| Sean J Murphy's Blog Historian, genealogist, lecturer and author based in Windgates, Co Wicklow, Ireland |
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27 September 2015: Latest edition of A Primer in Irish Genealogy launched online
This
Primer is based on introductory lectures for the author’s University
College Dublin Adult Education courses in genealogy/family history,
which have been running since 1989. An online booklet is offered both
as a text for students and as a guide for those in this country and
abroad who wish to trace their Irish ancestors. Click here or at Academia.edu for a free downloadable copy of the 2015 edition of the Primer.
There are lessons in research methods, computers and the Internet,
placenames, personal names and surnames. Guidance is given on the use
of core sources including census, vital, valuation and church records,
with some account of more specialised sources such as wills, deeds,
memorial inscriptions and so on. The work concludes with a case study
based on the writer’s Murphy ancestors of Ballylusky, County Kerry.
My UCD Adult Education Introduction to
Genealogy/Family History course, due to start on 1 October, is
unfortunately now full. However, there are still places available on
the Topics in Genealogy/Family History course, due to start at 7pm
on Wednesday 30 September on Belfield Campus, Donnbrook, Dublin, and
running for ten weeks. This course, designed to cater for those with
experience of genealogical research, will focus on surnames of the Four
Provinces, surnames of the ''New Irish', publishing genealogical
information online, Irish and international genealogical sources
accessible online and so on - plus of course issues and research
problems raised by students.
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28 July 2015: UCD Adult Education Genealogy Courses
As
noted in a previous post, the UCD Adult Education Certificate in
Genealogy/Family History course has been discontinued for reasons of
academic reorganisation. While all currently registered students, and
those who have partially completed it in the past, will be able to
complete the Certificate course, no new students will be enrolled. I
will be giving a number of replacement genealogy courses at night in
UCD Belfield during the academic year 2015-16, which are styled
'Lifelong Learning' and do not involve the submission of
assignments for grading or award of credits. The first of these courses
is Introduction to Genealogy/Family History, which starts on 1 October
2015 and as the title suggests is designed for beginners, dealing with
sources such as census, birth, marriage and death and valuation
records, church registers, wills, memorial inscriptions, newspapers and
directories. The second course, Topics in Genealogy/Family History, should suit more experienced genealogists, will
commence 30 September 2015 and covers topics such as surnames of the
Four Provinces, Irish and international genealogical research sources
online, the history of the family, genealogical invention and the
status of heraldry. The third course, which should be of interest in
the light of commemoration of the centenary of the Rising
next year, is Genealogies/Family Histories of 1916 Leaders, which will
start on 13 January 2016 and examines prominent participants such as
Pearse, Connolly, Clarke, De Valera, Collins and Markievicz in terms of
their family backgrounds. The UCD Adult Education Programme 2015-16, which features a range of courses in various disciplines, can be downloaded in PDF format here. Online
booking for UCD Adult Education courses commences on 10 August 2015 and
as usual those with queries concerning the content of my genealogy
courses can contact me personally via the e-mail link at the head of
this page. Hope to be active in genealogical education for a while yet!
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8 July 2015: Launch of Catholic Parish Registers Online at the National Library of Ireland
Today the Taoiseach (Irish Premier) Enda Kenny launched online digitised copies of Roman Catholic
parish registers in the National Library of Ireland, website
http://registers.nli.ie, which contains mostly baptism, marriages and
some burials covering the whole island of Ireland. While a minority of
registers in Dublin and elsewhere date from the mid- or late-eighteenth
century, most postdate 1800 and the online versions generally do not
continue beyond 1880. The good news is that the new National Library
site is free to view and is available internationally, freeing
genealogists and others interested in examining these registers from
the necessity of visiting the National Library and searching through
microfilms. While welcoming this forward step and congratulating
National Library staff on their achievement, the writer has to point
out that the online registers are not indexed or databased, so that one
needs to be able to identify specific parishes and then search entry by
entry. However, if the new site is used in conjunction with the
pay-to-view Irish Family History Foundation site
http://www.rootsireland.ie, which features indexed transcripts from
parish registers but no images, specific entries can be targeted for
checking (remember that a transcription is a derivative or secondary
source, while a digitised original is a primary source). In addition,
the Irish Genealogy site https://www.irishgenealogy.ie enables further
cross-checking of the registers of a range of parishes in Kerry and
Dublin and parts of some other counties. The images on the National
Library site are generally much clearer than the microfilms from which
they derive and in addition there are photographic enhancement tools
and the ability to download and print images. While the Taoiseach
properly credited the Catholic Church with compiling and preserving the
registers, there was no church representative on the podium nor were
dog collars much in evidence. This was a reflection perhaps of past
conflicts over access to these valuable records and certainly does not
bode well for the prospect of securing Church consent for the next step
of digitising registers after 1880 and creating an integrated images plus searchable database facility online.
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27 June 2015: Rules and standards
In
my first blog entry a year ago I promised to deal with with 'rules and
standards' and perhaps the time has come to make good on that
undertaking. In the last few days Claire Santry has posted a series of
articles critical of certain developments in Irish genealogy at Irish Genealogy News.
