John Grenham – Irish Roots

The standard story of globalisation is that economies of scale, accumulation of ‘talent’ and creative use of international tax law permit giant transnational corporations to reach extraordinary levels of profitability, which are then used to out-compete smaller local players and either crush them or absorb them.

How does this apply in genealogy? In Ireland, on first sight at least, the standard story seems to be in action. Ancestry.com and FindMyPast, the Coke™ and Pepsi™ of global genealogy, are indeed using their technical know-how, deep pockets and extraordinary marketing muscle to carve out territory and stamp their brands on Irish records.

For bread-and-butter research, there’s no doubt it’s working. I now use both services almost every day, in a way that I would have found inconceivable even two years ago. The range and depth of digitised records they offer is beyond the capacity of even the most dedicated Irish public or private institution and there is no doubt that they are swimming with the tide of economic history.

So should we all just accept our fate? They’re certainly not going away any time soon. But I think there are flaws in the way they can work that actually feed the ecosystem in which local record providers can thrive.

First, the sheer, cussed, devil-in-the-detail gnarliness of genealogy means that the more the service is standardised, the less it actually meets the needs of researchers, and standardisation is the be-all and end-all of globalised corporations.  Believe me, there is no frustration  like the frustration of knowing a source, knowing the information it might hold, and being forced to fish through a keyhole for it by a one-size-fits-all search interface (FindMyPast, I’m looking at you).

Second, the drift towards monopoly that seems to be an inevitable feature of globalised tech corporations means that intelligent usability is often an afterthought. The people making crucial management decisions are managers and marketers, with their attention on stockholders and the competition, not on the genealogists who are their customers. The business model seems to consist simply of hoovering up as many record-sets as possible, with no concern for making them intelligible (Ancestry, step forward).

To put it bluntly, the more databases they add, the stupider they get.

Contrast this with the (belated but very welcome) agility of a small, purely Irish commercial service like rootsireland. In the last year, it has dropped prices, allowed precision research using surname only, introduced a place-names search in church registers and added swathes of new civil and church records. The service is unrecognisable from the one that existed two years ago, largely, I think, because of the impact of the global genealogy giants.

On the public service side too, gorgeously non-standardised searches proliferate, allowing the slicing and dicing of information from censuses, directories, church and civil records in ways simply not available in the global giants’ services.

So by all means use Ancestry or FindMyPast to plug gaps – surname variants on the Archives census site or Askaboutireland, missing parishes for rootsireland, Irish Quaker records – but if you need to know the name of every deaf blacksmith in Ireland in 1911, there’s still only one place to go.

 

 

Alfred Henry Hunter is the Dubliner long known to be the model for the hero of Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. In 1904, after rescuing Joyce from a drunken fight, Hunter took him home and showed him a paternal sympathy that resonated deeply with Joyce, who originally planned Ulysses as a short story based on the incident. It expanded enormously between 1914 and 1922, and the figure at its centre changed from the kindly Hunter to the Everyman Bloom.

The James Joyce Centre’s website (jamesjoyce.ie) still refers to Hunter as “an elusive figure”. Not a bit of it. With all the records now online, his life is an open book.

 

 

Here he is in Mount Street in 1901, with his wife Marion Bruére Hunter (née Quin). He gives his occupation as “Gentleman”, and then crosses it out. But Marion remains a “Lady”. Very Bloom-like.

In 1911 they’re in Great Charles Street, less than five minutes from Bloom’s Eccles Street address. Hunter is now an advertising agent, as Bloom was. His marriage to Marion took place in London in 1899: see freebmd.org.uk. He was born in Ballymacarret in 1866. His parents, William Hunter and Maria Lockhart, were married in Maghera in 1856. His death in 1926 was from “cardiac asthenia”, congestive heart failure. And Marion was listed as a voter in Rutland Street, in Dublin’s north city centre, up to 1942.

In 1890, Hunter even registered a patent of an invention “for facilitating the unlacing of boots and shoes and corsets and such like articles of wearing apparel”, as reported in The Weekly Irish Times of November 14 1890. And at least one other patent exists, for a cuff fastener.  Bloomier and Bloomier.

Given Joyce’s penchant for using identifiable individuals, an intriguing question is why Hunter had to be re-imagined as Jewish. Perhaps Everyman as a Northern Protestant was a step too far, even for Joyce.

And what about the model for Molly, Leopold’s wife? It turns out that Alfred’s wife is just as accessible, and even more interesting.

