Where did St. Patrick come from?

One aspect of the myth of St. Patrick that I’ve always found peculiar is his early kidnapping and enslavement. Not the fact of it – Patrick’s Confessio is absolutely authentic, the fifth-century Irish enjoyed rich pickings in the decayed remnants of Roman Britain, and slavery was deeply embedded in Gaelic Irish culture. In Brehon law, a female slave (cumal) could be used as a unit of value in financial transactions. It took quite a few cumail to buy a horse, apparently.

Begone! And take the good weather with ye!

No, 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, way up in the north-east and a long, long way from Wales.  So 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, such places as Burgundia, the Visigothic kingdom in Spain known as Tolosa and (weirdly) “Éire”. For St. Patrick, 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 as nimble as a mountain goat. He makes it 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.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

How I got into this mess (part 2)

By the late 1980s, the Irish Genealogical Project was just getting into full swing. It was funded by piggy-backing on local voluntary groups, state retraining schemes, Bórd Fáilte, the cross-border Ireland Fund and a bit of whatever you’re having yourself. The aim was to transcribe and computerise all the major genealogical record sources and then use them to boost tourism in some unspecified way. Behind it stood the then Taoiseach, the thankfully unique Charles J. Haughey. The vehicle was to be the network of local heritage centres that became the Irish Family History Foundation, the organisation behind the present Rootsireland.

The IGP behaved initially as if professional genealogy did not exist, which, unsurprisingly, got right up the noses of professional genealogists. Surprisingly, however, we proved adept at political lobbying. As a result, in 1990 we were offered an official role in the Project. As part of this, out of the three project managers to be employed one would come from our ranks. In addition there would be state funding for research projects to be proposed by individual genealogists. My colleagues in APGI very generously (I think) put me up for the job.

It was a weird position to be in. When I started I had no office, no functions, no job description and was seen by many in the IFHF as a fifth columnist, one of the enemy. Eventually, I acquired a desk in a corner of Fergus Gillespie’s office in the Genealogical Office and a job doling out funding to my genealogist colleagues. The money, believe it or not, came from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Fund, originally intended to house Irish ex-servicemen after World War 1. Yes, yes, I know I was complicit in oiling the squeaky wheel.  Some good did come of it, though. Harry McDowell’s excellent Irregular Marriages in Dublin before 1837 (Dundalk, 2015) is just one of the tangible offspring.

A lot of the day-to-day work of a professional genealogist then consisted of repeated consultation of the same reference works in the same order – find a townland, identify the civil parish, work out the Catholic parish, check the diocese, check the dates, order the microfilm. My first meeting with a database, Microsoft Works 2, took place in Fergus’ office on an IGP computer. It was a light-bulb moment. Everything could be put together just once and would then be permanently available at the click of a button.

Putting everything together just once was the tallest of tall orders, but this was a possible escape from the IGP. So I began to tunnel out. All my spare time went into stitching together the Townlands Index with the National Library parish register listings and gravestone listings and census substitutes and estate records 


In 1995, bleary-eyed and bone-weary of the IGP’s interminable committee meetings, I quit. The plan was to sell a fully-fledged stand-alone expert system, “Grenham’s Irish Recordfinder”, capable of taking whatever a user knew about an Irish ancestor and producing a formatted report detailing all the relevant sources, with advice, reference numbers, and locations. It was based on Microsoft Access 2 runtime and came on no fewer than 21 floppy disks.

I’m no salesman. Happily, Paddy Waldron introduced me to the recently-started Irish Times website. They bought 50% of the online rights in December 1995 and my children could eat again.

It took until 1998 for the online version to go live, but from then until 2016 the site provided the basis of my livelihood. Its development also gave me the opportunity to fill in some of the vast gaps in my programming and database knowledge, solving knotty problems with the time-honoured practice of repeatedly banging my head off the monitor.

When the Times ended our collaboration, they very generously let me have the online rights back. I did fourteen years programming in six frantic months to bring you the current incarnation of the site.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I got into this mess.