As a concern of mine is mentioned therein a response is merited, which
given the controversy raised, should be as calm and measured as
possible. We Irish genealogists can be a quarrelsome bunch, but in recent times I
thought I had detected a more live and let live atmosphere in which
people tried to avoid treading on each other's toes. However, in
February 2013 I was shocked to be described as 'an eccentric man' by a
leading genealogist addressing a gathering in the National Library of Ireland sponsored by History Ireland magazine, which comments were posted in audio form to two websites. In
May of the same year I discovered that a former student of mine, now
also prominent in Irish genealogy, was using materials entrusted to him
in class to present his own lectures, in effect plagiarising his former
teacher's work. I tackled both cases robustly, but they were never
satisfactorily resolved. In the first case a relationship with a
magazine to which I had contributed for decades was shattered, and in
the second case I was subject to legal threats and a complaint to an
employer. I was struck by the number of genealogists who contacted me
at the time with messages of support and in some cases, with stories of
similar bad experiences, leading me to conclude that leaving my own
issues aside, there is a serious problem with rules and standards in
Irish genealogy which needs to be addressed. Claire Santry has bravely
decided to attempt to lance the boil and our response should be to
consider carefully what she has written and to reflect before posting
online, which I have done. Claire has posted a link to my 'Plagiarism: An Open Letter to the Genealogical Society of Ireland'
and stated an opinion that 'the GSI should respond to the claim'.
Finally, writing in a strictly personal capacity, I have to record that
while it is true that I taught many of the personnel working with
Ancestor Network, I have no link with that firm and do not endorse it in any way.
Clarification: In a recent blog entry entitled 'Polemical Corner',
Messrs Eneclann state, 'The National University of Ireland,
Dublin offers a Certificate course in Genealogy and Family History,
taught by Sean Murphy'. I have to reiterate that this course has
unfortunately been discontinued so that no new entrants can be accepted.
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25 June 2015: UCD Adult Education Certificate in Genealogy/Family History discontinued
Back
to the O'Brien Centre in University College Dublin for the annual Adult
Education awards ceremony, where the College Registrar
presented certificates to students who had completed courses.
These ceremonies are a
fitting tribute to the dedication and hard work of the students and a
time for their teachers to take pride in their achievements. Special
attention was drawn to the almost 100 students who received Access to
Arts and
Human Sciences and Access to Science and Engineering certificates. In
addition, 25 of the writer's students received Certificates in
Genealogy/Family History, a level 7 award on the National Framework of
Qualifications scale and recognition of six modules' work spread over
three years.
Unfortunately,
due to academic reorganisation and in
advance of my formal retirement in April 2016, UCD has decided to
discontinue this accredited, still very successful and, with its
emphasis on genealogy proper, probably unique Certificate course.
The course has been taught on the basis that the
discipline of genealogy/family history is a branch of historical
scholarship governed by certain principles and standards. All currently
registered students will be able to complete the course to Certificate
level, but there will be no new student intake from 2015 onwards. I
should take the opportunity to express my appreciation to the College
for allowing me to teach genealogy in an academic environment for 25
years and in particular to thank all my hundreds of students over the
years for their support. Finally, I should stress that like a growing
number of individuals, I am not 'retiring' in the standard sense, in
that
I neither can nor wish to cease working and intend to
remain active on the Irish genealogy scence in the areas of
teaching and training, research and publication.
In August I will post details of some non-accredited Adult Education
courses I will be teaching in UCD in the academic year 2015/16 starting
next September.
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24 June 2015: New Facebook Page
I have decided to start a Facebook page and my effort can be seen here. The
primary purpose of the open-content page is 'Providing information
relating to my work as an Irish genealogist, historian, lecturer and
author'. I will also feature and link to other Facebook pages with
interesting information (Facebook
pages differ from accounts or 'personal profiles', which tend to
be personal in content and restricted to smaller circles). My first two
posts relate to the historic Killruddery estate in County Wicklow and
republication on Academia.edu of my 1987 booklet on the memorial
inscriptions of St Catherine's Church and Graveyard, Dublin.
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1 June 2015: My 'Survey of Irish Surnames' article gets a boost
One of my articles on Academia.edu, 'A Survey of Irish Surnames 1992-97',
is the subject of a sudden surge of interest courtesy of Twitter and
Facebook users, with total views to date pushed over 300. Thanks
to Joe Buggy for a tweet at https://twitter.com/TownlandOrigin and to Irish Roots magazine for a Facebook post at https://www.facebook.com/IrishRootsMag.
As
the 1990s are now themselves history, I should explain that my article
was an attempt to to update Matheson's famous survey of surnames based
on the Irish births index for 1890. Whereas Matheson surveyed over
2,000 surnames, no small feat in a pre-computer age, I only managed
100. See the above table comparing the top ten surnames in the 1990s
and 1890, showing not a great deal of change over a century. There were
hopes of securing access to an Ireland-wide database of surnames
derived from telephone directories, but when this did not materialise a
more modest survey was completed. My article concludes with a tabular
analyis of the top 100 surnames 1992-97, showing estimated numbers of
bearers and distribution by telephone districts.
