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If you’ve noticed an uncharacteristic silence from me over the past while, it’s not that I’ve run out of opinions. Fat chance. No, I’ve just signed a contract with National Archives of Ireland to deal with their backlog of user-submitted corrections to the 1901 and 1911 census transcripts. So I’ve been deep in the entanglements of a decade of emails.

It’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. Some of the work can be automated, albeit with lots of convolutions. Inevitably though, a fair amount of squinting at the images is involved.

So here are some preliminary observations from that squinting.

The submitters take the process surprisingly seriously. I had expected to find dozens of corrections to ‘M. Mouse’ and ‘D. Duck’ . Not at all. People seem to feel that what appears on the site is in some way a public memory of their family and they just want that memory to be accurate. Many people also want to take the chance to correct the mistakes their ancestors made. On occasion, long-running grievances are discernible – a head of household’s claim to be the father of children disputed vehemently by a submitter, for example. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Whatever appears on the census form – reversed surnames and forenames, forgotten spouses, misspelt occupations, outright lies – is what has to appear in the transcript.

A disproportionate number of corrections come from particular places and classes. Cork people seem especially fussy, as are descendants of members of dissenting sects. Though it’s hardly being fussy to want ‘Independent Rolehash not Connected with any Denommation’ corrected to  ‘Independent Protestant not connected with any denomination’.

My favourites are the mistranscribed occupations. Prawn dealer for ‘piano dealer’, terrace lotto worker for ‘terracotta worker’, sister of the Mr Suline order instead of ‘sister of the Ursuline order’, hawker of Irish  for ‘hawker of fish’.

And straight from Alice in Wonderland: ‘Instire of the Peacly Tea Merchant‘. Which of course should be ‘Justice of the Peace, Tea Merchant’.

Clearly some people get a little obsessed with the corrections – the same emails crop up again and again: You know who you are. Actually I’m one myself. I’m now dealing with my own emails, which feels a bit ironic.

Finally,  some advice if you’re submitting corrections.

Putting the correction in ALL CAPS will not get attention any sooner. Nor will multiple submissions of the same correction. Nor multiple multiple submissions of the same correction. And outrage, though sometimes understandable – ‘They’re all nuns, for God’s sake!‘ – won’t get the changes made.

 

A month back, in my enthusiastic review of Claire Santry’s new book (which, by the way, is now seriously outselling my own on Amazon – D’Oh), I mentioned a record-set she highlighted that I was only vaguely familiar with, US Civil War widows’ pension applications.

I’ve now had a good root through them and they are truly extraordinary. Pensions were not just paid to widows, but to any dependents of those who died for the Union side in the US Civil War – elderly parents, those taking care of orphans, dependent siblings, anyone who could show that the death of the soldier had imposed financial suffering.

Why should they be especially useful for Irish research? Huge numbers of Irish emigrants fought in the War, by some estimates as many as served in the British Army in World War I. Most were Famine emigrants, some were post-Famine chain migrants and quite a few were recruited in Ireland specifically to fight. They all died in their tens of thousands.

Getting a pension wasn’t easy. The Army Veterans Administration was the mother of all bureaucracies and the hoops to be jumped through were mind-boggling, with files ranging up 200 pages and decisions often taking more than a decade. Which is good news for researchers. Marriages, births, service histories, dependent relationships – all had to be authenticated, usually by multiple sources, giving precise dates and places, and often with eyewitness affidavits from friends and neighbours.

Because almost all the soldiers were first-generation emigrants, many claimants were actually still in Ireland and many of the marriages and births reported are Irish, in some cases reaching as far back as the early decades of the nineteenth century. This is particularly useful because large numbers of emigrants left from Western counties – Donegal, Mayo, Sligo, Galway – for which few early parish registers exist. I’ve already come across a marriage in Achonry parish in 1828, with townland addresses. That’s four decades before the start of the surviving Achonry registers.