First, like Bloom’s Molly, she was christened Marion. The baptism took place in the Church of Ireland Mariners’ Church in Dún Laoghaire on May 19 1864, with her full name given as Marion Bruére Quin. She was the daughter of Francis Quin, a professor of music, and Menella (née Wilcox). Molly’s musical bent, so important in Ulysses, clearly has a background in Marion’s family.

Her mother’s side are even more intriguing. The Wilcoxes, from just outside Sunderland, were cousins of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen-name, Lewis Carroll. As an adult Dodgson regularly visited – he composed “Jabberwocky” while staying with them – and corresponded frequently with Marion’s mother, Menella. He also took an interest in Menella’s daughters, encouraging Marion’s elder sister Elizabeth Menella (“Minna”) Quin in her acting career, for which she used the stage-name “Norah O’Neill”.

Marion herself also knew Dodgson very well. In 1897, he gave her a hand-written facsimile of “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”, the original of what was to become Alice in Wonderland, inscribed “Marion Quin, with the Author’s Love”.

In later life, after the death of Alfred in 1926, she appears to have fallen on hard times. She sold the facsimile at auction in London in 1938, and lived her final years in a North Dublin tenement, sharing 14 Upper Rutland Street (now Seán O’Casey Avenue) with at least six other households.

There is no doubt that the original from which Joyce drew most of Molly’s character was his wife, Nora Barnacle. But he borrowed from everything and everybody in the Dublin he knew. And he clearly knew (or knew of) Marion Bruére Hunter.

 

Full links, and more information:

1901 Census: http://census.nationalarchives.ie/reels/nai003818919/

1911 Census: http://census.nationalarchives.ie/reels/nai000060036/

Birth: https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FR47-358

Sister’s birth: https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:F5PT-M68

Parents’ marriage: https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FGCL-R8L

Father’s will calendar entry: http://www.willcalendars.nationalarchives.ie/reels/cwa/005014887/005014887_00417.pdf

Father’s will fully transcribed at http://www.proni.gov.uk/index/search_the_archives/will_calendars.htm

Alfred’s voter registration

Will calendar entry for Francis, Marion’s father:

Will calendar entry for Menella (née Wilcox), Marion’s mother, cousin of Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll:

See Lewis Carrol and the Victorian Stage.

Dodgson was friendly with Marion and her sister, the actress Elizabeth Menella (“Minna”) Quin, and in 1897, shortly before his death, gave Marion a personally-inscribed gift of a facsimile of the original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground – see Christie’s description.

Marion B. Hunter’s voter registration 1939-42

One of the most common questions people ask me  is “What Irish genealogical records are online?” Years ago, on the old Irish Times version of the site, I did a single page giving a quick-and-dirty overview to answer the question.

I’ve just finished an updated version for this site and the changes are extraordinary.

The curse of 1922 still looms. The destruction of the Public Record Office in that year certainly simplified Irish research, but in the way Cromwell simplified Ireland. On the bright side, (repeat after me: “the glass is half-full, the glass is half-full”)  virtually everything of universal relevance to Irish genealogy is easily visible: Census/GRO/Griffiths/Church/Tithes.

 

Which in turn makes it relatively easy to get a grasp of what bits are searchable online and what’s still only offline.

From that Olympian perspective, a few things are clear.

First, offline territory is shrinking rapidly, mainly due to advances by global genealogy giants Ancestry.com and FindMyPast.

Second, many records are being transcribed multiple times on different sites. What a waste, cries the naive researcher. Not at all. Every transcription adds a fresh layer of mistakes, but different transcriptions have different mistakes: using them together provides a level of accuracy they can’t have on their own.

Third, digitisation is stretching that simplified set of universally relevant records.  When you can search a century of newspapers, or an entire set of burial registers, or decades of city directories at the click of a mouse, their relative importance changes completely.

And last, but not least, Irish genealogy online remains a lot more fun than in most other places. You have to rummage right down to the bottom of the Irish drawer to get at the good bits.

When I started doing Irish genealogical research thirty-odd years ago, I stumbled across A Census of Ireland circa 1659 (ed. Séamus Pender, Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1939) in the National Library reading room and my heart leapt.  A published census? From 1659?  Hallellujah!

But of course Pender’s Census is nothing like a census. (The decision to give it that name was not Pender’s: the manuscript in the Royal Irish Academy had been known as a ‘census’ since the mid-nineteenth century. So forgive him.)