Incidentally, don't be too disappointed if your surname is not in the
top 100, as possessing a rarer name confers a significant advantage in
genealogical research, in that there are generally fewer entries to be
checked in records. A series of articles on surnames of the Four
Provinces of Ireland in Irish Roots
magazine has recently been completed (see blog entry 19 February 2015
below), while my next lecture/workshop outing on the subject of Irish
surnames will be at the Ancestral Connections Genealogy Summer School in University College Cork 28 June-5 July 2015.
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18 May 2015: Drone's Eye View of Bray
Head
I've
lived on Bray Head, County Wicklow, for 28 years, but the above YouTube video by Skycam Ireland
gives spectacular views of the place I have never seen. These include
the Bray Head cross from
above, the cliffs with the Sugar Loaves and Wicklow Mountains in the
background, DART trains exiting and entering tunnels, the Cliff
Walk viewed from the sea and much more. As the video clearly shows,
Bray Head is a remarkably beautiful and unspoiled environment, having been made the subject of a Special Amenity Area Order in 2007. Other County Wicklow YouTube
videos by Skycam Ireland, all taken with a drone camera, include Powerscourt Waterfall and Gardens, Glendalough, Lough Tay , the Sugarloaf Mountain and Lugnaquilla under snow.
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4 May 2015 (revised from 8 December
2014): Location of Patrick Pearse's 1916 Surrender
The
above is a famous and much reproduced photograph of the surrender to
British forces of rebel commander Patrick Pearse at the conclusion of
the Easter Rising
on 29 April 1916 (restored and enhanced by Photografix).
It has been claimed
that the surrender point was at the now closed Conway's
Bar on the south side of Parnell Street, where there is a sign to this
effect, with another suggested location further down the same side of
the street beside
the junction with Moore Street. However, the
photograph appears to show
a location on the north side of Parnell Street looking up towards the
Rotunda Hospital and the corner of Parnell Square, not too far up from
the Moore Street junction on the other side of
the road. It should be remembered that in 1916 Parnell Street was
called Great Britain Street and that subsequent road widening has
removed buildings on the south side of the street on either
side
of the Moore Street junction, but the facing north side of Parnell
Street is intact.
As is well
known, Pearse's figure is somewhat distorted by the presence at his
side of Nurse Elizabeth O'Farrell, whose feet can be clearly seen and
who had stepped back rather than being 'airbrushed from history'.
The
British Army officers pictured above are respectively, from right to
left, Brigadier-General William Lowe, commander of the British forces
in Ireland, and his son and ADC Lieutenant John Lowe, who later changed
his name to John Loder and became a Hollywood actor. As it is
understood that there are plans to erect a
commemorative plaque on the site of Pearse's surrender in advance of
the centenary of the Rising in 2016, it is obviously important to get
the location exactly right by consulting with the broadest range of
informed individuals. I have completed an article on the 1916 surrender
photograph, which is published exclusively on Academia.edu,
and would welcome feedback.
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5 March 2015: Boston Massacre Irish
connection
The History Channel's recent US
miniseries, 'The
Sons of Liberty', dramatises events leading to the American Revolution
and features the infamous 'Boston Massacre', when British soldiers shot
dead five civilians on the night of 5 March 1770. The citizens of
Boston appointed a committee composed of James Bowdoin, Dr Joseph
Warren and Samuel Pemberton, whose task was to promulgate the town's
view of the killings and to counter pro-military accounts being sent
back to Britain. It is interesting to see that the Irish patriot
Charles Lucas (see blog entry 24 January 2015 below) was also among
those to whom the committee sent their account of the Massacre, which
Lucas arranged to have reprinted in Dublin in 1770. In the same year
Lucas sent a sympathetic letter in reply to the Bostonians in which he
declared that if the Government of Britain should oppress and plunder
its dependencies, 'the bond of filial affection and duty as well as of
allegiance must be cancelled'. Lucas's significant but little-known
1770 letter to the Boston Massacre Committee, one of his last
compositions, has been republished in full by the
present writer for the first
time since the eighteenth century and can be read here.
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19 February 2015: Radio Corca Baiscinn
Interview
I was interviewed today by notable
genealogist Lorna
Moloney on her 'Genealogy Radio Show' on the County Clare-based Radio
Corca Baiscinn (audio can be played here).