The files are even more useful for fleshing out family stories. Take the case of Unice and John Coyle, living in the townland of Muineagh in Clondavaddog, Donegal, parents of Hugh Coyle who died on June 24 1864 in Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp. Their application went through the US Consul in Derry and included letters from Unice giving painful detail of their circumstances and health, even attaching an original ‘Notice to Quit’ from the notorious Lord Leitrim. They got $8 a month. God bless America.

The only online access to the files is on fold3.com, a site set up by Ancestry.com and, unsurprisingly, not covered by an Ancestry.com subscription. At least they’ve taken the chance to rethink the ridiculously clunky Ancestry search interface. Fold3’s is clean, intuitive and fast, making it simple, for example, to pick out all files that mention a particular Irish county.

For a detailed case history using the files to reconstruct the social history of Cruit Island in Donegal, see Damian Sheil’s excellent blog. Damian has also done maps of the locations mentioned in the files for Britain and mainland Europe, but not for Ireland.

Hmm. There’s an idea.

A recent episode of RTE’s “The Week in Politics” once again left me frothing at the mouth. This time, though, it wasn’t the politicians. As a bit of light relief, RTE had invited a geneticist and a political scientist to discuss the results of their study into the connection between genetic inheritance and political allegiance. Worthy as that sounds, what they were actually looking at was the hoary old chestnut about Fine Gael being Anglo-Norman and Fianna Fáil Gaelic Irish. Unsurprisingly, they found that FG supporters were indeed marginally more likely to have Anglo-Norman roots.

But how did they discover this? They tested politicians’ surnames, of course. This is the point where I turned purple. Exactly what scientific test did they perform on the surnames to determine their level of Gaelickery or Anglo-Normanosity? Did they carefully take swabs from the insides of the surnames’ cheeks? Did they culture the surnames in their lab?

The truth is that Irish surnames are utterly unreliable as markers for cultural inheritance. Yes, ‘Fitzgerald’ sits at the other end of one particular spectrum from ‘O’Brien’. But what about a venerable Fianna Fáil Kerry surname like ‘McEllistrim’, “Son of Alastair [Fitzgerald]”?  Or the apparently impeccably English ‘Higgins’, from a diminutive of the understandably widespread peasant name ‘Hick’. Which in Ireland can be an Anglicization of either Ó hUiggín, from Uiggín, Gaelic for ‘Viking’, or Ó hAodhagáin, grandson of big ould Hugh. Put that in your political science petri dish and smoke it.

Before they are anything else, surnames are words, embedded in language and mutating under the pressure of history like all other words. Maybe, once upon a time, they started out as badges of tribal identity but those badges have long been distorted beyond all reliability by the twists and turns of Irish history and individual Irish family histories. Reducing them to a quick political litmus test is just plain dim.

The real joy in the programme was seeing the scathing scepticism of the Fine Gael politician they asked for a response, none other than the delightfully-monikered Leo Varadkar. His people came over with Strongbow, you know.

 

The real lesson is that scientists are only marginally less likely to peddle bunkum in return for publicity than non-scientists. I read that in a recent survey.

A while back, I was a guest on a radio programme and a listener texted in a plea. She was adopted, she said, and she couldn’t uncover her birth mother’s name. “Please help me to find out who I am”, were the exact words.

On one level, this is absurd: I don’t know her circumstances, but she almost certainly leads a normal life, coping (or not coping) with all the joys and worries of work and money and immediate family in exactly the same way as someone who does know their birth mother’s name. She is who she is, in other words, as we all are.

But of course I’m being disingenuous. I knew exactly what she was asking and why it carried such a resonant pang of loss. At the centre of everyone’s network of allegiances, to tribe, parish, country , race, lies the family, and embedded ineradicably in the very notion of family is the need for a blood connection. Unfair and irrational this may be, but it is very old. For most of the existence of the human race, the only dependable guarantee of safety has been blood kinship.

None of this is much help to that listener. The uncomfortable fact is that researching adoptions can be extremely difficult. The vast majority took place in order to hide illegitimacy. Finding records of people who tried to leave no official traces, who didn’t want to be found, demands levels of persistence and resourcefulness well beyond the ordinary. But the sheer intensity of that need to know remains extraordinary.

