Irish Roots »

• Morpeth conference

  November 14, 2012 @ 2:57 pm | by John Grenham

  Gabriel Byrne’s dyspeptic take on The Gathering in 2013 has at least drawn more attention to it. But despite the hooting and jeering (see below), interesting things are happening. More and more local groups are actually taking up the idea of researching the descendants of those who emigrated from their area, and making clear that they are very welcome to come back. Something about the idea chimes with Irish notions of hospitality and extended family. As well as chiming with our beloved begrudgery.

  As part of the preparations for next year, the Department of History at NUI Maynooth is hosting a conference on Saturday November 24th next titled “The Gathering: Local History, Heritage & Diaspora“. Some very interesting speakers will discuss the concept of reverse genealogy and the practicalities of engaging with our diaspora.

  One of the main aims of the event, however, is to draw the attention of local history and genealogy groups to the Morpeth Roll. This is the huge testimonial to the departing Chief Secretary of Ireland George Howard, Viscount Morpeth, in 1841. Apparently organised by Daniel O’Connell’s supporters and encouraged by the Catholic Church, more than 250,000 signatures were collected in the space of a month. The giant roll recording them has been in Castle Howard in Yorkshire for the past century and a half and has only just been transcribed. As renowned local historian Mario Corrigan will show, local historical expertise brought to bear on the Roll can turn it into that most precious of genealogical treasures, a pre-Famine census.

  But to do that, the widest possible range of researchers need to engage with the Roll. So come one, come all. It sounds like a great Saturday, and a great project.

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

• Tithe on

  November 11, 2012 @ 1:00 pm | by John Grenham

  If we still had the early nineteenth-century Irish census returns – 1821, 1831, 1841, 1851 – then the Tithe Applotment Books would be an obscure backwater for researchers, of interest only as an afterthought. Thanks to the catastrophic destruction of 99% of these census returns in 1922, however, the Tithe records have acquired an unnatural importance. Quite simply, they are the only surviving island-wide survey of who was living where in the 1820s and 1830s.

  The Books were created between 1823 and 1838 as a result of The Composition Act (1823) which required that tithes due to the Church of Ireland, hitherto payable as a portion of agricultural yield, should now be paid in money. As a result, it was necessary to put a monetary value on the potential output of every eligible land-holding and the Books are the parish-by-parish record of this valuation.

  These are exclusively rural records. Anyone not involved in agriculture was omitted, and even within agriculture there were exclusions: most pasturage was exempt, for example. On the other hand, as ever, the tax fell most heavily on those who could resist it least, poor tenant farmers for whom few other records survive. At a (wildish) guess, perhaps 40% of households are recorded here in some form.

  And because the Church of Ireland was the State (“Established”) Church, everyone, including Dissenters and Catholics, were required to pay these tithes. If you think the Household Charge is unpopular today, imagine the fury 180 years ago. The resulting “Tithe Wars” raged through the early 1830s until finally, in 1838, direct tithe payments by tenants were abolished.

  The Tithe Books have long been widely available on microfilm but, because they are handwritten and had such a peculiar genesis, they have been under-appreciated. No longer. The National Archives, in cooperation with the Mormon Church, has digitised their entire 26-county collection and made it available free at titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarchives.ie. Happy hunting.

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

• More graveyard buzz

  November 4, 2012 @ 7:57 pm | by John Grenham

  A few weeks ago I wrote about the Northern Irish gravestone and graveyard management site discovereverafter.com. Like buses, you wait for ages and then umpteen graveyard management sites come along at once.

  First, Marie Mannion, Heritage Officer for Co. Galway, points out that the County Council is supporting a project in the North-East of the county to map each graveyard, then photograph and transcribe every gravestone and make the end result available online, along with a Google Earth aerial image. So far, the project has covered just thirteen graveyards (see tinyurl.ie/als) , but it promises to become very useful indeed for Galway research.