The subject of the interview was Irish surnames, with special reference
to names of the Province of Munster (Counties Clare, Limerick,
Tipperary, Kerry, Cork and Waterford). We spoke about the importance to
genealogists of understanding surnames, their origins and variant
forms. Crucial entries in records may be missed if there is not an
awareness of the need to search for variants, eg,
O'Callaghan/Callaghan, McMahon/Mahon, Magee/McGee, Whelan/Phelan,
Kavanagh/Cavanagh, Carr/Kerr and so forth. It was agreed that rare
surnames are an advantage in research, in that there are less of them
to be checked in the records, while in the case of more common surnames
such as Murphy and O'Sullivan a lot more checking is involved and there
is a greater necessity to know at least approximate place of residence
within a county. We also took a look at the most common surnames in the
province of Munster, with the familiar names O'Sullivan,
Murphy,
Ryan, McCarthy, O'Connor and O'Brien topping the list. Reminding us
that Irish surnames include those of other ethnic origins, the surname
Walsh, meaning Welsh or British, is very common in Munster, while the
Norman names Fitzgerald, Power and Burke are also prominent. The above
table is from my article 'Surnames of Munster' in Irish Roots
magazine, second quarter, 2014, part of a series on the surnames of the
four provinces (digital back issues may be ordered here).
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14 February 2015: St Valentine in Dublin
Distinguishing fact from fiction in the
case of St
Valentine is not easy, as there were at least three saints of the name,
all of whom died as martyrs. St Valentine’s Feast Day falls on 14
February, on which day lovers have customarily exchanged cards and
other tokens of affection, a practice which has now spread to many
parts of the world. The Carmelite Church in Whitefriar Street in Dublin
City asserts that it holds the remains of St Valentine, but of course
other churches in Italy and elsewhere also claim this honour. Relics of
St Valentine were apparently gifted in 1836 by the then Pope to the
Carmelite preacher Fr John Spratt. These relics were placed under the
high altar in Whitefriar Street Church but after Fr Spratt's death
interest in them waned. Following the rediscovery of St Valentine's
relics during renovation work, they were relocated in 1956 to a new
shrine surmounted by a statue, and it is only since this time that
there has been active and continuous veneration of the saint in Dublin.
For further details, see my article posted on Academia.edu.
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9 February 2015: Ancestral Connections
Summer School
The Leeside campus of University College
Cork will be the location for the next Ancestral
Connections,
an Irish Genealogy Summer School scheduled to take place between 28
June and 5 July 2015. A selection of Ireland's leading genealogists
will give presentations and workshops on a range of topics and there
will also be field trips. The topics to be covered include civil
registration, census records, placenames, studies of individual
repositories, online sources, valuation records, church records and
much more. The writer is due to give a talk on Irish surnames,
concentrating on the characteristics of names at the provincial level,
followed by a workshop in which individual surnames suggested by
participants will be examined (see my ongoing series of articles on
'Surnames of the Four Provinces' in Irish Roots
magazine). The Summer School timetable and procedures for booking are here
and for further information please contact Summer School Co-Ordinator
Lorna Moloney at l.moloney@ucc.ie.
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24 January 2015: Charles Lucas
(1713-1771)
I
have uploaded to Academia.edu
a new edition of my compact biography of Charles Lucas, the
eighteenth-century Irish patriot, author and medical doctor. In
contrast to figures such as Swift and Grattan, Charles Lucas is little
remembered today and has not infrequently been dismissed as a minor
politician and anti-Catholic bigot. Born in County Clare in 1713,
probably near Ennistimon, Lucas’s earliest surviving published work
described Kilcorney Cave and the Burren. After moving to Dublin city he
trained as an apothecary and agitated against abuses in that trade.
Following his election to Dublin Corporation in 1741 Lucas led an
unsuccessful campaign for municipal reform. Lucas’s candidacy during
the Dublin by-election of 1748-49 was accompanied by copious
pamphleteering on national as well as local issues, leading to his
condemnation by parliament for alleged seditious writings and exile in
Britain and Europe. Having
qualified as a medical doctor, Lucas promoted hydrotherapy in
particular as a cure for many illnesses. Following his return from
exile in 1761 Lucas succeeded in being elected as one of Dublin's MPs,
and in parliament he continued to assert Irish autonomy and to oppose
perceived English misgovernment until his death in 1771. A case is made
that despite Lucas’s undoubted Protestant prejudices, he was more than
a mere anti-Catholic bigot, and furthermore that his ideology was
nationalist and marked a pivotal transition to the republican
separatism of the United Irishmen. Some account is also given of the
origins of Lucas's family, who were of Cromwellian stock and hailed
from Bury St Edmonds in Suffolk.
The text of A
Forgotten Patriot Doctor: Charles Lucas 1771 can be read here,
with free downloading of a PDF copy optional.