The Irish state is finally recognising the needs of adoptees and giving them legal rights to trace their birth families. Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Katherine Zappone’s wonderful ‘Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill 2016‘ formalises the record-keeping obligations of adoption agencies and the tracing services they need.

Two state agencies already offer tracing assistance of sorts. The Adoption Authority of Ireland offers free personalised assistance, while TUSLA, the Child and Family Agency, is actively archiving and making available records from the local religious adoption agencies that were the norm until very recently.  The Natural Parents Network of Ireland provides support for parents of children. who were adopted.

Our sense of time is tuned to the everyday: you can’t see your children grow or mountains erode, for the very simple reason that life would be impossible if you could. Genealogy usually keeps a researcher’s nose firmly against this grindstone of the humdrum, and that’s one of its beauties; it is very hard to stray into geological time-scales and grand historical abstractions when you can see individuals and families flagrantly disobeying the laws of statistics before your very eyes. Just occasionally, however, something will poke out from the background that gives a sense of the scale of the invisible changes going on.

The surname “Costello” has more than 70 recorded variant spellings in the records of the past two centuries, from “Castolo” to “Custullo”, (see here) but it has a very precise origin. It was adopted in the 12th century by the children of Jocelyn de Angulo, son of Gilbert, one of the original Norman invaders. There is disagreement as to whether Osdealbhach, the forename at the root of the surname Mac Osdealbhaigh (phonetically “McOStealvy”), is a genuine Gaelic name itself, or a mangled Gaelicisation of ‘Jocelyn’, but there is no doubt at all that this individual was the origin of the modern surname.

In 1911, around 10,000 individuals in Ireland bore the surname Costello or a variant. A first reaction might be to congratulate Jocelyn on his fecundity, but of course, over 7 centuries, anything up to half-a-million individuals could be the 20-generation ancestors of someone living in 1911, so Jocelyn was only responsible for the surname, not all the genes. Even so, the sheer numbers connected to him both as descendants and co-ancestors give a dizzying glimpse of the complexity of our relatedness.

Nothing punctures your sense of being in charge of your own life quite as thoroughly as a stinking head-cold – I have one at the moment – but genealogy can come a close second.

A few years back I got into hot water for saying that the defeated Irish (and English) transported to Barbados after the Cromwellian wars were slaves. The vehement online response was that they were indentured labourers. Involuntary indentured labourers. With no fixed term to the indenture.  At my nit-picking best, I said that forced labour without time limit sounded very like slavery to me.

How wrong I was.

In my utter up-from-the-country innocence I had wandered onto a battlefield in the ongoing Culture Wars. The kind of people who like to get together after dark carrying flaming firebrands have made it one of their central (idiot) beliefs that slavery was colour-blind: us whites have got over it and so should you African-Americans. Saying there were seventeenth-century Irish “slaves” in Barbados was the equivalent of putting on a white hood and lighting a nice big torch.

What brought this back to mind was discovering University College London’s extraordinary ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership’ website. When Britain abolished slavery in 1834, it did so by buying out every single slave in the Empire, paying the mind-boggling sum of £20,000,000 to the former slave-owners. The process naturally involved recording in detail every single one of the 46,000 compensation payments. All the records, including payees, amounts and locations, are in The National Archives in Kew.

What UCL has done with those 46,000 payments is remarkable. They have extracted and mapped the personal information – names, addresses, occupations, numbers of enslaved people – onto zoomable maps of Britain and Ireland. At a glance it becomes clear where slavery-derived wealth collected, who owned it, how much they were compensated. (Ireland appears to have had relatively few slave-owners).