Two classes of people are recorded. The first, ‘tituladoes’, are so called because they claim title to the land they occupy and because that title is in question. The OED defines titulado as “A thing that has only a nominal existence.” Their names and townland addresses are given in full. Because they represent the tiny property-owning class, their numbers are few.

More interesting is the second class, “Inhabitants”. These are described as English, Scotch or Irish, their surname (or a rough version of their surname) is supplied, along with their number. These numbers are for baronies, so the areas they cover are much larger than for the tituladoes.

Clearly, the ‘Census’ was part of the preparatory work for the mass confiscations that took place under the Cromwellian Commonwealth. Although the returns differ in format from one part of Ireland to another, they were designed to answer two simple questions: Who is in possession of the land? (the tituladoes) And who is likely to oppose or support their dispossession? (Numbers of English, Scotch or Irish)

Even on its own terms, the ‘Census’ is flawed. It is missing all of counties Cavan, Galway, Mayo, Tyrone and Wicklow, most of Meath (nine baronies) and four baronies in Cork. The Inhabitants of Fermanagh and Leitrim are recorded in composite groups of parishes, not baronies as elsewhere. And the recording of surnames is inconsistent beyond belief.

This much said, Pender’s ‘Census’ has one unassailable virtue: It exists. Almost no other records survive for the Ireland of this period.

The 1939 edition is available online at the IMC website. An updated version with more modern analysis by William J. Smyth, was published by the IMC in 2002. A good plain transcription, lacking the academic apparatus, is at the Clann O’Lochlainn website.

All of which finally brings me to the point for this post. I’ve spent the past few months extracting the Inhabitants’ surnames and the corresponding baronies to produce maps showing surname distribution and numbers in the mid-seventeenth century, now part of the surname search. Have a look at Whelan, for example.

Making the maps produced a little queasiness, I have to say. They do show just how long-lived is the connection in Ireland between particular surnames and places, but their implied pinpoint precision is very misleading. Treat them with caution.

[This post was first published on May 23 last. From May 30, the reason you couldn’t be reading it is that I deleted the entire johngrenham.com site by accident on that day, and my most recent backup was from May 16. Web-publishing is very like riding a unicycle on a tightrope over Niagara Falls. While juggling chain-saws. With a family of acrobats standing on your shoulders.]

I’ve always had a liking for the paradox of  Eubulides, now nearly three millennia old. He simply said: “What I am saying now is a lie.” If he was telling the truth, then he was lying, in which case he was telling the truth. And so on round and round.

You can’t help the sneaking suspicion Eubulides’ granny was a Murphy.  We Irish specialise in wonderful paradoxical non-sequiturs, from the self-evident direction: “If you want to get there, you shouldn’t start from here” to Phil Lynnott’s  immortal “Man, when I tell you she was cool, she was red hot” from “The Boys are Back in Town.

My favourite sign in Dublin used to be D’Olier Street’s “Ears Pierced While You Wait”. So much more convenient than dropping them off.  And the picture is of a (very nice) ad for an optician currently working in Drumcondra. The target market for the poster is … people who can’t see it.

The reason for all this Irish bull is that the Irish Times/Irish Ancestors site at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor is switching off this morning and redirecting its 30,000 daily page-views to this site. Which I expect by now has crumbled under the assault.

So that’s why you can’t be reading this.

Last week I got a call from the producers of  ‘The Real Housewives of Orange County’. Really. They were in Ireland filming, and needed an emergency genealogist. One of their housewives had Irish ancestry, could I whip up her family tree and get back to them in 10 minutes?

Whoooah there, Neddy. That’s not how it works. First off, what does she already know?

She already knew quite a bit, it turned out. An uncle had done some serious research and, on the basis of an emailed tree, I was able to connect her with actual parish records and Griffith’s and come up with some great grand-aunts and uncles in 1901 and 1911.

Then they had me come down to their hotel, Powerscourt just outside Enniskerry, to spring the results on the unsuspecting housewife. Reality TV, you see. So far, so good.

Things got a little strange after that. Her nineteenth-century ancestors were O’Tooles, with the forename Phelim recurring in every generation, all based in Greystones, just 3 km down the road from Powerscourt. And of course the O’Tooles of Powerscourt were notorious/renowned for their part in the sixteenth-century rebellion against the Tudors, when their leader was … Phelim O’Toole of Powerscourt.

At this point the word “karma” crept into the conversation.

Real Powerscourt. Not real housewife.