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8 January 2015: Theft of Irish Crown
Jewels
As noted
in a previous blog entry, I have uploaded quite a few scholarly
articles to my pages on Academia.edu,
where visitors can preview without restriction, but downloading of
material requires registration. The advantage for authors is that they
are given details of the numbers and countries of residence of
people visiting their sites and reading their articles. Since beginning
to upload papers in November 2014, my daily document views have ranged
from 0 to a respectable 16, but to my considerable surprise, today the
number has exceeded 100, with visitors from countries all
around
the world. The great majority of visitors are interested in one article
only, 'A Centenary Report on the Theft of the Irish Crown Jewels in
1907'. The referring site in most cases is given just as Facebook, but
a Google search indicates that Turtle Bunbury's Wistorical
Facebook page has today featured my work on the Irish Crown Jewels, so
thank you very much for the mention (perhaps I should reconsider my
decision not to join this particular social network!). The theft of the
Irish Crown Jewels by a person or persons unknown in 1907 is one of the
most famous and puzzling mysteries of Irish history, and has been the
subject of numerous books and articles, as well as several television
programmes. The Jewels were worn during functions of the Order of St
Patrick and were entrusted to the care of Ulster King of Arms,
Ireland’s chief herald and genealogist. Many and various are the
theories which have been advanced over the years to explain what
happened to the Jewels, with allegations that they were stolen by
insiders, or by Unionist conspirators eager to derail Home Rule, or by
Republican plotters seeking to embarrass the British government. My report
re-examines the affair and comes to some tentative conclusions as to
what may have happened, naming two insiders as the prime suspect and
suspect number two respectively.
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15 November 2014: Publications Posted on
Academia.edu
Writing
is one thing, but being read is another. The website Academia.edu
provides an opportunity for scholars, whether fully tenured, part-time
lecturers or independents, to upload copies of their papers
and hopefully thereby
gain a wider readership. Anyone can then preview these publications,
while those who are signed up can download full
copies for
their own use.
Academia.edu does not carry out peer review of submissions and like
operations such as Google, it is primarily interested in monetising
information online rather than upholding scholarly standards, even if
the latter is not a matter of complete unconcern. It therefore behoves
users of Academia.edu to adopt an extra-critical approach to what they
read there. Some of the papers on Academia.edu under the research
interest 'Reincarnation', for example, may provoke scepticism, but
their very presence is evidence of freedom of expression, a key
requirement for the advancement of knowledge. Of course, there is
currently perceived to be a crisis in the standard of peer review and
quality control in the case of some established journals, particularly
in the sciences (see Curt Rice's Guardian
article
of 4 October 2013), so the message must be to take absolutely nothing
on trust.
As an experiment, the writer has decided
to post a
selection of his publications from his own website on Academia.edu, on
the subjects of Irish surnames, the Gardiner Family, the Moravian
Cemetery, Whitechurch, and the eighteenth-century patriot doctor
Charles Lucas, with more to follow. Click here
for details and remember you need to register with Academia.edu to
download papers, but signing up is not required merely to view
same. As
well as making my publications more accessible, I have a
second
reason for so posting, namely, to combat plagiarism of my work by
asserting authorship in a forum more prominent than my own webpages.
One individual reproduced without permission or adequate credit copies
of a number of my statistical tables on Irish surnames (full details here),
while the website Gardiner
Street Dublin
includes a near-verbatim and again uncredited copy of my article on the
Gardiner Family (section beginning 'The north-side of Dublin, with its
elegant streets and squares, is perhaps the best surviving monument to
the Gardiner Family, which was primarily responsible for the creation
of this sector of the Georgian city'). I opened this blog with a
promise to touch on the subject of standards, and plagiarism is
certainly a growing problem in Irish genealogy as elsewhere. Again,
plagiarism is 'the copying or paraphrasing of other people’s work or
ideas without full acknowledgement' (University
of Oxford),
while publishing substantial portions of the work of others
online
or offline without permission is also in breach of the principle of
'fair use'. Beware of those who try to persuade you otherwise.
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18 October 2014: What Was Destroyed in
the Public Record Office of Ireland in 1922?
Speaking
this weekend at Back to Our Past, the genealogical segment of the Over
50's Show running in the RDS, Ballsbridge, Dublin. There were multiple
stands run by the major commercial players, educational institutions,
societies and record repositories involved in Irish genealogy,
including Ancestry.com, Findmypast.ie, UCC Adult Continuing Education,
Irish Roots
Magazine,
Association of Professional Genealogists in Ireland, Irish Genealogical
Research Society, National Archives of Ireland and
so forth. There was also an APGI-organised series of talks by leading
experts in the
world of Irish genealogy dealing with subjects such as surnames,
gravestones, military ancestors, oral tradition and much more. Nice as
well to see so many of my former and present students in attendance. I
gave a
talk on Saturday afternoon dealing with what was destroyed in the
Public Record Office of Ireland in June 1922 during the Civil War.
Having observed that blame for the destruction could be spread between
government and anti-government forces, it was noted that our best
source of information for what was lost is Herbert Wood's Guide to the Public Record
Office of Ireland,
published in 1919. It can be imagined how Wood in particular must have
felt
when he viewed the smouldering ruins of the PROI just three years later.
Wood's Guide
shows that the contents of the PROI fall under the headings of court,
parliamentary, ecclesiastical, testamentary, commission, census and
miscellaneous records. The census records, strangely listed by Wood
under 'miscellaneous', are of particular importance to genealogists and
as is well known we lost all but fragments of our pre-1901 censuses in
1922. Yet it should be noted that these fragments and the full
surviving censuses of 1901 and 1911 can now be searched freely on the
website of the National Archives, with the pre-1901 fragments only
on FamilySearch. Having gone through the census, testamentary
and
other partial survivals of 1922, I was able to conclude my talk on a
more
positive note by indicating that certain classes of records had not
been deposited in the PROI by 1922 and so survived intact, including
General Register Office, Valuation Office, Ordnance Survey, Registry of
Deeds, Irish Land Commission and other records. Watch this blog for the
announcement hopefully later this year of my online republication of
Wood's Guide,
with commentary and a new biographical account of its author, and in
the meantime a large PDF file of Wood's Guide can be
downloaded from the National Archives website.