  On a different scale altogether is the site historicgraves.com. This is designed by archaeologists and aims to facilitate community-focused grassroots cemetery projects. Teams of volunteers are trained in using GPS-enabled smart-phones and cameras to survey the graveyards, and the results are combined on the site with text transcripts, maps, and audio and video interviews. When done well, an extraordinary multi-dimensional record of the graveyard emerges. The site has records of about 350 graveyards, but actual headstone transcripts from fewer, perhaps 60 or so. Most seem to be in the Tipperary-Kilkenny-Waterford area, but the potential exists for much broader coverage.

  And then of course, there are the large numbers of transcriptions already done: for Northern Ireland by historyfromheadstones.com; for Wicklow and Galway by the Cantwell family at findmypast.ie; for almost every part of the country by volunteer transcribers at interment.net; for (at least parts of ) seven counties by FÁS schemes at rootsireland.ie.

  The difference with the new projects is largely technical. A digital photograph of the headstone relieves that sceptical genealogical itch like nothing else. Precise GPS coordinates make it child’s play to locate the most inconspicuous grave in the largest cemetery. It would be great to see the existing transcripts used as the jumping-off points for broader projects.

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

• ‘The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine’

  October 28, 2012 @ 3:59 pm | by John Grenham

  The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (Cork, August 2012) is the most recent in the magnificent series of atlases published by Cork University Press. Over the past six weeks, I’ve been slowly working my way through it, and am astonished again and again at every aspect of it. The sheer weight and heft of the thing is extraordinary, more than 700 pages of eight- by twelve-inch high-quality paper, weighing in at over ten pounds. No vanity is involved. The heavy paper is necessary because of the colour illustrations, and the astonishing detail and fine distinctions made in the illustrations are what render the book unique.

  The most vivid of these are the maps visualising and contrasting information from the censuses of 1841 and 1851, before and after the Famine. Again and again, they produce a transfixing, visceral understanding of the underlying dry numbers and tables: the intense concentration in 1841 of children under five in the poorest, most vulnerable areas of the western seaboard; the percentage population decrease between 1841 and 1851 mapped out parish by parish over the entire country; land values, again mapped parish by parish over the entire country, instantly demonstrating the connection between poverty and starvation.

  The written contributions show the same combination of meticulous detail and sweeping overview. At the heart of the book are the 300-odd pages devoted to detailed studies of areas in each of the four provinces. Among the stand-outs here are William Smyth’s month-by-month story of the Famine in the Tipperary parish of Shanrahan and Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill’s account of Clifden Workhouse. The only criticism to be made is that, as bedtime reading, this book is guaranteed to end any marriage.

  The Atlas was number seven in the Hodges Figgis in-store bestsellers list last week. There’s hope for us all yet.

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

• “Genealogy makes you a better person”

  October 21, 2012 @ 12:28 pm | by John Grenham

  In the middle of the History Ireland hedge-school panel discussion at the recent “Back to our Past” event in the RDS (a roaring success, by the way) I found myself saying “genealogy makes you a better person”. My fellow-panellists, and a fair number of the audience, looked at me as if they were counting how many heads I had, politely ignored the remark and moved on to saner topics.

  Nobody was more surprised by the comment than myself. It has depressing echoes of the hoary adolescent debate about the utility of art. Does reading and appreciating a great poem have any moral effect? A long time ago, after half a decade spent in the company of third-level teachers of literature, I came to the conclusion that the answer was “No”. If anything, spending your professional life immersed in great writing appears to have the opposite effect. Pettiness and spite seem to be pettier and more spiteful among specialists in English Literature than anywhere else.

  And, on the surface, genealogy is hardly much better. Cranks and shysters make up a disproportionate number of those involved. The committee wars are acrimonious and interminable, following the well-known axiom “the smaller the teacup, the bigger the storm”. The goal of research is not disinterested truth but more information about yourself and your family.

  And yet the very process of family history research, its sheer amateurishness, does have a strong positive effect, at least on some people. It teaches that we are all mongrels, providing a powerful antidote to snobbery and racism. It shows that history is not a simple competition between good guys and bad guys and, by extension, that neither is the present. It provides a powerful emotional antidote to social atomisation.

