Category: Uncategorized

Received wisdom in Ireland has long been that the process of reclaiming and resuming the Gaelic patronymic prefixes “Mc” (mac, “son of”) and “Ó” (“grandson of”) paralleled the resurgence of interest in Gaelic culture in the second-half of the 19th century. In the words of Edward MacLysaght, “when the spirit of the nation revived”.

The process was never straightforward. Inevitably, some people mistakenly claimed the wrong prefix. The most notorious example is the Gaelic family Mac Gormáin – all are now either O’Gorman or plain Gorman. MacLysaght’s explanation of what happened still can’t be bettered:

“Probably the man chiefly responsible for the substitution of O for Mac in the name was the celebrated gigantic Chevalier Thomas O’Gorman (1725-1808), exiled vineyard owner in France who, after being ruined by the French Revolution, became a constructor of Irish pedigrees.”

Mistakes apart, the story told by MacLysaght and others about surname prefix resumption remains that of steady progress eventually flowering into independence.

The figures from birth registrations tell a different story.

The proportion of total births recording Mc (or Mac, or M’) was 10.14 per cent in 1865. In 1913, it was 10.48 per cent. So there was a slow increase, but certainly nothing dramatic (see the chart here). It is tempting to surmise the great flood of “Mc” resumption only took off when it became clear in the early 1920s how useful a Gaelic-looking surname would be in the new Ireland.

Interestingly, the story is different for surnames starting “O'”.

In 1865, 1.67 per cent of total births used “O'”. By 1913, it was 3.2 per cent, almost doubling in five decades ( here). Perhaps the difference is that “O” surnames were found predominantly in Munster (and Donegal), traditionally nationalist regions, whereas “Mc” surnames were concentrated in north and east Ulster, with a solid unionist majority.

The devil remains where he always was, in the detail.

For decades, public health scientists assured us that the common cold was caused by our spending half the year indoors sneezing on each other. There’s no evidence, they told us, that Ireland’s long-standing position as the world’s leading producer of winter phlegm had anything to do with the cold or the wet. “Old wives’ tales” they said, when we pointed out that for 10,000 years our mammies have been telling us that we’ll catch our death if we go out dressed like that.

And then  came a complete change of tack. Scientists at Yale actually looked at the evidence and found – surprise – that rhinoviruses, the culprits behind most colds and chest infections, thrive in cooler temperatures.  And the lower the temperature, the lower our innate immune response to viruses. And what’s more, our noses are usually three to four degrees colder than the rest of the body.

The scientists’ advice for avoiding runny noses? “Always stay in warm tropical weather or try to prevent the nasal cavity experiencing very cold air.” Translated into Irish terms, that says “Emigrate south or dress the way your mother told  you”.

The first lesson is that the phrase “There is no evidence” is just a euphemism for “We don’t know”, even when uttered by a scientist.

The second is that not all evidence is cast-iron scientific evidence. Most research advice will tell you to treat your family traditions with deep scepticism and most professional researchers will say “Yeah, right” (under their breath) when you tell them you’re descended from kings and princes. But even though centuries of tradition may not constitute forensic proof, it remains genuine evidence. Discount it at your peril.

But the most important lesson is that, although your Mammy might not be absolutely right absolutely all the time, the odds in her favour are pretty good.

The burning of the Public Record Office in Dublin in 1922 is the sole reason why we spend so much research time on ridiculously bitty little scraps of half-records. We’re like archaeologists trying to reconstruct branches of humanity from a piece of fossilised jawbone. Except that we also want to know who the jawbone’s parents were, who it married  and the names of all its children.

The 1841 and 1851 census search forms are some of the most peculiar of these fragments. They came into existence because of the introduction of the Old Age Pension in early 1909. To qualify for the princely sum of five shillings a weeks, applicants had to be “of good character”, have an annual income of less than £31-10s and demonstrate that they were seventy or more.