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8 October 2014: Retaining Old Royal
Proclamations
The
Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has placed online, with a
request for public comments, schedules of legal instruments
and
orders up to and including the year 1820 which it is proposed either to
retain or revoke via the Statute Law Revision Bill 2014 (http://www.per.gov.ie/slrp/).
The revocation list is the largest, containing 4,474 items, and few
would be surprised at the scrapping of archaic proclamations such as
those 'declaring Charles II King' or 'suppressing tories and
woodkerns'. The list of instruments to be retained is much smaller,
with only 38 items, and these require close examination in order to
establish why they too are not to be revoked. The retention list is
composed mainly of licences to use names and arms, eg, to William
Burton in 1781 'to use the surname and arms of Conyngham'. Yet these
are but a fraction of such licences as were issued under the British
regime, and what relevance do they have now when bearing names and arms
is not subject to government order? The review of old legal instruments
is informed by the Irish Manuscripts Commission's recent 5-volume
publication, The Proclamations of Ireland,
1660-1820, which
costs a pricey €250 per set or €60 per volume, and given declining
library space and budgets, might have been better issued as an online
publication.
The most remarkable item which is
proposed for
retention is a proclamation of 6 February 1685 'authorising Ulster King
of Arms to prevent improper use of arms, style of esquire or gentleman,
etc.' to be known as the 'Genealogical Office Order 1685'. The
Genealogical Office within the National Library of Ireland, also known
as the Office of the Chief Herald, was mired in controversy in the
1990s in relation to its involvement in the MacCarthy
Mór
bogus Gaelic chief scandal, as a result of which its legal authority to
grant coats of arms was questioned by an Attorney General. The
implementation of Section 13 of the National Cultural Institutions Act
in 2005 is claimed to have resolved the issue of legal authority to
grant arms, but this has been challenged, and all arms grants by the
Chief Herald before that date, including those to Presidents Kennedy,
Clinton, Robinson and McAleese, were issued without proper legal
authority (see the writer's 'An
Irish Arms Crisis'). It
is difficult to comprehend why in an egalitarian modern republic it
should be considered necessary to retain, or more accurately, reanimate
archaic powers relating to coats of arms and titles such as 'esquire'
and 'gentleman'. Furthermore, because they derive from the old British
royal prerogative, it can be argued that all such pre-independence
legal instruments are null and void in any case, and they would hardly
be accepted as fit subjects for modern legislation. As to the matter of
preventing misuse of the State's quasi-heraldic emblems, the harp and
shamrock, these are currently well protected by trade marks legislation
(see Irish Patents Office webpage).
It is recommended
therefore that
the 38 ancient legal instruments due for retention should be revoked
along with the other 4,474 items.
Note: A
number of the above points were made in a letter to the Irish Edition
of the Sunday Times
published on 28 September 2014.
_______________________________________________
15 September 2014: Relationships
Genealogists
are naturally expected to be able to define relationships, but beyond
the range of
first cousins, for example, most of us will need to refer to a chart
such as the one featured above. The highlighted 'subject', which can be
yourself or another person, anchors the process and closer
relationships such as parents, children, grandparents,
brothers/sisters, etc, are quite easy to comprehend. First cousins, as
can be seen, are the children of one's uncles/aunts and can also be
defined as sharing grandparents with the subject but having different
parents.While many prefer to use the terms 'great uncle' and 'great
aunt' for the siblings of one's grandparents, others use the more
consistent 'granduncle' and 'grandaunt' to match 'grandfather' and
'grandmother', as is done in the above chart. When we come to first
cousins once removed, things become more complicated, in that there are
two sets of these in different generations, namely, the children of
one's granduncles/aunts and the children of one's first cousins. We end
our chart with third cousins thrice removed, but the scheme can be
continued to include fourth and fifth cousins, and so on.
Once the pattern is understood, degrees
of
consanguinity or blood relationship are not difficult to estimate, in
that we count from the subject to the common ancestor and then down to
the
specified individual. Hence as shown above, there is one degree of
consanguinity between
a subject and their parents and their own children, two degrees between
a subject and their grandparents and their own grandchildren, three
degrees between a subject and their great-grandparents and their own
nephews/nieces, and so it continues. Finally, the distinction between
direct and
collateral relationships should be noted, the first referrring to
descent
through a single line, the second to descent from a common ancestor but
through different lines. Thus we are directly descended
from grandparents but have a collateral relationship to
cousins.