  Maybe some nuance is needed: the study of ancestors won’t make bad people good, but it can make decent people more decent.

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

• Habemus blog

  October 14, 2012 @ 10:41 am | by John Grenham

  A long, long time ago, I worked on a project that shall remain nameless, save to say that it was Irish and genealogical. A senior person involved in running it once opined to me that there were two ways of going about things, one Protestant, the other Catholic. The Protestant method was carefully to define a goal, then identify and quantify the means needed to reach that goal, then weigh the costs against the likely benefits and then – only if the cost/benefit balance was positive – carefully plan each step in the journey to the goal. The Catholic method, of course, was just to (feckin) fling yourself at it and see what happened. This particular project was more Catholic than the Pope.

  The reason for remembering the comment is some recent encounters with rootsireland.ie. A fortnight ago, the latest in a series of cryptic emails proudly informed me that the Roscommon centre had added 17,000 birth and death records. Hurray. But for where in Roscommon? It didn’t say, and as far as I can see, the list of places covered (at roscommon.rootsireland.ie) hasn’t changed. Does this mean that previously I was paying to search records that actually weren’t there? In a word, yes. Suddenly, there are loads more Grenhams in the records of St. Peter’s Athlone than there used to be.

  And the payment system seems to be developing into something from Alice in Wonderland. A sample explanation, verbatim: “For a limited time, when you purchase credits, you can view search results for FREE equal to the value of the number of credits that you have purchased.” What?

  There are at least two meta-currencies in operation, record-view credits and index-search credits. Somehow, I have 124 of one and 9 of the other, but they’re not convertible.

  The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith can only look on in envy.

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

• New Twist for Old Plots

  October 7, 2012 @ 1:39 pm | by John Grenham

  As regularly as clockwork, someone in Ireland wakes up with a giant light-bulb over their head and the words “Genealogy! Irish-America! Mega-bucks!” ringing in their ears. So veterans of family history in Ireland tend to view new ideas about research and the records with wary scepticism. At times, though, this can blind us to real advances.

  A new website with the slightly cheesy name discovereverafter.com appears to be just another gravestone transcription site, albeit more comprehensive than most, covering graveyards in the Magherafelt area. Looked at more closely, however, the site is something genuinely new. It is a commercial operation, but the target customer is not the hapless, ever-skint genealogist, but all bodies responsible for maintaining the graveyard. It offers a complete graveyard management system to local authorities and parishes, providing a full survey and map, with photographs of each headstone, radar detection of unmarked burials, design of any remaining free plots and the amalgamation of church burial records with headstone transcripts.

  The end result is a complete online set of interlinked transcripts, maps and photographs that can be added to as new burials take place. For a researcher, it is every bit as good as visiting the cemetery in person; for the parish or local authority, all those pesky genealogists are taken care of and a simple process allows easy management of future burials.

  Naturally it concentrates on Northern Ireland to start with. The home county of the developers, Derry, has a large majority of the 73 graveyards covered so far. Optimistically, perhaps, the site has space reserved for graveyards from all of Ireland. They have a decent chance of success in the North, I hope. In the South, any local authority that still has two halfpennies left to rub together is trying to hide them from Phil Hogan.

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

• The National Library has bolted

  September 30, 2012 @ 11:40 am | by John Grenham

  Just over a year ago the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht organised a great genealogical jamboree in the National Library, bringing together everyone involved in Irish family history in an effort to thrash out a common approach. A policy document prompted by the meeting is apparently still ripening slowly inside the Department. In the meantime, however, the Library itself has bolted. It has just issued an extraordinary request for tender (see tinyurl.ie/agw), seeking a partner to digitise not just genealogical records – primarily parish registers, commercial directories and electoral registers– but also its huge collections of journals, newspapers and photographs.

