"...to seek and to find the past, a lineage, a history, a family built on a flesh and bone foundation."

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Happy Easter to you and yours!

In the treasure trove of old cards sent to our family from Ireland, and kept for years by my mother, is this one. Cards sent to our family at Easter time were usually deeply religious in nature, and so this silly little one stands quite apart from the others.

So..'ears' to you on this Easter day. May you enjoy it with your family and friends.


HAPPY EASTER TO YOU AND YOURS!

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Famine Fact: Not every famine ship was a coffin ship: An Gorta Mór 1845-52

Did you know?

Not every Famine ship was a Coffin Ship
The Jeanie Johnston, Custom House Quay, Dublin, Ireland.
The Dunbrody, New Ross, County Wexford, Ireland.
A little tiny bit of good news here.

The term 'coffin ships' is a very useful one because it expresses the real suffering and the significant number of deaths which occurred onboard most of the immigrant ships travelling to North America during the period of An Gorta Mór, The Great Famine of 1845-52. However, not every ship was a coffin ship. A few had a very low rate of mortality, and at least one had no loss of life onboard at all.

Each one of the replica ships pictured above — The Jeanie Johnston and The Dunbrody — is docked as a tourist attraction in Ireland, and each ship has a history of success during the Great Famine.

The Jeanie Johnston has the most successful history of all, since not a single passenger or crew member was ever lost onboard the ship. In fact, on her maiden voyage of April 1848, a baby boy was born. Between April 1848 and 1855, the ship completed 16 voyages to North America, landing at the Port of Quebec, as well as at Baltimore and New York. It took an average of 47 days for the Jeanie Johnston to make the voyage, and yet not a single person died onboard.

Although the record of the Dunbrody is not spotless, over the history of her travel during the Great Famine, only eight lives were lost. Between 1845 and 1851 the Dunbrody carried thousands of immigrants to North America, carrying anywhere from 160 passengers per journey to over 300. In 1847 she is recorded as carrying 313 passengers to Quebec.

When you consider that thousands of people perished at sea during the Great Famine, this stands as good news, although most certainly not for the families of those eight lost.

In the case of both the Jeanie Johnston and the Dunbrody, the excellent survival rate of their passengers is attributed to their captains. The Jeanie Johnston also carried a doctor, Dr. Richard Blennerhassett, as a member of the crew who cared for the passengers on their journey.

As noted above, both of the currently docked ships are replicas of ships which were once used to carry immigrants to North America. Neither one of these replicas has ever carried an actual famine victim onboard. The Jeanie Johnston replica was christened in May of 2000, and the Dunbrody replica was christened in February of 2001.  These ships were purpose built in order to give an idea of what it may have been like to travel onboard such a ship during the Famine period, and serve to illustrate the close quarters in which large numbers of immigrants travelled. The Dunbrody is docked in New Ross, County Wexford, and the Jeanie Johnston is docked at the Custom House Quay in Dublin City.

If you believe one of your ancestors may have travelled on a real famine ship then you may want to search The Irish Emigration database on the Dunbrody website. The database is compiled directly from original Ships' Passenger Manifests, and includes the records of Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh immigrants arriving at the main US ports. For the port of New York, the database covers the years between 1846 and 1890. For Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, the database covers only the famine years between 1846 and 1851. Access to the database is free through this website, and printouts of the information are available for a fee.

If you believe one of your family members may have perished onboard a famine ship bound for the Port of Quebec, then visit the searchable Immigrants at Grosse-Île Database, which includes information about the 4,936 people who died on ships at sea, on the St. Lawrence River or on quarantined ships at Grosse Île from 1832 to 1922.

If you are searching for famine immigrants who landed in the United States, see the NARA (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) website search page Irish Famine Passenger Records . On this site the records of immigrants to the Americas during the Famine period is not exclusively limited to the Irish born. In the Irish Famine Passenger Records approximately 30 percent of the passengers list their native country as other than Ireland.

In addition, on the Ships' List website, there are a number of well detailed passenger lists for those who emigrated from Ireland during the period of the Great Famine, as well as many passenger lists for other periods of emigration.

References

Crowley, John, and William J Smyth, Mike Murphy, editors. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, New York University Press, New York, 2012.
O'Gallagher, Marianna. Grosse-Île: Gateway to Canada, Carraig Books, 1984.


Copyright©irisheyesjg2013.
Click on images to view larger versions.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Oh, I love technology, except when I don't...

This isn't a rant. Honest! It is just an update with an apology to anyone who tried to send either a comment to this blog, or an email via gmail to me, on Thursday 7 March. My new internet provider (insert name of big conglomerate here), who bought my old smaller dependable internet provider, "inadvertently caused delay and deletion in error". They keep sending me apology emails with listings of the subject matter of what they deleted, but can offer nothing more. So far, they are up to 14 inadvertent deletions.