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
21
July 2014: GRO Online Indexes Withdrawn _______________________________________________
18
July 2014: Molly Malone Statue _________________________________________________
3
July 2014: UCC Summer School and GRO Indexes Online _________________________________________________
26
June 2014: Awarding of Certificates in Genealogy _________________________________________________
20
June 2014: Irish Roots
Magazine _________________________________________________
Of
course it was too good to be true. The free-access
indexes to the birth, marriage and death registers of the General
Register Office (GRO) on the IrishGenealogy.ie
website, launched to
great fanfare on 3 July as described below, have been removed on the
direction of the Data Protection Commissioner, Billy Hawkes. This was
done on the basis that the site exposed sensitive personal information
such as dates of birth and mothers' maiden names
for all to see, including possible identity thieves. I must admit that
I was surprised to find that the site included births, marriages and
deaths up to as recently as last year, but assumed that this had been
approved with relevant authorities such as Hawkes, which it clearly had
not. Coming hard on the heels of the Garth Brooks cancelled concerts
fiasco, this
episode is another of the periodic avoidable cock-ups which
characterise this country, in both of these cases essentially good
rules being
applied
retrospectively and
destructively following failure of forethought. However, Hawkes's
reported comments in today's Irish
Times
indicate that he thinks online genealogical research should be confined
to 'dead people', a doctrinaire view which if carried through
absolutely would greatly limit family historians. One does not want to
be too hard on the Department of Arts, which after all had been trying
to do something to improve access to GRO records in the face of that
office's lack of movement, but really, all the angles should have been
checked first. The General Register Office of Northern Ireland makes
its records available online according to the following scheme: births
over 100 years old, marriages over 75 years old and deaths over 50
years old. One hopes that a revised online service along these lines
will be provided for the vital records of this state without too much
further delay, but don't hold your breath.
Having
been moved from her place at the end of Dublin's Grafton Street as a
result of Luas tram extension works and undergone a bit of a sprucing
up as well, the famous Molly Malone statue is being relocated today to
nearby Suffolk Street. Pending planned restoration to her old perch
when the Luas works are complete, Molly will now stand outside the
Dublin Tourism Office in the old Church of Ireland St Andrew's Church,
where believe it or not, it has been preposterously claimed she was
baptised in 1663.
The statue commemorating the heroine of the ballad 'Cockles and
Mussels' was erected in 1988 and has become one of the most iconic
images of Dublin, being known affectionately to citizens as the 'Tart
with the Cart' as a result of a bizarre claim that Molly was a
part-time prostitute as well as a fishmonger. Her impact outside
Ireland is shown by the fact that there is an international empire of
Molly Malone pubs and restaurants in places as far apart as Paris,
Stockholm, Los Angeles and Singapore.
But
can we get past the still developing Molly legend and establish
something of the truth about her origins? Firstly, it must be said that
the girl in (very low-cut) seventeenth-century dress
represented
by the statue is the product not of careful historical, genealogical
and musicological research but of a great deal of imagination and
supposition. Our principal historical document has to be the song
'Cockles and Mussels' itself, which first appeared in print in the
later nineteenth century and whose lyrics give no indication of a
seventeenth-century ambience. Indeed in Walton's Music
mid-twentieth
century sheet-music
edition of 'Cockles and Mussels' their artist portrayed Molly
in
nineteenth-century dress, obviously not as a real person but as a
representative type,
also correctly pushing a wheel barrow as specified by the lyrics of the
song in contrast to the
cart strangely featured in the statue. Note also the
silhouette of the now destroyed Nelson's Pillar in the background of
the old Walton's image above, which places Molly north of the Liffey,
where her modern counterparts still sell fish in Moore Street, and this
portrayal would have been a much more suitable inspiration for a
statue. At this stage, however, historical accuracy has been well and
truly sidelined and poor Molly, kitschy, fanciful and fishy in every
sense of the word, will continue to stand wherever they put her as a
symbol of Dublin city and how it wishes to be seen by the world. For
more on the subject, see my longer article on Molly
Malone.
PS
Totally misreading the above, the Herald
newspaper of 19 July 2014 reported as follows: 'The real-life Molly was
baptised in the church in 1663, according to genealogist Sean
Murphy'.To aid the irony deficient, I have now added the word
'preposterously' to the entry above. 
A busy Thursday
which started in Cork and ended back in Dublin. I was honoured to be
included on the speakers' list for the Ancestral Connections
Genealogy Summer School in University College Cork (the only such
genealogical speaking invitation to be received this year). Organiser
Lorna
Moloney demonstrated that genealogy is now being taken more seriously
as an academic subject by assembling on the campus of one of Ireland's
leading universities a team of expert speakers who addressed a serious
and involved group of students on a broad range of topics, including
civil, mapping, online, property, graveyard, newspaper, church and
other records, with some field trips thrown in. More advanced topics
dealt with by speakers included DNA analysis and medieval genealogy,
while I gave a Munster-oriented talk on Irish surnames. UCC's is a very
attractive campus beside the River Lee and on the way back to Kent
Railway Station I
stopped into the restaurant of Hotel Isaacs on MacCurtain Street, which
has a natural waterfall in a garden to the rear.
