity College spin-off company also well known for its research and archival work and its partnership with FindMyPast.ie. The Trinity connection is extremely useful, since TCD Library has had a right of legal deposit since the Act of Union in 1800. In theory, then, the Library could have a copy of everything published in Britain or Ireland since 1801. Reality, as ever, falls a bit short. But there are still many, many wonderful things – ephemeral local directories, rare printed genealogies, valuations, biographies, pamphlets, surveys … and Eneclann/Archive CD Books have dug up many treasures for researchers.

  Now, in an act of commendable pragmatism, Eneclann have begun to convert their CDs to downloadable PDFs, and dropped their prices to reflect the cheaper distribution costs. See eneclann.ie/acatalog/New_download_releases.html for what they’ve converted so far.

  But as a business model, doesn’t the whole arrangement look a bit dated? Isn’t it all out there in The Cloud somewhere? Surely the problem with selling PDF versions of hard-to-find books is that very little is actually hard to find any more? Emphatically not true. Maybe eventually everything ever printed will be instantly available. In the meantime, there are still weirdos like me who actually want a full copy of all 800 pages of The Statistical Survey of the County of Roscommon, 1832, and want it now. Our time is at hand.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• Military census

  December 2, 2012 @ 12:12 pm | by John Grenham

  Getting information about soldiers who served in the Irish army can be a bit like trying to get directions from a Kerryman: “Why would you want to know that, now?” The glorious exception is the Military Archives in Cathal Brugha barracks in Dublin. At least for material up to the mid-1920s, it is a treasure trove, and its growing commitment to online access (militaryarchives.ie) provides detailed information without a hint of a Kerryman’s qualm.

  The most recent addition is the Military census taken on November 12th 1922. Such a census was needed for a very simple reason. By Autumn 1922, the civil war was at its peak, but the Free State Army had only a rudimentary idea of how many troops it had and where they were, the most basic information needed for any military action. So it was decided to send detailed census forms to each General Officer Commanding, which he would in turn send on to every post or outpost under his command. There, a compiling officer would use the forms to list comprehensive information on every individual present, covering all ranks and including home address, next of kin and next of kin’s address.

  It is important to keep in mind those two words “post” and “outpost”. Free State soldiers were then stationed in all sorts of places – Foxford, Toomevara, Killybegs – where no military barracks had ever existed. And when the returns came in, they were assembled as they had been collected, place by place, and then bound into ten large volumes. These are the volumes now available on militaryarchives.ie.

  The project is not yet complete. It is possible (with a broadband connection) to view and download the returns for any post, but there is no facility as yet to search by name. The site promises these transcriptions will be complete “in the coming months”. Roll on the new year.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• Problems with the Tithe Books

  November 26, 2012 @ 9:39 am | by John Grenham

  Mistranscriptions are the price we have to pay for the convenience of researching online. Unwelcome and infuriating they can be, but when kept to a reasonable level and accompanied by record images, they are a price well worth paying – the 1901/1911 census site makes the case very persuasively.

  So when readers began to point out mistakes in the new National Archives Tithe Books site – titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarchives.ie – I just took a deep breath and tried to take the broader view. Alright, maybe Flatley is misread in no fewer than ten different ways in a single parish, (Knock in Mayo and Flattey, Hattley, Halley, Hattely, Hatley, Huttley, Slatterly, Slattery, Thally, and Harley, just for the record). But the record images are still there and can be searched manually if need be.

  Then some hair-raising peculiarities started to emerge in browsing the record images. Dunmore in Galway is lumped in with Dunmore in Kilkenny. Caher in South Tipperary is mixed in with Caher in Kerry. Aglish in North Tipperary becomes Aglish in Waterford. It appears that the notion that there might be two parishes with the same name never crossed the transcribers’ minds. God help anyone searching in one of the four separate parishes in Galway called Ballynakill. The only possible conclusion is that no checking of the transcriptions took place. And the result is a bit of a dog’s dinner.

  Let me be absolutely clear: the National Archives staff are not to blame for this. They are doing heroic work under atrocious conditions. The fault lies squarely with their masters in the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, who give their underlings a ball of string and a piece of Blu-tack and tell them to build the Taj Mahal. If the Archives had control of its own budget, something like this just would not happen. And if ever there was an argument against giving civil servants direct control of our cultural institutions, this is it.

  A postscript: the Archives have just responded to the (wave of) criticism of the quality of the transcripts with a clarification of where responsibility lies (here), and a detailed error correction function on the search page (example here). Hats off to them.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

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