But the state only began to register Irish births in 1864, more than twenty years after the relevant period. So a system evolved to get the PRO to use the 1841 and 1851 census returns for proof of age. Based on an address and parents’ names supplied by the applicant, either directly to the PRO or through an official of the Pensions Board based locally (Customs and Excise men in an unusually popular role), the Office would search the returns and confirm the necessary age.

After we went and blew up all the originals (thank you, Ernie O’Malley), only the PRO search forms survive for most areas. They are useful primarily for the information submitted by the applicants, but sometimes the search results include scribbled summaries of the others recorded on the form. In the sample 1841 image, John Murphy of Castlegar, Ballynakill Co. Galway has his parents confirmed as Thomas and Mary, but the “particulars found” include the fact that they married in 1833 and others in the household were Elenor (5), Patt (4) and Biddy (2). In the 1851 search, however, only “John aged 20” is noted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At their best, then,  they can come close to the full original. But how many exist? There are 32,472 forms in total for the Republic and 3,568 for areas now in Northern Ireland. This represents less than 1% of the households covered in 1841 and 1851 As with so much of Irish genealogy, luck is an essential ingredient.

The forms for the Republic are online at The National Archives of Ireland. The search interfaces at ancestry.com and FindMyPast.ie are better, with FindMyPast especially useful in the way it allows the easy retrieval of all forms from a particular parish. FindMyPast is also completely free. The FamilySearch version won’t let you look at the images outside a Family History Centre, for reasons only the LDS know.

The Northern Irish forms are on microfilm in PRONI and published by Josephine Masterson as Ireland 1841/1851 Census Abstracts (Northern Ireland) (Baltimore, MD: GPC., Inc., 1999), transcribed on ancestry.com. 

The first batch of 1901 and 1911 census corrections, all 15,962 of them, went live on census.nationalarchives.ie on Thursday last and great sighs of relief were breathed all round. Well, by me anyway.

For the past two months I’ve been working my way back through the user-submitted emails, checking them against the images and separating them into saints and sinners. At the same time, along with NAI’s IT staff and developers, I was working on getting the validated corrections live, a more complex operation than you’d imagine. Because the census data is static, it makes perfect sense to have the live version as a set of indexes rather than a transactional database – no moving parts, so much more stable, as well as faster to search.

That means, in order to add or change anything, the indexes have to be rebuilt from scratch. Not impossibly complex to do (he said, not having done it himself) but not something you’d want to be doing every day either. In the tables of personal information alone, there are approximately 10 million records, each with twenty items of data. Turning all of those into a static index produces almost 200 million index entries.  So carefully does it.

Those 15,962 represent all emails received between October 25 2016 and September 11 this year, the date I started. If you submitted between those dates, your correction should now be live, provided I agreed that it was accurate. If you don’t see it, have another go and make me look again. And of course I’ve made my own mistakes , slated for correction the next time round. The aim now is to have a regular monthly batch update.

In the course of working eyeball-to-eyeball with the emails it’s hard not feel I’m getting to know the submitters. Some people seem to be swept away by the urge to correct. Having found a mistake in their own family, they just can’t stop: suddenly it’s four in the morning and they’ve sent off a hundred emails. Others, by the look of their email addresses, are spending most of their work day actually correcting the census. Tut tut. And I feel for the poor soul who discovered that his ancestors had recorded their religion as Baptist and retrospectively converted them to Presbyterianism.

One enterprising crowd in east Galway seem to have got together with the aim of completely correcting every single entry for the area. Good for them. Except that part of their agreed procedure appears to have been to send each correction at least three times. Just to be sure. Thereby ensuring it takes at least three times as long for the corrections to be validated. Grrr.

Another group I can’t help empathising with are the transcribers. What a strange and wonderful place early twentieth-century Ireland must have seemed to them, a land where people had jobs as coco drivers, boot owners, professors of surging and pork rangers, where children could be sixty years older than their parents and gender-roles were so fluid you would commonly find mothers-in-law who were male labourers aged 30. It feels a shame to be erasing that parallel Ireland.