How I got into this mess

Anyone working in genealogy is regularly asked “How did you first get involved?” which I translate as “How the hell did you get into this mess?”

Here’s the long version of my response.

Forty years ago, I had been living in Italy for four years, teaching English as a foreign language in private language schools and had become deeply Italianised. Italy has everything – food, culture, style, history, landscape, weather 
 I thought Italians had completely mastered the art of living well. I wanted to be Italian.

But TEFL in a private language school anywhere is not the most fulfilling or lucrative way to earn a living, so I decided to come home to do the Ph.D. which would then enable me to get a university job in Italy.

Grotesquely badly-dressed and inexplicably happy Irish people, 1981

Back in Ireland (which to my Italianised eyes then seemed to be full of grotesquely badly-dressed people eating grotesquely terrible food but all having a great time), I had to fund myself. A friend’s partner with a degree in history was doing piece-work for the Genealogical Office. Though like everyone else in the country at the time, I thought of professional genealogy as a form of intellectual jarvey-ism, the piece-work side suited perfectly. I could make the rent in a day or two, then switch back to the doctorate.

The friend said his partner wouldn’t mind helping me start (without bothering to ask her first, sorry about that Anne), so I turned up at the GO office in the National Library, picked up a research file, wandered out into the Reading Room and fell flat on my intellectual face.

Eventually, I learnt the ropes and discovered to my surprise that I had an aptitude for it, which mainly consisted in having a very high boredom threshold. The amount of research required to make a living escalated steadily until I was completing more than a dozen research files a week, had settled down happily and was beginning to look for ways to climb the genealogical food chain. But that’s a different story

What about the Ph.D? Big mistake. First, for all my Italianisation, I hadn’t realised that it’s impossible to get work in Italian third level education without being part of a well-established mutual back-scratching network. Second, I made a disastrous choice of subject for the Ph.D., the poetry of John Ashbery. Yes, the John Ashbery who died a year ago at the age of ninety. The John Ashbery renowned for his productivity, who published almost thirty books of poetry, most of them after I started my thesis on him. He just outwrote me.

My early induction into Irish genealogy

And the short version of my response is that I was cursed in my cradle by an evil fairy.

Is the Golden Age of Irish genealogy over?

Golden Age? What Golden Age, you might ask.

All things are relative. For decades, Irish research fumbled awkwardly around the great smoking crater that was the destruction of the PRO in 1922.  Genealogists were viewed askance by Irish archives, and not without reason: one of my most vivid memories is of watching a colleague speed-search a box of original 1911 returns, creating a tiny blizzard of 80-year-old paper fragments in air around her. A few more speed-searches like that and there’d have been no 1911 left.

Before digitisation

We were groping in the dark, finding the same nothing again and again. No wonder our hearts leapt when the first digitisations began – the old, deeply-flawed CD-ROM index to Griffith’s, the fuller Eneclann/National Library transcript, the early 1911 censuses for Dublin, Belfast and Kerry. (Why Kerry? Because the Minister for Arts at the time was from Kerry. Whatever made things happen.)

And then the dam burst: the Catholic registers, all the surviving censuses, and post-1858 wills, rootsireland’s collection going online and finally the mother-lode, the General Register Office’s birth, marriage and death collection at IrishGenealogy.ie. (See here for a rough list of what’s currently online.)

After digitisation

Four sources are almost universally relevant for Irish genealogy, the GRO records, the surviving censuses, the surviving church records and the two nineteenth-century tax surveys, Griffith’s and the Tithe Books. All four are now online, substantially complete and mostly free to search.

For a few years, it seemed like every six months brought another wonderful breakthrough. If those years were a Golden Age, it is certainly over. There’s plenty still to be done improving what’s there, and filling in what’s missing – Church of Ireland registers, estate papers, the Land Commission records and much more. But the big beasts have been slain.

It was a Golden Age that made our ancestors findable at last. Now all we have to do is actually find them.

Genealogy is just not that interesting.

Ok, I only wrote that to get your attention.