Finding O’Tooles in north Wicklow is the genealogical equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, so I laughed it off and joked that if she wanted to meet a living relative, she should just go down to Greystones, tap anyone on the shoulder and they’d be her fourth or  fifth cousin. Big mistake. Californians (and Californian TV producers) tend towards the literal.

That night, in Johnny Fox’s pub in Glencullen, they put out the word they were looking for O’Tooles. Naturally, a family stepped forward who claimed direct descent from Phelim of Powerscourt.  Naturally, I was asked to authenticate the connection between them, Phelim and the real housewife.

And, naturally, I made my excuses and exited.

I recently had an Ancestry DNA test done. The process is clean, well-designed and private: 10ccs of spittle in a plastic container sent off in a pre-addressed package identifiable to the testers only by a reference number. Once the test is complete – only a matter of weeks – the results are available using the reference number.

Until recently, most genealogical DNA testing focused on the Y chromosome for direct male father-to-son descents, or mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) for mother-to-daughter descent. In both cases, the tests seek out small inherited mutations. By comparing the results of large reference groups, it is possible to infer roughly when and where each mutation first arose and, by extension, the most recent common ancestor of everyone whose DNA includes that mutation. The rate of change on the Y chromosome is much faster than for mtDNA, and the inheritance from father to son mimics European surname inheritance, so Y DNA testing has long been the most genealogically useful.

What Ancestry does is different. It is an autosomal DNA test, taking samples from across the entire genome, all 23 chromosomes, rather than just part of a single sub-chromosome. They test 730,525 points, over 7% of the entire genome. Even three years ago, industrial DNA-testing on this scale was barely imaginable, and it makes possible broad-brush comparisons on a completely new scale.

What do those broad-brush comparisons tell you? Ancestry uses the results in two ways. First comes an “ethnicity estimate”,  giving a percentage match to each of 26 ethnic groups. Second is a search across other Ancestry test results to uncover unsuspected 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th cousins.

So when I got the email saying my test was complete, I was like a child on Christmas morning. Would I be 40% Iberian, 10% Eastern European, 20% Finnish? Third cousins in Hawaii, please, please, please.

No. Apparently, I’m 98% Irish. After trying to choose which of my treacherous Brit fingernails to pull out in order to make the 100%, I took a closer look at the way the results are created. There’s a margin of error of +/- 5%. So I could actually be 103% Irish – Hiberniores Hibernicis ipsis, more Irish than the Irish themselves. Wrap the green flag round me, boys.

More seriously, that 98% points up the limits of autosomal testing. It is very broad, but also very shallow, its accuracy limited to four generations, great-great-grandparents. This is because you get half your DNA from each parent, who each got half from their parents and  so on, halving with each generation. As a result, the amount you share with any of your great-great-grandparents is just 6.25%.

I already know who all my great-great-grandparents were and where they lived, all along the Galway/Roscommon border, God help them. Not a Finn or a Polynesian among them. So Ancestry was telling me nothing I didn’t know.

Ethnicity is also much slipperier and more dangerous terrain that Ancestry seems to realise. In the US, being “Irish” or “Italian” or “Polish” is an interesting twist on basic American-ness: it might be pistachio or vanilla, but it’s still ice-cream. In Europe, we spent most of the 20^th century fighting genocidal wars that revolved around a toxic mix of  ethnicity and nationalism. Not ice-cream at all.

The second part of the Ancestry DNA experience is genuinely useful, though. On Ancestry itself, I found four third-cousin families, all of whom have extended family histories about which I knew nothing.

And when I uploaded my results to the open-source GedMatch.com, I found even more, and closer connections.

The Ancestry test costs £99 and is well worth it, especially if your main interest is the broader extended family. Just take the ethnicity side of things with a grain of salt.

 

 

On Saturday I loaded up on all the scepticism I could muster and headed down for a sneak preview of the Epic Ireland visitor attraction in the CHQ building on Dublin’s Custom House Quay. (Full disclosure: the reason for the invite is that the Family History Centre attached to Epic has licensed some of the software from my site)

Custom-built “visitor attractions” are not generally high on my wish-list: being told what to see, even in velvety PR-speak, gets my hackles up. And after all the fruitless ballyhoo a few years back over a National Diaspora Centre, I was afraid this private-sector version might go for the paddywhackiest of paddywhackery. So I entered the CHQ vaults with a clenched heart and some trepidation.

And two hours later emerged with my heart melted, a lump in my throat and my eyes out on stalks. The place is simply extraordinary. First, and most important, it is honest. The reasons for leaving and the lives left behind, the individual stories, the huge chronological and geographic span of migration from Ireland, are all
presented straight.