Wouldn’t we all live in a much more interesting place if Eoin MacNeill really had been the secretary of The Garlic League?

In the middle of a recent panel discussion,  the words “genealogy makes you a better person” emerged from my mouth. My fellow-panellists, and a fair number of the audience, looked at me as if I had just announced that the moon was made of cheddar, politely ignored the remark and moved on to saner topics.

Nobody was more surprised by the remark 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 literature than anywhere else.

 

And, on the surface, genealogy is hardly much better. Cranks and shysters make up a disproportionate number of us. Our committee wars are acrimonious and interminable, following the axiom “the smaller the teacup, the bigger the storm”. The goal of our research is not disinterested truth but more information about ourselves and our families.

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.

One of my record-keeper heroes has long been Sir William Betham (1779 -1853). He arrived in Dublin for a brief visit in 1805 and by chance found himself wading through the chaotic collections of records held in Dublin Castle. As a result, he went about acquiring authority over the Bermingham Tower records, by getting an appointment as Deputy Ulster King of Arms.

Ulster’s Office was the heraldic authority for the island of Ireland, responsible for providing confirmation of their social status to the Anglo-Irish elite: the right to bear arms was (and is) purely hereditary and thus an indicator of supposed good breeding. So as well as putting order on the Office’s existing records, Betham set about creating a new reference collection covering the propertied Anglo-Irish, the Office’s clientele.

By far the richest source of family information on the propertied Anglo-Irish was the collection of prerogative wills held at the Prerogative Office in Henrietta Street. A prerogative will was one with property worth more than £5 in two probate districts ( Church of Ireland dioceses), meaning they tended to cover the top end of the social scale, the Office’s main market.

In 1807, Betham began to transcribe all the family information recorded in these wills, coming from 1536 right up to 1800. The project took him a full twenty-one years to complete, by which time he had become Ulster King of Arms himself. With the information from the wills, he then created a series of volumes  of sketch pedigrees that provided ready-made pigeon-holes for any subsequent information that turned up. These volumes, more than forty in all, are in the Genealogical Office, the successor to Ulster’s Office, now part of the National Library of Ireland and are being digitised superbly through NLI’s online catalogue.

The original notebooks Betham used for the transcriptions were purchased by the National Archives of Ireland in the 1930s and microfilmed by the LDS in 1969. And as part of their program of enhancing online access, those microfilms are now freely available online to signed-in users.

One of Betham’s successors, Sir Arthur Vicars, published an index to Irish prerogative wills in 1897, which is now also freely available online. It matches Betham’s work perfectly. Any pre-1800 entry recorded by Vicars will have a full transcript of all its family information in the notebooks, and a possible expanded version in the GO manuscript volumes.

The transcripts are a magnificent source for eighteenth-century Irish ancestors, not only because we blew up all the originals in 1922, but also because the social range covered by the wills is much broader than Betham’s original intentions implied. Shoemakers, ironmongers and small tradesmen of every description are also included.  If  you lived near a diocesan boundary, it was very easy to have £5-worth of property in more than one diocese.

On the back of the LDS release, FindMyPast have come up with a transcript which I have to say I find a little puzzling. It gives no indication of where the originals are, that the images come from LDS microfilm or that the notebooks are part of a wider set of records. And then lumps the will transcripts in with Marriage Licence Bonds extracts.

But (with a bit of ingenuity) it is possible to use the index to zero in on particular entries in the notebooks, cutting out some of the to-and-froing  necessary on FamilySearch. Small mercies.

 

IN the 1980s I lived in northern Italy, up near the border between the provinces of Trentino and Alto Adige, the latter known to most of its German-speaking inhabitants as Sud Tirol. There was a point on the road about 10k from my house north of which gnocchi turned into dumplings, lederhosen hung on the washing lines and speaking Italian in a shop or café would get you no service, just a glare.