So... my apologies to anyone who sent a comment or a message and is wondering why I have not replied. Please send it again, if you feel so inclined. Apparently the idiots are now running the asylum, so stay tuned, I have a feeling I may see the words 'inadvertent deletion' show up again.

Also on the technology front, I have closed my Twitter account for now. Once again, for what is the umpteenth time — I love that word 'umpteenth' — my Twitter account was hacked. Twitter sends me those lovely emails telling me I am part of that segment of their population whose accounts "may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter". Despite the fact that I use very strong passwords, and change them regularly, in January I was hacked twice, and received a lot of email from annoyed Twitter followers telling me I'd been hacked. Again on Friday, the same thing happened, so for now, at least until Twitter solves their security issues, this bird is keeping her beak shut on Twitter.

Cheers,
Jennifer

Image credit: Google images, and also to Carol at Reflections From the Fence, who I know can relate to technology issues.


Thursday, March 7, 2013

News from Find My Past Ireland and a free offer

FindMyPast.ie is hosting an Irish Family History Centre in Dublin from Thursday 14 March until Monday 18 March, and if you have the opportunity to attend this event I hope you will take it. When I was in Dublin in January I stopped by the building in which the event is to take place, and they were then beginning the refit of the space, in preparation for this event. It is the perfect venue, an old church building, formerly outfitted solely as a tourist centre.

Not to worry, if you don't have the opportunity to attend the event, then be sure to stop by the Find My Past Ireland website, on that weekend, since they will be offering free credits to view materials on their website. It will give you the chance to see the kinds of materials to which they offer access. The site is particularly good for viewing old prison registers and county directories, and they regularly add lots of new material which you may find of value to your research. By the way, I am not a paid spokesperson for Find My Past, I have simply found the site to be useful.

This morning I received the following press release about the event from Find My Past Ireland:


FINDMYPAST.IE to host Irish Family History Centre
  • Free event offering access to millions of family history records
  • Expert genealogists on-site to help ‘find your past’
Thursday, 7th March 2013: – Family History website,  findmypast.ie, will be taking over the Discover Ireland Centre, Suffolk Street from Thursday 14th – Monday 18th March to create an ‘Irish Family History Centre,’ in association with The Gathering Ireland.  The Centre will be free all weekend and is open to the general public. Findmypast.ie is encouraging everyone curious about their family history to come along over the St Patrick’s Day Weekend, to avail of free expert advice, lectures and access to the company’s more than 65 million Irish family history records.
The Centre will be open from Thursday 14th to Monday 18th March, and those interested in enquiring about genealogy or looking for help with their family tree can visit without appointment, and speak to the findmypast.ie team. Computers will be available throughout the Centre providing free access to the website  and its 65 million records,  including births, marriages and deaths, newspapers, criminal registers and travel and migration archives .
There are up to 80 million people around the world claiming Irish ancestry and findmypast.ie General Manager Cliona Weldon is expecting a large interest, not just from Irish guests, but from visitors further afield: “St Patrick’s Day is always a busy time of year for us at findmypast.ie with people from home and abroad keen to unearth their Irish connections. We are expecting huge numbers over the St Patrick’s Festival Weekend coming to visit us to help find their past, and we are really looking forward to seeing what great stories we can uncover for them..
 “What better time to trace your roots and celebrate being Irish than on St. Patrick’s Weekend? People from all over the world can reach out to our site to claim their Irish heritage. Despite our economic woes and our bad weather, it seems that everybody still wants to be Irish!  With over 22 American Presidents and a host of well known figures from Walt Disney to Britney Spears having claimed Irish ancestry, it seems being Irish is always in fashion.”
For those who cannot make it to the Irish Family History Centre next weekend, findmypast.ie will be offering free credits on the website throughout the weekend on www.findmypast.ie 
*****************


Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Third Blogiversary: The lessons in looking back

In a way is it hard for me to believe it has been three years since I wrote the first post for this blog on 6 March 2010. Up to that point I had already been writing for years, and even had the opportunity to teach writing when I was in graduate school. Still, I felt much trepidation over my very brief first post, because it meant a foray into an entirely different medium.

That first post, entitled 'With the help of O'Connell's Angels', was an invocation of sorts to my favourite Dublin ladies, the angels which surround the base of O'Connell's statue in Dublin. It was also an invocation to my ancestors to continue to aid me in my ongoing search for their history, and the accurate dissemination of the facts of their lives.

As I have shared in the description of this blog, my search for my family has taken me across Ireland into a history which has included both the glorious and the ignoble, the beautiful and the profane.