  On the face of it, this is rational and familiar. In the UK the British Library and National Archives have teamed up with ancestry.co.uk and findmypast.co.uk: the private companies bear the entire cost of digitising original records held by the institutions, in return for which the companies have an exclusive but time-limited licence to make the digital versions available online as part of their commercial services. Everyone wins. For researchers, the pain of payment is more than balanced by the accessibility and transparency that digitisation provides. The original records are better conserved because they are no longer being handled.

  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Library’s treasures were available, not just to those who can visit Kildare Street, but to everyone on the planet? Unfortunately this is Ireland, where nothing ever does exactly what it says on the tin. The tender positively stamps on the toes of a whole host of special interests, political, clerical, local government, bureaucratic …

  The Library must have known just how much opposition it would provoke. So why issue the tender? Is it an effort to forestall Department policy? An attempt to cut the Gordian knot of petty politicking? A cry for help? Or can they really think it’s possible to do something sensible and honest in Ireland in the common interest?

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

• The Scale of the Problem

  September 25, 2012 @ 8:25 am | by John Grenham

  I still remember vividly the first research report I worked on. My job was to find a David Fitzgerald in East Limerick in Griffith’s Valuation, the 1852 property tax survey. At the time, the only way to do this was to identify roughly which parishes had Fitzgerald households (!), then comb them all by hand looking for Davids. So I wearily resigned myself to grinding through microfiche after microfiche. But then Croom, the second parish I searched, produced a David Fitzgerald. What luck!

  As I sat down to write the report, though, doubts started to niggle. Yes, David was an unusual forename at the time, but just how unusual? So I went back and continued looking. And of course, it immediately began to rain David Fitzgeralds: in Ballingarry, Emlygrennan, Ballinlough, Knockainy …

  The point of this is not (just) to show how green I was. The fact is that without some idea of the scale of what you’re searching, it’s impossible to interpret what you find. If you don’t know that half of the population of West Cork is called O’Driscoll, you’re likely to fall on the first Patrick O’Driscoll you find and install him as your ancestor. The appropriate metaphor is the hoary old one about the blind man trying to describe an elephant, depending on touch alone.

  The same problem of scale applies to time-periods. One of the imaginative leaps genealogy asks is to try to see the world through our forebears’ eyes. But trying to grasp how our ancestors saw their own past can be very hard. What did the world look like to someone for whom the Famine had not happened, was inconceivable, for whom The Battle of the Boyne was as recent as the Great War is to us? Distance always foreshortens perspective, chronologically, geographically, genealogically.

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

• Theory and Practice

  September 16, 2012 @ 6:19 pm | by John Grenham

  A confession: the last time I had any formal training in history was for something called the “Inter Cert”, back when giant elk roamed the country. Despite thirty years of trying to catch up, like every autodidact I still have some peculiar gaps in my knowledge. Napoleon? Who?

  Most trained historians take for granted a theoretical framework for what they do. In the day-to-day grind of chasing family events and land records and parish registers, the absence of such a framework doesn’t usually matter, but a dim sense persists that what’s going on is a form of practical history, albeit one far removed from the stately procession of rebellions and heroes and wars that I was forced to memorise so long ago. That’s one reason why Anne Patterson Rodda’s new book Trespassers in Time: Genealogists and Microhistorians (Rodda, 2012) is so welcome.

  The writer is both a working genealogist and a historian, and her book attempts to place the practice of genealogy in the context of the study of history. She approaches the question methodically and thoroughly, starting with a wide survey of the ways history is practised – political, economic, social, cultural, local, micro – and then producing step-by-step examples of genealogical research that show how perfectly family history fits the microhistorical school. Her case histories themselves are intensely interesting, all Irish, and ranging from a group of small Catholic tenant farmers in the tiny parish of Kilbannon in north-west Galway to Protestant nationalist associates of Daniel O’Connell and William Smith O’Brien. The book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the connections between local and family history and the broader disciplines of which they are a part.

  Like Molière’s M. Joudain, who found he had been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it, I was delighted to discover that I’m a microhistorian. The book is available from amazon.

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

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