On the Fiddle

I could have been Bob Dylan, but then I wouldn't be able to play the harmonica, or the mouth organ as it was vulgarly known in my day. I could even have been Joan Baez, but the gender transition might have been painful.

I could have been Bill Clinton, but then I would have had to sleep with the harridan, initially at least.

So I am glad I opted for the Fritz Kreisler route. It has brought me lots of fulfilment and variety in my life. I have played in the Workman's Club with a well known and talented accompanist (above). I have "entertained" the orphans in Stanhope Street convent on many a Stephen's Day. I have played the Francis Xavier and Father Mathew Halls. I have twice played for President de Valera and Sinéad, in the Coláiste Mhuire and Gate theatres. I have made a record in Billy McBurney's studio in Central Belfast during the height of the Troubles. I have even appeared on RTÉ television, no less (below). And all with the fiddle in hand.

So to hell with the international circuit and the crashes and the comebacks. There's no place like home when you're on the fiddle.

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Shoots, Leaves and Branches

It's time again to report progress on growing the family tree. I have been solidly hacking at it now for almost two years and am amazed and fascinated by what has emerged in that time.

I was relatively (no pun intended) ignorant when I started out. I had met some family members and had bits of paper and photos relating to others, but in the overall I was very vague on the whole thing. I now know a lot more about the family, including more about the members of some of the far flung branches than they know themselves. Tricky that.

There are now over 500 people, between living and dead, entered in the tree. At some points it spans 9 generations and the earliest births are around 1800. I should really be concentrating on going back further, at least as far as my own ancestors are concerned, but I have found so much fascinating material on the way that I have allowed myself to be seduced into filling out the blanks on those I have already discovered, and moving sideways rather than backwards as my curiosity about some of these people is aroused.

Occurrences
In the tree generally, and not confined strictly to ancestors, I have 3 drownings, 4 generations of coopers (5 coopers in all), 4 members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, 3 British Army (including one who died on the Somme in WWI), and for balance one rebel sentenced to death by the British, commuted to 15 years penal servitude, released within months on the signing of the Treaty, took up arms against the new Irish Government and spent most of the rest of his life interned by his own.

I have 3 native Irish speaking ancestors.

The tree now covers 18 of the 26 counties and among the 70 separate occupations identified so far some of the more esoteric are: Attorney General, Alderman, Blacksmith, Barman, Dance Instructor, Detective, Fireman (railway steam engine), Lock-keeper (Grand Canal), Neurosurgeon, Pawnbroker, Royalette (Theatre Royal dancing chorus), Signalman (railway), Timekeeper (?), TD (Member of Irish Parliament) and Silkweaver.

Some deaths are memorable: in one case a mother and two daughters-in-law died from the same kidney complaint which can be caused, inter alia, by mercury poisoning; in another case the death certificate records the cause of death of an 89 year old female ancestor as old age - without dementia. I'd say she gave the Lord a run for his money when she turned up on his doorstep.

I have also met family members I didn't know I had. One of these found me when he put his Granny's name into Google and got one hit - my website, where his past was all laid out before him, like one of those TV chefs taking a dish out of the oven which they just happen to have put in earlier.

Background
Pursuing the tree has given me an interest in subjects which passed me by in the past:

• the functions and history of Dublin Corporation (now Dublin City Council). The Council has a long and chequered history, including in relation to the national struggle, and I had an Alderman relation on the Council during some of its most turbulent years in the early 20th Century, when it was even abolished for a number of years.
  
  
• the history and geography of Dublin city. This includes urban planning in general and, in particular, water supply and sewerage systems in which James's St. was central for a period. There are plans underway for regenerating the Liberties, including the old harbour and basin area behind James's St. and I have been following, and participating in, the recent the planning consultations for this project.
  
• Guinness has been a significant player in the development of not only the area around James's St., but of Dublin in general as far as employee social welfare and housing were concerned. The company has opened its personnel archive to interested parties and I have got the employee records of three out of the five coopers so far.
  
• the RIC, while operating as a native police force, was also the ears, eyes and arms of the Crown and many of its members found themselves in tricky situations as a result.
  
• WWI had more or less passed me by until I found that an uncle had died in a botched operation on the Somme and a grand uncle, while injured, had survived the war and returned to hard times in Dublin.
  
• Catholic Emancipation more or less passed me by in the history class in school, but in real life it may well have opened up opportunities for my ancestors and their relations and I can't get away from Glasnevin cemetery (the dead centre of Dublin) where many of my relatives are buried. Daniel O'Connell got this non-denominational cemetery established to facilitate Catholics (mainly) who were subject to a certain amount of harassment at funerals to Established Church graveyards.
  
• my faith in the Divine Database has unfortunately been shattered by this exercise. The system where you had to produce a recently issued baptism cert to get married and where the marriage was then entered on the original baptism register, looked, on the face of it, like a beautifully closed system which protected against bigamy. However, when you factored in human behaviour the system proved to be full of holes. Pity, it looked great on paper, so to speak.
  
• I have also learned the irrelevance of administrative boundaries when it comes to settlement. People may get very attached to their county football team, and you may be lucky to live under a County Council which provides a better service than others, but when you are tracing back family origins and attempting to disentangle the cousins from one another, such boundries are irrelevant. For example, East Limerick and North Tipperary are all the one, genealogically speaking, and it is sometimes not even clear which county a particular village is in, or at least to which it owes its primary allegiance.
  

Techniques
The exercise has also put pressure on my own technical competence, in a very constructive way:

• I can be a bit scattered so I was using a free family tree computer programme to store, manipulate and report my findings. I was getting so much material and my ambitions for presenting it were increasing at such a rate that I invested in a more advanced programme which is great but where I am still on a sharp learning curve.
  