Although I have not always been entirely comfortable with all aspects of the information found, I am very grateful for all that I have uncovered. The course of many years of conducting family history research has taught me a number of lessons, five of which I will share here.

1. Blood is definitely thicker than water.

It seems no matter how far back in time my research takes me, I feel a sort of protectiveness about my ancestors and relatives, and their respective stories. I have suffered heartbreak over the loss of members of my family, including young children who died needlessly, and young men who fell on the fields of battle in Europe during the First World War. So too, those connections make me want to be in the places in which my ancestors and relatives once lived and died, to tread where they once did. My connection to Tom Kettle, and the two Williams, Dunne and Pell, will take me this summer to the battlefields of France on which they once fought, and where Tom is memorialized, and to the graves of the two Williams in Belgium to pay my respects.

My connection by blood leads me to continue the search for the story of my maternal fifth great-grandmother, for whom I have only a name and an approximate year of birth: Ally Howard, circa 1740. I am intrigued by Ally in part because of her forename. In a period in which the names of other family members were recorded in a more formal fashion, on the baptismal records of her children, she is simply 'Ally'.  Although her granddaughter Ally Cavenagh was christened Ally, she always wore the name Allice. It seems Ally Howard is the only Ally in the family tree. For some inexplicable reason I feel a real affinity with Ally, and hope to learn more of her story.

'INSTRUCTION' on the left, and 'PEACE' on the right.
Two of the four female figures which sit atop the complex in Dublin called Government Buildings.
2. The more you look to the past for family connections, the more you may come to understand those closest to you.

Occasionally my mother used to talk to me about her grand-aunt Alice, my great-grand-aunt. When I was a child the story of Alice frightened me because she seemed to me to be a woman of unbounded cruelty who would beat my mother and her siblings with a wooden cane. What I found to be most cruel was that the thrashing was never delivered immediately following an infraction, but instead sometime later, and usually when the child was in a happy mood. I describe one such incident in the post entitled 'Tittering Lily', and childhood tales of Ringsend.

Despite this sort of treatment from Alice, my mother always spoke of her with great love, and over the course of doing family history research I have come to understand why. Alice is remembered with love because she held together their family unit. Also, for the youngest children who had no memory of their mother, Alice, for all intents and purposes, took on that role. Without Alice, the children may have been taken away from their father following the death of their mother.

St. Patrick's Church, Ringsend, Dublin. The church in which my parents were married.
3. Family History is not always on the page; often it is right in front of you.

In the time following the death of my mother, I learned more about the connections within my mother's family, and about who shows up in such situations and who does not, who is compassionate and who is not. On a very positive note, as I shared in the post entitled 'Life lessons from my brother', I learned from my older brother as he bravely faced the loss of his closest friend. I have also learned a lot about my own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to dealing with profound loss.

Above: Bray Head in County Wicklow
Below: A thatched cottage in the Boyne Valley, County Louth.
4. Family History is not just about names and dates.

Family History is also about the places and spaces our ancestors and family members once occupied, and how those places impacted their lives. Even if the houses in which they lived no longer exist, we can still get a sense of what life was like for them.

Did they live in the shadow of a mountain, or at the edge of the sea? Were their lives bounded by the narrow spaces of a tenement life, or did they thrive in a cottage in a seaside village? Did they live and work the tenant farm nearest to the Lord's castle, or did they live in the castle itself, and bear the titles of Lord and Lady?


Elements in the natural world also connect us to our ancestors, on an unbroken chain through time. Our tenth great-grandparents rose to the same sun which awakens us each morning. They gazed at the light of the same moon which hangs in our skies at night. As the tide begins its rhythmic movement, drawing sea water out and then back into Clew Bay in Mayo or Dublin Bay in Howth, I know my ancestors might have watched the rush of the water in much the same way I am seeing it now.

5. There is always room for a little levity. 

One of the things I most love about family history is those stories which round out the history of our family. Some of my fondest childhood memories relate to stories my parents told me, both the amusing and the poignant, such as the story in one of my favourite posts: 'Cycling Apparitions' in the Castle ruins: An Irish Story.

There are many other lessons I've learned over the years while doing family history research, but for now I'll leave it at these five. Researching the past also means looking to the future, and as I celebrate this blogiversary I look forward with joyful anticipation to all that is yet to come in terms of research and writing.

Finally, I want to sincerely thank each and every one of you who continue to share this journey with me. I am truly very grateful!

THANK YOU!!!

Cheers,
Jennifer

Detail from a stained glass window in St. Patrick's Church, Ringsend, Dublin.
Copyright©irisheyesjg2013.
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