Returning
to Dublin that afternoon I made my way to the elite Royal Irish Academy
in Dawson Street for what was flagged as a very important enhancement
of state services for genealogists. Arts Minister Jimmy Deenihan
and Social Protection Minister Joan Burton jointly launched
free-access indexes to the birth, marriage and death registers of the
General Register Office (GRO) on the IrishGenealogy.ie
website, which appear to be relatively up to date. The GRO is an agency
of Social Protection which despite expenditure of millions has hitherto
failed to roll out an online research service, so praise is due to Arts
for having helped to break the logjam somewhat. The event was treated
as an
entirely new development, with no-one mentioning that the Mormon FamilySearch
site has for a number of years provided free access to their database
version of Irish vital records indexes up to the year 1958 (now copied
on FindMyPast.ie and Ancestry.co.uk).
Back at
base I
naturally gave the new IrishGenealogy.ie site a try, but was somewhat
put out to have to sign in first, then fill in a 'Captcha' and after
what seemed quite a wait was informed that there was no record of the
birth of my late mother Eileen Mary Keating in 1918. (The following day
I
managed to locate the entry by dropping the registered second name
'Mary' and the registration district indicator 'North' after 'Dublin'.
In the process of undertaking this and other sample checks I made the
additional discovery that yearly quarters have unfortunately been
dropped from the online indexes, but on the plus side mother's maiden
name is generally included in the case of birth entries from about
1900.)
Without any kind
of bureacratic barriers, FamilySearch quickly provided index details
for
the birth record of my mother in 1918, the respective search results
being shown in the screenshots above. Another point not mentioned in
the overly-congratulatory ceremony at the RIA was the fact that a full
online service for genealogists has yet to be provided, in that once
the index details of a birth, marriage or death have been found, a copy
of the full registration still has be purchased offline at a cost of €4
each, either in person at the GRO facility in Werburgh Street or by
postal application (there is an expensive online full certificate
ordering service at Certificates.ie,
costing €20 each). Unless the new service improves, it may be advisable
to use FamilySearch first for index searches
before 1958, then use the IrishGenealogy.ie site for double-check
searches and searches post-1958, also where relevant do not forget
Northern Ireland's online GRO
service.
To
the new O'Brien
Centre for Science in University College Dublin, Belfield, for
the
awarding by the Registrar of Certificates in Genealogy/Family History
to 34 of my students (I am at the back right in the above photo, for
which thanks to Orla). This was part of the annual UCD Adult Education
Awards Ceremony and my genealogy students joined others who
had
completed Access courses in Arts, Human Sciences and Science and
Engineering. This happens to be the largest final genealogy class I
have ever taught in my 25 years in UCD, indicating the continuing
popularity of the subject. The students undertook six 25-hour
modules spread over three years of night classes, completing
assignments on their own ancestors, other families and related
subjects. That's a substantial amount of work and just cause
for
pride and a sense of achievement. The Certificates in Genealogy/Family
History are graded at Level 7 of the National Framework of
Qualifications and carry 30 ECTS (European Credit Transfer and
Accumulation System) credits. The next three-year cycle of the
Certificate course in Genealogy/Family History will commence in late
September 2014, while the UCD Adult Education programme with
details of a wide range of courses and guidance on enrolment procedures
should be available online in August (see my webpage for further
particulars and contact details).
Okay,
okay, the're all at it in genealogy as in other spheres, Facebooking,
tweeting and blogging I mean. I continue to resist the time-consuming
temptations of the first two social media, but will belatedly get on
board the bloggers' bandwagon, if only to help keep my views and ideas
in circulation, which to some I know can appear 'eccentric'.
I'm a trained historian working in genealogical research, writing and
education, not as second best but frequently frustrated by the tendency
of some practitioners both amateur and professional to overlook the
fact that genealogy is a branch of history subject to its rules and
standards (of which probably more anon). Don't expect me to be as
regular and informed a blogger as John
Grenham or Claire Santry,
for example, but hopefully my tuppence worth will add something to the
babel of voices in the currently hyperactive world of Irish ancestor
hunting.
What
will I blog about first? How about a venerable
institution in Irish genealogy, on the go since 1992, that is, Irish Roots
magazine. It's the publication we go to for information on the latest
developments online and offline and for a range of interesting articles
on various aspects of Irish genealogy. The Summer issue is out and
features pieces on the Military Service Pensions Collection and Cumann
na mBan records, tracing Your County Galway ancestors and undertaking
your own digitisation project.
Oh, I almost forgot, there's an article by myself on the surnames of
Munster, the first in a four-part series which will deal with each of
the provinces in turn. Next up Connacht, followed by Leinster and
Ulster, and a principal theme will be reminding people that many Gaelic
surnames have multiple rather than single 'clan' origins, for example,
the Murphy sept of Munster which is unrelated to the Murphy septs of
Leinster and other areas, or the O'Connor sept of Connacht which is
unrelated to O'Connor septs in Munster and elsewhere.
PS Thanks
to Susan for the mugshot of me at the top of the page.