But 
 there is some truth in it. The stamp-collecting side of family history, adding name after name and pasting them into the album, can be compulsive, but it’s a little dull. As my mother used to say, “What are you interested in them for? Sure aren’t they all dead?”

John Lennon’s not very interesting stamp album

So why do I do it? First off, the research can be good fun. A lifetime of mislaying car keys has left me with a passion for finding things. Fitting them together once they’re found can also be deadly – all those gnarly little puzzles entangling records and families.

More seriously, a lot of genealogy involves reknitting broken family connections and uncovering forgotten family members. I remember one woman telling me about a family photograph from the early 1900s from which her great-grandmother’s face had been cut out. This was the only picture of the woman that survived and the family had long wondered if this was revenge in some long-forgotten feud. Then, clearing out a deceased grand-uncle’s attic, she found a locket with the cut-out photo. Far from revenge, it was love that had taken the face.

And genealogy is also the business end of microhistory, famously defined by Charles Joyner as the ‘search for answers to large questions in small places’. All of the written histories that have stayed with me are small scale with great ambitions: Iris Origo’s mesmerising reconstruction of the life and character of a run-of-the-mill thirteenth-century Florentine trader, The Merchant of Prato; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, three decades of a medieval French village brought stunningly to life; Frank Dikotter’s monumental evisceration of Mao and his legacy, The Tragedy of Liberation, Mao’s Great Famine and The Cultural Revolution, all done with local archive material and eyewitness accounts, creating an unanswerably detailed mosaic of everyday horror.

In Ireland too, small places have raised large questions. The townland of Ballykilcline in north Roscommon was the scene of a violent rent war in the 1840s. The end result was the dispersal and emigration of almost its entire population. Two wonderful matching microhistories tease out the causes and consequences. Robert Scally’s The End of Hidden Ireland (1997) describes the conflict, resulting evictions and mass emigration, and Mary Lee Dunn’s Ballykilcline rising: from famine Ireland to immigrant America (2008) takes the story up on the other side of the Atlantic.

One thing all microhistories have in common is that they always, rightly, show lives as ever more complicated, always unfinished, with no simple moral tally.

So in future, when people ask me what I do, I’ll tell them I’m a microhistorian. All 5’6″ of me.

Geeky negative proof

A recent research project took me to a headstone in Terryglass in north Tipperary (historicgraves.com). It was erected by a Daniel Hogan in memory of his father John, who died in 1856, and it included mothers’ maiden name, siblings, ages at death – wonderful stuff that took the family well back into the 18th century.

Griffith’s Cappanasmear

My focus was also Daniel Hogan, listed as occupying 40 acres in the townland of Cappanasmear in Terryglass in Griffith’s Valuation, published for this area in 1852. Could they be the same person?

Circumstantial evidence is all that survives. So first, I needed to check how many households in Terryglass were headed by a Daniel Hogan between 1827 and 1857. The baptismal registers (rootsireland.ie) show no fewer than 12 separate Hogan families headed by a Daniel. Not good news. But the Cappanasmear Hogans seem to have been the most prosperous, so there was still hope.

Valuation notbook, 1845

The Griffith’s manuscript notebooks for Terryglass from 1845 were next. Daniel was there, but the difference with the published record showed the effect of the Famine on the townland. In the seven years to 1852, three of his neighbours’ holdings had vanished.

Because the Valuation was a tax record, it had to be updated regularly.

1857 revision

The first revision in the Valuation Office, dated 1857, showed the ongoing catastrophic impact of the Famine. Of 21 houses listed in Cappanasmear in 1845, by 1857 only 11 remain. And Daniel is gone, his house demolished, his land absorbed into neighbours’ holdings. This doesn’t look like someone who was erecting a carefully-carved gravestone commemorating a death that took place in 1856.

1855 Chili, Monroe, NY

Where did the family go between 1852 and 1857? An 1855 state census shows four of them in upstate New York. And Daniel’s wife, Ann, records that she arrived in the US two years previously and has been a widow for a year. So my Daniel could not have been in Terryglass in 1856 and could not have put up that wonderful headstone.