• I have always enjoyed taking photos and this venture has put me, my new digital camera, and my photo processing package through our paces.
  
• I originally put up a page on my website to carry family material and this has now grown to over half the site. I can practically talk HTML in my sleep at this stage, but the presentation of the material still continues to be challenging and puts pressure on me to master new techniques. I have also enlisted the help of Feedblitz which emails interested parties when I update the site, and have managed to tweak the system so as not to send out alerts for trivial updates.
  
• and finally, the most recent technical addition to my armoury - Google maps. I had intended, from the beginning, producing a map showing the geographical spread of the family, particularly in Dublin city itself. However, hardcopy versions become quickly outdated and are not scaleable. Enter Google maps and a little bit of code-nicking and hey presto!
  

Sources
I have had great fun following up sources and squeezing them dry. I exaggerate - so far I have only creamed the surface. I have pored over indexes of births, deaths and marriages and then over the certs themselves. I have read wills that would make you weep. I have visited graves that would bring tears to your eyes, both of sadness and anger, and sometimes even a wry smile. I have got eyestrain from the small and often fudgy print in newspapers, not to mention the microfilm version of them. I have cursed the sloppy digital archiving of newspapers and despaired at the wanton destruction of housing rent records and photo-archives. I have enjoyed picking up on oral history from family members, both old and new. And I look forward to the promised unveiling of the 1911 Census (Dublin) online in the next few days.

You can catch up on all of this, as well as staying in touch with future developments, here.

Irish Solutions - Confucius, him say

I got to thinking recently about some Irish solutions to Irish problems over the years and thought I should share the fruits of our native inventiveness with a wider audience, so here goes.

Traffic lit roundabouts
I always thought roundabouts and traffic lights were alternative solutions to a traffic flow problem.

If, for example, you are trying to sort out traffic coming from four directions you can use a roundabout.

This has the following benefits:

• it is eco-friendly - no electricity used - static signage
  
• it does not delay traffic when there is no one on the roundabout
  

But it can have one big disadvantage. If the traffic flow on one axis predominates, such as with a main highway versus a minor crossing road, the low priority road may never get a look in.

In this case you need to use traffic lights, even if the timing needs to be varied depending on time of day or observed traffic flows.

Ireland has combined these two methods to give us the roundabout with traffic lights. The lights are just at the entry, and exit, points of the roundabout, and the chaos is appaling.

The site of one, at least, of these monstrosities, is at Ireland's first official roundabout in Artane on the northside of Dublin. Since writing this I have been through the roundabout at Dublin Airport which reminded me that this must be the mother of all trafficlit roundabouts. A webcam at this roundabout would provide weeks, if not months, of uninterrupted entertainment to rival anything Big Brother has to offer.

Oddly even numbers
I have seen street numbered in many different ways.

• Numbers can go up on one side and come back down on the other.
  
• numbers can progress along a street with odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other, but both ascending in the same direction. These can sometimes get out of phase depending on the incidence of number interrupters, like other streets, on either side, but it is usually manageable.
  
• you can have the odd effect in a cul de sac of numbers starting at the far end on one side, rising as they come towards you at the entrance, jumping across the entrance, and going on up the other side. You then see two adjacent numbers at the entrance and it can be difficult to know whether it is worth entering the cul de sac in pursuit of a particular number.

But I really came across a gem recently when trying to match up numbers before and after a number of separately numbered terraces were inegrated into a unified numbering system for the road.

The odd numbers start at one end of the road and go along one side, while the even numbers start at the other end and go in the opposite direction on the other side.

Mindboggling, but, perversely in my case, very welcome as for some reason, the terrace I was interested in started from 1 and had only odd numbers, which it fortuitously kept under the new system. So No. 31 was still No.31 after the changeover. My thanks to the mad hoor who thought that one up. [The terrace was Park View Terrace, and the road Brookfield Road, in the Old Kilmainham quarter of Dublin city.]

Bona fide contraception
In the first half of the last century the environment in Ireland was very repressive. There was strict censorship (sex not violence) and contraception was not available, unless you opted for abstention, coitus interruptus (also known as Vatican Roulette), or oral or anal sex, and the last two of these were considered immoral and abhorrent.

A woman could get the pill, supposedly to regularise periods, but this not only put the onus on the woman, it also left her open to the long term side effects of the medication.

Then Charlie Haughey thought up an Irish solution to an Irish problem. Contraceptives (ie condoms) would be made available on prescription to married couples who were practicing bona fide contraception.

In other words only those who were entitled to have babies were allowed to avoid having them. QED.


The empty oath
One of the things that kept Fianna Fáil out of the Dáil (Irish parliament) in the latter half of the 1920s was the requirement for deputies to to take an oath of allegiance to the Free State and of fidelity to the British King in his role as a symbol of the Commonwealth.

De Valera realised that to get into power he would have to take the oath, so he announced in advance that he considered it an empty formula and abolished it once he came to power.

Túsáite
There are two official languages in Ireland. The first one (Irish/Gaeilge) and the other one (English/Sacsbhéarla).

For the most part, or virtually entirely, the country lives its life through the medium of English and has done so for the last 200 years. As a result, its laws are conceived in English, drafted in English, debated in English, adopted in English and ultimately implemented in English.

There is a constitutional requirement that versions should also be available in the Irish language and these are invariably produced as translations from the English and published with a lag, which can be up to a fair number of years.

But here's the rub. In the event of a dispute over the meaning of a piece of legislation, the Irish language version takes precedence.

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Believe it or not.