But the wonderful use of touch-screens, hi-definition projectors, motion-sensors and especially of the barrel-vaults of the building itself make it possible for a visitor to skim or go deep, to linger over the role of the Irish in Bordeaux wine-making or the battle of Fredericksburg, to whip through Riverdance or be hypnotised by the spectacular animations illustrating the history of Irish science.

In the end, it was one of the most moving museum experiences I’ve ever had. I suspect anyone with Irish blood will find it just as emotional.

Quibbles? Of course: There’s not enough about the awkward Other Irish, Northern Presbyterians, responsible for the winning of the American War of Independence, a fact worth bigging up. I found the passport to be stamped as you go from section to section just a tad on the hokey side. The sheer scale can be a bit overwhelming. And there is some mission creep – it covers aspects of contemporary Ireland with only the most tenuous links to the Diaspora.

But, all in all, it is breathtaking.

Epic Ireland opens to the public on Saturday next, May 7^th. I’ve been to the current top attraction in Dublin, the Guinness Storehouse, and Epic is much better. If there’s any justice, it will be a runaway success. And so will the Family History Centre.

One of the perennial problems I face is responding to the question “What do you do?”

“Genealogist” doesn’t quite cover it (and constitutes a dangerous open invitation to tell me about Granny Murphy). “Software developer” isn’t right either, because all the software I do is connected to Irish genealogy and heritage. Same for “writer”, same for “teacher”.

Twenty years ago, out of sheer badness I occasionally used to answer, “I’m a cowboy taxonomist”.  Taxonomy is the science of pigeon-holing, and at the time I was deeply involved in developing the software that underlies almost all of this website. It entailed dozens of interrelated categories and sub-categories, all ready to store information about genealogical sources.

To my surprise, I found I enjoyed it. As I put it to a poor, puzzled soul I once cornered as a party: “I have no interest in looking at every single gravestone transcript in Co. Tyrone. But I really, really want to know where they all are.”

When I originally collaborated with The Irish Times in putting the results of this cowboy taxonomy online, the plan in the back of my mind was that I’d use that income to keep on expanding and populating those pigeon-holes. And to some extent, that’s what happened. To misquote John Lennon, now I know how many pigeon-holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

But many other things got in the way over the years, and the expansion slowed way down.

The collaboration with The Times is now ending, and one of the unexpected side-effects is that the classifying juices have started flowing again.

Already, the way newspaper transcripts is handled has changed completely – you can now compare, county-by-county, what years of what relevant newspapers are online (look at Waterford, for example). General Register Office records likewise, now down to local registrar’s district level.

And I have plans. Map the surnames in Pender’s Census. Rejig the old step-by-step wizard to reflect the revolution in online access. Master the explosion of new gravestone transcript sites. More record-images, more maps –  Irish research ever simpler, ever more transparent.

Which suggests another response to that what-do-you-do question: “OCD genealogist”. Or is that just tautology?

After 18 years, the Irish Times/Irish Ancestors sub-site is winding down and transferring here, johngrenham.com.

From this morning, the Times is no longer accepting payment for any reports, instead offering a link that will take the user here, to a free version of each report. From next week, some of the legacy services will be redirected, telling users (and Google) that the service has moved permanently. A week-by-week process will increase the number of services redirected until May 23^rd, when the Irish Times sub-site will cease to operate.

All the services on this site will remain free until May 11^th,  after which a soft pay-wall will ask for a small monthly subscription after five free daily page-views. All users who have paid for Irish Times/Irish Ancestors reports will continue to have full free access here.

Obviously, I have mixed feelings about the change.  From the very outset in 1998, it was clear that a genealogy sub-site was out of place on a newspaper website, especially a genealogy sub-site not fully owned by the newspaper. I always thought of the relationship as symbiotic: I was the little bird that picked the crocodile’s teeth.

Ironically, it’s the success of the internet itself that has finally produced this parting of the ways. While the Times website was the Cinderella of the organisation, hard-working but neglected, my sub-site was welcome. But as the online side came front and centre, the Ancestors bit fell behind,  increasingly clunky and out-of-date.

By last year, it was clear that there were only two options. Either the sub-site got serious attention, with redevelopment and some marketing muscle, or it had to go.

In the end, it’s entirely understandable that, if the choice was between using scarce resources for online journalism or for redeveloping a genealogy sub-site, there could only be one result.

The crocodile got dentures.