Negative outcomes can be just as important as positive ones. But I still cling to the hope that something will disprove my disproof.

 

Why your descendants won’t be researching you from their home on Proxima Centauri B

Since I first borrowed A for Andromeda  from Castlerea public library in 1964, I’ve been a regular reader of science fiction. It provides escape and reassurance in equal measure,  distorting the present in safe but stimulating ways, projecting well-worn history onto future landscapes. Space opera, ĂĄ la Star Trek, is especially good at this.

Make it so.

But one aspect of genealogy has made it increasingly difficult for me to suspend the disbelief needed to keep space opera readable. As DNA studies expand knowledge of our deep ancestry, it has become crystal clear how interrelated we all are. And by “we” I don’t just mean human beings. We’re descended from the same original microbe as every living thing on earth. Those trees are your umpteenth cousins, umpteen times removed. The bacteria in your intestines helping to digest your food are more distant maybe, but still part of the family, still harking back to gtn-gt-granddaddy, the Methesulah microbe.

You want a real family tree? We’re Eukaryotes

The point is that we’re not just related, our existences are utterly intertwined. We have spent 2.8 billion years co-evolving, depending on the peculiar seasonality of this planet, on the slow accumulation of soil, knotting ever-deeper symbiotic links between living things.

Not known for its exploration of outer space

Human dependence on Earth is total. Our immune systems, our brains, our muscles all rely for their day-to-day existence on the intermeshed family trees that comprise life on the planet. To think about extracting one element of this whole, human beings, and throwing them through space to other planets is utterly absurd. It makes as much sense as sending a steak and kidney pie to the moon and expecting it to set up a colony.

That’s why I can’t watch Captain Picard any more. And that’s why your descendants won’t be researching you from their home on Proxima Centauri B.

A cautionary tale

A recent research case I had involved a woman called Christina Vance. Nicely unusual surname and forename, I thought. And sure enough there was her marriage in 1928, supplying her father’s name, and there was her death in 1936, supplying her age, 27. Subtract 27 from 1936 and you get 1908/09 as a year of birth.

Christina Vance’s birth duly popped up in 1908, daughter of Joseph, a signalman and Julia nĂ©e Buggle. And there was the family in 1901, with sister Mary Vance, bridesmaid at the wedding. And there was the marriage of Joseph and Julia in 1894, fathers Edward Vance stationmaster and Patrick Buggle farmer. Johnny, said I, you may award yourself the Golden Egg of Self-Satisfaction.

The Golden Egg of Self-Satisfaction

And then when I came to write the report, a little fly dropped into in the ointment. The marriage record gave her father as Robert, not Joseph. Hmm. Better check this. No Robert Vance death, no Robert Vance marriage, no Robert Vance in 1901 or 1911. No other Christina in 1901 or 1911. Had she (or the priest) made a mistake with the father’s name? Maybe. Or maybe not.

So I set out to check out Joseph’s family more closely.   His death is listed in 1936, evidence that he wasn’t Robert, who was dead in 1928 according to the marriage record. And there, in 1929, was the marriage of his daughter Christina to Christopher Keane. A completely different Christina, unrelated to my Christina who married a year earlier just down the road also in north Dublin.

Back to the drawing board. Using my trusty wild-cards, I found the death of Robert Vanse in 1925, the birth of his daughter Christina Vanse registered in 1907, the family’s 1911 return mistranscribed as “Vause” in Summerhill, the marriage of Robert (again as “Vause”) in 1906, Christina staying with her granny in 1911 and mistranscribed as “Vanne” 


The moral? Trust the records. Distrust yourself. And make sure you really deserve that Golden Egg of Self-Satisfaction.

Catherine Corless

A few days ago I heard a full half-hour radio interview with Catherine Corless, the local historian responsible for tracking down the 796 death certificates of young children in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home between 1925 and 1961.  It was riveting.