This much is very interesting in its own right – the sheer social and geographic breadth of British slave-ownership is astonishing. But the project goes much further. It links the owners to the specific plantations in Barbados, Grenada and Jamaica from which they drew their profits and maps the plantations too. It looks at what the payees did with their slave-compensation money, the industries it supported, the political careers it enabled, the cultural institutions it helped to found, the great houses it built. Later generations of slave-owning families are tracked through their careers in politics, imperial administration, the arts and education, with prominent individuals highlighted throughout – William Gladstone, the Prime Minister of Britain through much of the Victorian era, was the son of the recipient of the single largest compensation payment. John Gladstone owned no fewer than 2508 enslaved people in British Guyana and Jamaica in 1834.

What the project does is something very familiar to genealogists, the bringing of forgotten truth back out into the light, piece by painstaking piece. The forgotten truth here is that much of the apparent majesty of Britain’s industry and culture was founded on slave money, a fact quickly and conveniently buried by subsequent Imperial historians.

The site also makes clear what enslaved Afro-Caribbean people got in compensation for their generations of degradation. Nothing.

One of Irish genealogy’s dirty little secrets is that it’s all very simple. We do like to dress up in fancy complications – a valuator’s codebook here, a tithe defaulter there.  And if we’re genetic genealogists we really really love our tight-fitting hermetic acronyms and our spangly centi-morgans.

Really, though, the logic behind research is as elementary as an infant’s building blocks. Pile one record on top of another until you can’t go any further. And that’s it. Yes, there are little bits of lateral thinking that can sometimes get around an obstacle. But it’s not brain surgery. It’s not even rocket science.

Another little secret is the fact that many of the processes we use are deeply repetitive and, frankly, stupid. Identify a townland. Find the civil parish. Match the Catholic parish. Do it again. Do it again.

The impulse to automate this stuff before going mad with boredom is the main motivator behind the programming I do. It’s the motivation behind the latest addition to this site, an attempt to map the numbers of householders in the civil parishes of Griffith’s Valuation onto the matching Catholic parishes. Here’s Gilshennan, for example.

The aim was to provide quick-and-dirty access to information on the Catholic records covering areas where particular families were living around the 1850s. Quick maybe, dirty certainly. Catholic and civil parishes don’t correspond precisely, which has thrown up lots of oddities. For instance, if there were seven Grenham households recorded by Griffith in the civil parish of Kilmore, and the civil parish of Kilmore is divided between the Catholic parishes of Castlemore and Kilbeg, then the map displays seven Grenham households in each parish, seven in Castlemore and seven in Kilbeg. Talk about Reproductive.

I’ve plastered the thing in disclaimers, but I have doubts about its usefulness. At the very least it shows that even if Irish genealogy isn’t that complicated it can still get pretty weird.

Over the course of the years, I’ve read many books on Irish genealogy. Some are useful but a little dull or cumbersome. Some are irritatingly cavalier. A few are downright infuriating.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned any names. So let me mention one: Claire Santry. Claire is the sole begetter of the Irish Genealogy News blog, the single most trusted source of updates on Irish record releases and events. She’s also a professional journalist. One reason the blog is so successful is that she brings hard-won professionalism to it. And she’s just brought that professionalism to her new book, The Family Tree Irish Genealogy Guide: How to Trace Your Ancestors in Ireland (2017, Family Tree Books).

It is absolutely splendid: engaging, amusing and down-to-earth, perfectly lucid but without a hint of condescension or dumbing down. She tells the stories behind the sources with a wonderful light touch and a very strong sense of personality.

And it educated me. Again and again, I found out things I didn’t know: precisely how the application system for searches in the 1841 and 1851 censuses worked; what exactly the RIC gazette Hue & Cry was and where you can get at it; that you can order a copy of anything in the PERSI index via the Allen County Library website; how the Catholic Church kept marriage registration at arms’ length until the 1880s; why US civil war pension applications are so useful. I could go on and on.

As if that wasn’t enough, the design is lovely, with plenty of eye-catching illustrations, side-bars and box-outs that break up the text and make it easy to dip in  and out.

Quibbles? Some of the stretching and bending needed to fit with the Family Tree format seems unnecessary, and the slant towards North American researchers is a bit too pronounced. Mentioning the Emerald Isle on the back cover is a sure way of deterring purchasers actually living on the emerald isle.