I was teaching English in a language school where the majority of other teachers were from the UK and (like many Irish in Europe in those pre-Riverdance days) we Irish regularly had to fend off the irritating presumption than we were British. Gradually, though, we were forced to look at just how much Irish and British culture overlapped:

language, food, sense of humour, currency, television, shops … Compared with the chasm between German and Italian civilizations just 10k north, the Irish and the Brits were practically joined at the hip.

But there was one area that was then and still is utterly distinctive, and that’s the attitude to death and the rituals of death. Very little survives in Ireland of the pagan Celtic culture that created Samhain, the festival of the dead that underlies Halloween  – here it’s now an just Anglo-American holiday, mixing cartoon ghouls with Guy Fawkes fireworks. But the dead are still a much more important part of everyday life in Ireland.

First, there is an absolute obligation to be physically present at the moment of death of a family member, almost as if the death has to be caught and preserved. Then, funeral attendance trumps every other social duty, even for remote acquaintances. With funerals held extraordinarily close to death, within three or four days at most, which means dropping everything at very short notice. And a good time tends to be had by all – my uncle Paddy used to prefer funerals to weddings, because you didn’t need an invitation to a funeral.

And then there’s the removal, the lying-in, the wake (now more usual after the funeral), the death notice, the memorial announcements, the mass cards, the month’s mind … While many other Irish customs and traditions have withered, those surrounding death are as tenacious as ever.

Which is good news for those of us who track the Irish dead (aka genealogists). Because getting to funerals is so important, the Irish newspaper death notice is absolutely essential and at its most florid can give a picture of entire extended families and social circles as well as home addresses and burial places. From about 1940, it’s a very rare funeral that didn’t have a death notice, and they’re now all searchable online at the subscription site www.irishnewsarchive.com (25% off with the discount code JGDISC25). They can provide superb evidence of living relatives. And for the past 10 years, www.rip.ie provides a free online version. There is, needless to say, no such thing as www.rip.co.uk or www.rip.com.

One other feature of Irish funeral rituals is that we’re very proud of them. I once boasted about them to an American psychotherapist and genealogist and she responded “Yes, I’ve noticed that the Irish have problems letting go.”

Food for thought. Perhaps eventually ceasing to grieve for the dead is not a betrayal, just an acceptance that they’re gone.

Anyone who researches nineteenth-century Irish families quickly becomes aware of what is unspoken behind many records. Despite the fact that the Irish language, Gaelic, was the majority tongue in many areas until well past the middle of the century, not one state or church record writes down a single word of Irish.

Think about what that meant for the people being recorded: the language in which they lived their lives was utterly worthless to the bosthoons and looderamauns running official Ireland. No wonder so many made the stark choice to abandon Irish in order to survive.

The implications for research are unavoidable. Imagine that baptismal record from the 1830s as it must have seemed to the parents. Their names are being written down, often phonetically, sometimes (mis-)translated,  in a language they don’t understand and which they almost certainly couldn’t read even if they did understand it. You may care how your surname is spelt. Your ancestors certainly didn’t.

One result is that the slow evolution of names out of Irish and into English happens before your eyes. In West Cork Catholic baptismal registers, the many Fowlues (from Ó Foghlú, derived from foghlaí,  meaning ‘robber’) transmute decade by decade into the contemporary English ‘Foley’. In other cases, the changes are dizzyingly abrupt. In North Mayo, I’ve seen the first children of a family baptised as Mulderrig (Ó Maoildeirg,

‘grandson of the red(-haired) priest’, with the younger ones all ‘Reddington’, a common attempt to shoehorn the colour red into a perfectly respectable but completely different surname from the north of England. The Leitrim surname Breheny (from Bhreithiúnach, meaning ‘lawyer’ or ‘judge’) starts off in the 1830s as Breheny, becomes ‘Abraham’ and ends up’ Judge’.