She described in detail the first stirrings of curiosity about a place she had passed every day on her way to and from school as a child and the utter silence in official records about what had happened inside its walls. She had to go door-to-door, for all the world like a private detective, to recover local memories of the place and in the process came across a story of young local boys stumbling upon human remains. They were in what she found out was the abandoned septic tank of Tuam Workhouse that the Bon Secours nuns had used to store the remains of the children who died.

From then on, she was possessed by the idea of recovering the memory of those forgotten children and would let nothing stand in her way. The interview makes it plain that she had plenty of help – from the Galway Registrar’s office, who cut her a deal on the 796 certs, from Galway archivists and from locals in Tuam – but it is also clear that the passion fuelling the research was hers and hers alone.

Catherine Corless at her conferring

The occasion of the interview was Catherine’s conferring with an honorary doctorate by Trinity College, and there has never been a more deserving recipient.

The interview sparked a few thoughts. First, if she were doing the work now, all the death records would be at her fingertips online. In March, I wrote about how her work could be replicated for other Mother and Baby homes. Just as an example, here’s a single page from Castlepollard death records from April 1947. Of the ten deaths recorded, eight are of infants from the Manor House Mother and Baby Home.

Second, her zeal for the full DNA-assisted identification of the children is awe-inspiring, but not unproblematic. It is certainly possible to recover substantial amounts of DNA from the children’s remains, but identifying them involves comparing that DNA with existing test results. These would almost certainly be genealogical tests, probably on GEDmatch.com or Ancestry, as in the case of the Golden State serial killer. Which means that the families of these children would more than likely be identified via descendants of their North American emigrant great-grand-uncles and aunts, with extended family trees leading (eventually) to likely parentage.

From listening to Catherine speak, I have no doubt she feels that these children have an absolute right to a proper burial, with each individual named and rescued from oblivion. But there is no way to do this without a massive state-sponsored programme of genealogical research. Apart from the expense, such a programme would almost certainly infringe the privacy of the extended families of the mothers who were incarcerated in these homes, as well as the privacy of the mothers themselves, many of whom would now be in their seventies.

I’m not sure how the balance will be struck, but it will have to be.

Wild-cards are a geneal*gist’s b*st fr*nd

Wild-cards, – usually an asterisk (‘*’) representing any series of characters and a question-mark representing a single character – are one of the most important (and under-appreciated) tools in any online researcher’s toolkit. The garbled English versions of original Irish-language surnames and placenames we work with in Ireland make them doubly important. Here are a few hard-earned lessons.

All surname variant systems are flawed. Try searching for Callaghan on Rootsireland and you’ll get a faceful of Gallaghers. FindMyPast appears to think all surnames starting  “O'” are variants of each other. And years back I came across a Brien recorded as Breen and made them variants of each other. Which they’re not really.

So you should never rely completely on any site’s built-in variants system. The best – IrishGenealogy and FamilySearch come to mind – allow maximum flexibility, running all the way from  returning all variants of any name matched anywhere in the search, through all wild-carded versions of both forename and surname, to exact matches only. At the other end of the spectrum, AskAboutIreland’s Griffith’s search will just put invisible wild-cards around the surname if you tick the “similar names” box. And in between come:

  • genealogy.nationalarchives.ie: no variants, but wild-cards you can sprinkle like snuff at a wake;
  • Ancestry:  no wild-cards and a very peculiar variants system;
  • Rootsireland: wild-cards (“%” and “_”) only in the placename field when searching a local centre’s records, but a generally good surname and forename variants system.

Most sites that allow wild-cards have restrictions. For example, a search with a wild-card as initial letter is usually verboten, because of the strain it puts on the server. Not me. I proudly strain my CPU in your service – *or?m Most also specify a minimum number of characters. Again, not me.

So, for example, ‘B*urk*’ will find Bourk, Bourke, Burk, Burkett 
  Remember that consonants tend to be more stable than vowels. Very often simply replacing all the vowels in a search term with asterisks will provide a useful list of candidate results.

Above all, experiment with wild cards. Would you like to see all Rootsireland baptisms in Carndonagh between 1865 and 1875 with a godmother called Mary? No problem:

Note the redundant “Surname required” warning