Irish Roots »

• Family History Year

  March 10, 2013 @ 12:00 pm | by John Grenham

  In the build-up to St. Patrick’s Day, Tourism Ireland recently christened 2013 “Family History Year”. To the grizzled veterans among us, for whom every year is another (bloody) Family History Year, this might seem less than startling. But some interesting things are emerging. The first act of the Year was to set up a dedicated Facebook page in mid-February, facebook.com/IrelandFamilyHistory, with an aim of reaching 50,000 followers by the end of 2013. After a month they’ve already reached 10,000.

  Keeping an eye on the page as it updates is fascinating, if a little scary. Wave after wave of people announce their irishnesss and give a few details of their ancestry. As a professional, I feel a bit like a mother bird watching a nest fill with thousands of little chicks screeching to be fed. The first impulse is just to run away.

  But the site’s success demonstrates more powerfully than any market survey ever could just how tenacious identification with Ireland remains among the 80 million. Making it as easy as possible for them to find the records of their ancestors should be one of the main concerns of our public administration, and not just because they might give us a few bob, but because we owe it to them, and to their and our ancestors. Even if a sizeable proportion will remain poor lost souls, no matter how much help they get: “My grandfather’s name was Ryan. He came from Tipperary.” Well, yes.

  A valiant attempt to unlose some of them takes place at The St Patrick’s Festival Irish Family History Centre in the Discover Ireland centre in the old St. Andrew’s church in Suffolk St. in Dublin from March 14th to 18th next. Run by Eneclann and FindMyPast, and with six other groups participating, the Centre is designed unapologetically for beginners, with a rolling programme of talks every day and free on-site access to FindMyPast’s records. More information is at bit.ly/XXVrCJ.

  The Centre also offers personal advice from experts who won’t run away.

• The Origins of the Irish

  March 3, 2013 @ 4:40 pm | by John Grenham

  In his introduction to the work of the same name that he has just published (Thames and Hudson, €25.15), J.P. Mallory writes “an entire book devoted to The Origins of the Irish is just asking for trouble”. And then dives right in.

  The book provides a comprehensive overview of all the current evidence for the origins of the people(s) who inhabited Ireland in the 5th century A.D., around the time of Niall of the Nine Hostages. Mallory covers cosmology, physics, geology, plate tectonics, climate change, archaeology, Irish origin stories, medical genetics, DNA studies, and the history of the Irish language.

  Such breadth is only possible because of his genius for synthesis and summary, lightened with a touch of sharp wit. One example: in looking at the constituent elements of a human body, he works out that it would take the uranium contained in 80 million bodies to produce an atom bomb. And then points out that 70 million people claim Irish descent. The implication is that UN weapons inspectors should be on the lookout, in case we reach critical mass.

  His own academic expertise is in archaeology and Indo-European linguistics (he is Emeritus Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at QUB) and these are the parts in which the evidence is most closely argued. But every single section is scrupulous about evidence and logic.

  Nonetheless, the book remains joyously non-academic, while still managing to retain some of the best elements of a textbook. Each of the 10 chapters ends with a bullet-point summary of the conclusions reached or uncertainties still remaining. Wickedly, and tellingly, the end of the chapter on genetic evidence provides two mutually contradictory sets of conclusions.

  With unmatched clarity and humour, the book challenges every single received notion of ‘Irishness’. It is a masterpiece and I’ll be going back to it again and again.

• Make sure they don’t die

  February 24, 2013 @ 12:17 pm | by John Grenham

  When I was a boy, my father would often tell me stories of his own boyhood in Athlone in the 1930s. As I got older, the repetitions grated, and became one of our many I-know-it-all conflicts. Now that my own son is mocking me for telling him the same five stories over and over, I can understand my father’s motivation (and irritation) a bit better. At a certain point in life, when mortality ceases to be an abstraction, the urge to pass on memories, to make sure they don’t die, becomes well-nigh irresistible.

  This is the same urge that lies at the root of much family history. But how long does it last? How many generations does it take for extended family connections to be peacefully forgotten? I think it can last a very long time indeed.

  An example: Father Bartholomew Donovan of Melbourne wrote to me recently. His great-great-grandfather, also Bartholomew, was a house carpenter born in Cork city who emigrated to New South Wales in 1838 and became a successful builder. Fr. Donovan recently traced the family to St. Finbarr’s parish, identified Bartholemew’s parents as Anthony Donovan (also a carpenter) and Mary née Daly, and found records of no fewer than five siblings (Sarah 1798; Mary Ann, 1800; John, 1804; Simon, 1806; Ann, 1815). Three of them, his direct ancestor and sisters Sarah and Ann, emigrated along with two of their spouses, while the parents and three of their remaining children stayed in Cork.

  Fr. Donovan now wants to know if any descendants of the Anthony and Mary who stayed behind are still alive, and still in Cork. He is coming for a visit in April to meet any possible relatives. Even at fully five generations distance and over 200 years later, the urge to keep those connections alive is enduring.