Another shadow language is also there. We didn’t just take on the English language. We took it on and banjaxed it. Hiberno-English is a wonderful stew of Gaelic and medieval English, flavoured with intense local accents. If you’re wondering why you can’t find your Deane ancestors, that’s because they’re in the records as ‘Dain’ (‘Cup of tay, anyone?’). Likewise with Geaney (‘Ganey’).

And all your Grenhams are Grinhams.

Professor Joe Lee recently gave an extraordinary review to the new Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland ( ed. Eugenio Biagini and Mary Daly, CUP, 2017). Glowing isn’t the word: it was positively radioactive.  So of course I jumped straight in.

And he was right, it is a remarkable piece of work. Its thirty-three essays are divided into three sections, ‘Geography, Occupations and Social Classes’, ‘People, Culture and Communities’ and ‘Emigration, Immigration and the Wider Irish World’. Clearly ‘social history’ is a very broad church, ignoring the boundaries of local history, human geography, anthropology, linguistics and many more apparently separate disciplines. That’s all to the good. The more perspectives, methods and opinions are applied to the Ould Sod, the clearer and more wonderfully complicated our ancestors will be.

 

The really novel feature of the work, not remarked on by Professor Lee, is the weight given to what used to be called ‘The Irish Abroad’. A full third of the volume deals with the histories of Irish communities in North America, Australasia and Britain, a remarkable and welcome change of focus, that finally puts emigration at the centre of the Irish experience. The stand-out essay in the book, for me, is part of that section, Kevin Kenny’s magisterial ‘Irish Emigrations in a Comparative Context’, a masterpiece of eagle’s-eye summation and cool authority that I can see myself rereading over and over again.

Another reason I was interested in the book is that one of the people incuded once told me casually that she’d like to wring the neck of every genealogist on the planet. (Her name is available only after a few pints). I don’t think she meant me personally, though I did feel a tad nervous. It was the bluntest example I’ve come across of academic anger at the Laity (that’s us) getting in the way of the Priesthood (that’s them). I just smiled and nodded and backed away.

In one sense, of course, she was right. Genealogy can never be a truly academic discipline – it just doesn’t have the requisite dispassion and disinterest. On the other hand, a Priesthood is pointless without its Laity.

A widespread assumption among people who haven’t done any family history, and a reason often advanced for not starting, is that there’s a dreadful skeleton somewhere in the family past that mustn’t be brought out into the open. I used to think this was just Irish Catholic guilt seeping out of our collective unconscious but it seems to be present in almost all cultures: De mortuis nil nisi bonum, ‘Of the dead, speak nothing but good’, was first coined more than two-and-a-half millennia ago.

In Ireland, that suspected skeleton almost always boils down to a suspicion of a birth out of wedlock somewhere a couple of generations back.

It’s very hard now for us to grasp just how shameful illegitimacy was, even a few decades ago, and shameful not just for the mother (fathers usually managed anonymity or just decamped), but for the child and even for later generations. There were sem-racist overtones, hints of tainted blood and multi-generational stains. Some of the outraged comments in the baptismal entries of children born outside marriage in nineteenth-century church registers make it clear just how grievous the offence was.

 

The possibility of descendants suing for the insult to their ancestry was one of the main reasons the Catholic Church was so little reluctant to have their records digitised as recently the 1980s. Now, though, there is no shame: one man I did some research for was very hurt to find out about his mother’s illegitimacy after her death. But the hurt was only because she had not trusted him enough to tell him while she was alive.

Similar reversals of attitude have happened in other areas. Convict ancestry was once something Aussies kept quiet about. It’s now a badge of pride. Having a relative who entered a workhouse used to be a disgrace for the entire family, a feeling that probably accounts for the loss and deliberate neglect of most Irish workhouse admission registers. Nobody feels like that now.

Today, we have different taboos. All our empathy is for the destitute pauper, the poor convict, the single mother and child. Skeletons are Halloween jokes.  And the dead are no longer entitled to secrets.