But all in all this is now my favourite book on Irish genealogy. The bee’s knees and the cat’s pyjamas rolled into one. It’ll come in very handy for the fifth edition of Tracing Your Irish Ancestors.

Irish genealogical researchers persistently ignore one aspect of almost all the records we use. Those records were created by a country that no longer exists, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. After three generations, a blind spot on both sides of the Irish sea is perfectly understandable, but that vanished country is the direct ancestor of both our unfinished Republic and their truncated Kingdom, and there are important consequences that researchers shouldn’t ignore.

On the negative side, there are no official records of migration from Ireland to Britain, any more than there are official records of migration from Birmingham to London. Browse the 1911 Dublin census and you’ll see that the Irish Sea was then an internal trade route, not an international boundary.

But there are many records now in London that cover pre-1922 Ireland: post office workers, soldiers, the merchant marine, the coastguard … Everyone employed by the British state left traces in records now held in England.

And it works both ways. As anyone who has tried to read the Nighttown episode of Joyce’s Ulysses knows, there were large numbers of British soldiers stationed in Victorian and Edwardian Dublin – they were the main clients of the city’s huge red light district.

A more licit record of young men’s sexuality appears in the extraordinary number of soldiers’ marriages recorded in Dublin Church of Ireland records. The non-Catholic marriage records from 1845 are especially informative, giving the names of the fathers of bride and groom as well as their occupations. Because a large majority of these soldiers were from England, Scotland or Wales, it is very likely that many dead ends in UK family history might be resolved by looking at these Irish records.

I have a personal reason for going on about this. For the last few weeks I’ve been spending long, long lengths of time combing the post-1845 Dublin marriage records church by church. The sheer variety of surnames is continually astonishing – Calisendorf , D’Cloett, Flouterlin, Gammaly, Minchinfort – and so is the variety of spelling versions: Campell, Cambel, Camphil, Canpell, Cambhill …. For British soldiers, the main requirements for a posting to Dublin seem to have been a strong libido and the possession of an odd surname. And dyslexia was evidently epidemic among nineteenth-century Dublin Church of Ireland clergymen.

One final point about the overlap between Ireland and Britain: James Joyce, whom we now claim as completely one of our own, was born a United Kingdom citizen and held a United Kingdom passport all his life.

I still remember vividly the first research report I ever worked on. My job was to find a David Fitzgerald in East Limerick in Griffith’s Valuation. At the time, back when genealogical dinosaurs roamed the earth, the only way to do this was to identify roughly which parishes had Fitzgerald households in Griffith’s using the old Index of Surnames, and then comb through them all one by one looking for Davids. So I hunkered down and resigned myself to hours of grinding through microfiche after microfiche. But then  – what luck! – the second parish I checked, Croom, produced a David Fitzgerald.

As I sat down to write the report, though, doubts started to niggle. Yes, David was a relatively 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. Without some idea of how to measure the likelihood of what you’ve found, its place on the scale of probability, it’s very hard to interpret it. If you don’t know that half of the population of West Cork is called O’Driscoll, and that Cornelius was extremely common  in just area, you’re likely to fall on the first Cornelius [O’]Driscoll you find and install him as your ancestor. The appropriate metaphor is the hoary old one about blind men trying to describe an elephant, each one extrapolating from the particular part they happen to touch.

This is especially important for Irish research before the 1850s. At that point most conclusions are balance-of-probability judgements, not cast-iron certainties.

So is there any systematic way to measure genealogical probability? The short answer is no. Doubt your presumptions and go off to count David Fitzgeralds.

The long answer, as usual, is that it depends. Now that so many records are searchable in flexible ways, you can get a sense from a quick search of just how common name combinations are. So there are 107 Cornelius [O’]Driscolls in the 1901 census, but only five Cornelius Maguires. It’s rough and ready, but do it often enough on different datasets and you’ll begin to develop a genealogical Spidey-sense.

Just don’t trust it all the time.