  If you think you’re related, let me know and I’ll pass on the message.

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

• Cast the net wide

  February 17, 2013 @ 12:27 pm | by John Grenham

  The most common mistake made when starting research online is surprisingly counter-intuitive. It is to be too precise. The fact is, the more detail you include when you query a genealogical database, the less likely you are to find anything useful.

  Just think. Your John Brennan was born on March 17th 1868 (March 17th being a surprisingly common birthday for the nineteenth-century Irish), married Mary Murphy on September 14th 1890, had children John (1891), Mary (1893), Michael (1896) and Delia (1898), and lived all his life in the townland of Ballymore, Co. Mayo. Enter all of this simultaneously into a query, and the possibility of getting a match is zero.

  All it takes is a single missing item in the originals, (the page recording Michael’s birth was used to light a fire in 1898), a single missing item in the database transcripts (the transcriber had a late night and dozed off over the marriage record) or a single item misreported by the family (John was actually born in 1890) and the response from the database will be the same: no match.

  Don’t get me wrong. Knowing these details will eventually help unlock the truth. But to start off, you need to cast the net as wide as possible. How many Brennan births are registered in and around Ballymore between, say, 1864 and 1870? How many Johns? Can you identify the precise marriage registration, using only the names, not the reported date? What are the ages given in the 1901 and 1911 censuses? Do they match each other, or the ages you think you know? (Unlikely.) Are there other Brennan households in and around Ballymore in 1901 and 1911? Any with heads of household of an age to be siblings of John?

  The biggest sites – ancestry.co.uk, FindMyPast.ie, irishgenealogy.ie – all know that funnelling research like this, starting off broad and ending narrow, is by far the most productive way to use their records and have set up their search interfaces to encourage it. They know what they’re doing.

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

• Irish Lives Remembered

  February 11, 2013 @ 9:16 am | by John Grenham

  A perennial problem for genealogy publications or websites is the narrow range of naming options. Ancestors, ancestry, family history, or roots, and that’s it. (“Roots”, incidentally, would not be nearly as popular if more people were familiar with Australian slang. “To root” is an Aussie synonym for the more familiar four-letter Anglo-Saxon f-word. Which casts a whole new light on “Irish Roots”.)

  There have been a few valiant attempts to escape the naming monotony, with FindMyPast the most conspicuous. But the best I’ve come across is the title of an online genealogy magazine founded just a few months ago, Irish Lives Remembered (irishlivesremembered.ie). The title manages to capture one of the main drivers of research, people’s need to ensure their ancestors are not forgotten.

  The contents of the magazine, published monthly, are also quite special. Eileen Munnelly, the publisher, has long years of media and publishing experience in Ireland and Australia, and it shows. The quality of layout and design is superb, with every page more eye-catching than the last. Each issue has a full 70 pages, allowing room for a very well balanced mix – articles on county research, on individual families and family artefacts, stories of migration, reviews, events listings and more.

  But the most extraordinary thing about the magazine is that it’s completely free. The fact that it appears purely online most emphatically does not mean it costs nothing to produce. The design is carefully tailored for mobile or tablet devices such as the iPad and that will make it attractive to advertisers. But hardly attractive enough to make a profit, at least not under current conditions. As far as I can make out, the only commercial element is an online service hosting memorials dedicated to the memory of people with Irish heritage around the world. If there is any justice, the quality of the product alone should guarantee success. I can only wish them the very best of luck.

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

• Evidence, evidence, evidence

  February 3, 2013 @ 10:46 am | by John Grenham

  Dick Eastman writes the genealogy world’s longest-established and most authoritative family history blog, at blog.eogn.com. So when he started a recent post with “John Murphy lived to be 219 years old”, I sat up and paid attention. The story was from last week’s Limerick Leader and described how a local man had come across a headstone in Knockainey recording the death of a John Murphy in 1784 and giving his age as 219. Dick was sceptical, to say the least, but a link from his post took me back to the Leader article, complete with a photographic close-up of the age, “219″, apparently carved on the gravestone.

  People in 1784 were no more stupid than we are. Someone claiming to be 219 in 1784 would have been born in 1564 or so, around the same year as Shakespeare, and would have been widely celebrated and just as widely disbelieved. A monumental mason will not carve something self-evidently ludicrous without a very good reason. It all seemed a bit Irish, in the Healy-Rae sense of the word. So what was going on?

  Then I remembered that Knockainey is one of the areas covered by the Historic Graves project. And yes, there is the inscription in St, John’s Knockainey. But in full it reads ” John Murphy died the 11th day of October 1784 aged 29 yrs.(sic.) May the Lord have mercy on his soul”. Most importantly there is also a high-quality photograph of the stone, showing the “2″ and the “9″ widely spaced, but with nothing between them. John Murphy was born in 1755, not 1564.

  The moral is, of course, “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper.” Or in a blog, not even this one: always check the evidence. The Limerick Leader story is at tinyurl.com/b8jym77. The historicgraves.com image and transcript are at tinyurl.com/aq2757z.

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

• 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]

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