The Oral, Archival and Genetic Heritage of Ireland

Paddy Waldron

Tralee Library

1:30 p.m. Wednesday 16 May 2018

WWW version:

http://pwaldron.info/WSU2018/

YouTube version:

TBA

History, culture, folklore, heritage and tradition flow from place to place and down through the generations via three channels:

1. Oral traditions are passed down through the generations, actively and passively, from older family members to younger family members.
2. Archival sources, offline and online, written and digital, are traditionally used by historians and genealogists to fill some of the gaps in the oral history.
3. For genealogists, genetic evidence embodied in our DNA now fills many of the remaining gaps left by the traditional sources.

This talk will provide examples of how local history and genealogy (micro-history), like all aspects of Irish history, are created, nurtured, transformed, contested and transmitted.

• Oral history and tradition was passed on at regular social occasions:
• cuaird
• creamery
• forge
• church, especially weddings and funerals
• Oral genealogies were written down by
• Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh (Leabhar na nGenealach)
• John O'Hart (Irish Pedigrees)
• Nollaig Ó Muraíle
• Burke (Peerage, Landed Gentry of Ireland, Irish Family Records)
• More general folklore is being preserved by
• Schools’ Folklore Scheme (1937-38)
• part of the National Folklore Collection
• Cuimhneamh an Chláir, the Clare oral history & folklore group
• Irish Life & Lore
• The tradition includes:
• genealogy
• local and general history
• music
• superstitions, e.g. holy wells
• cures
• farming practices
• boat-building techniques
• etc., etc.
• Digital technologies are allowing the tradition to be preserved, researched and interpreted in innovative and more efficient ways.
• The 1901 and 1911 census website is the most used Irish genealogy website.
• The addition of Civil Registration indexes of births, marriages and deaths has been controversial.
• Data Protection is threatening the transmission and preservation of personal histories.
• DNA analysis, like the oral tradition, can go back before the written record to circumvent brick walls.

• Names
• Dates
• Places
• Family history

Names

• Ireland adopted surnames before almost anywhere else.
• Most of them are patronymics.
• Further patronymics and nicknames were required where one surname became predominant (e.g. Ryan, O'Sullivan, Durkan).
• O'Brien: descendant of Brian Ború (d.1014).
• Y-DNA always follows the male line; surnames and grants of arms almost always follow the male line.
• Mitochondrial DNA follows the female line; surnames almost always change in every generation in the female line.
• Names in Ireland were spoken and written in three languages
  • in Irish by the ordinary people;
  • in Latin by the church authorities;
  • in English by the civil authorities.
• There were no computers insisting on consistent spelling of names before the late 20th century.
• M', Mc, Mac, O' prefixes (often dropped when names were anglicised in the 19th century, but often restored in the 20th century) indicate Gaelic surnames.
• de and Fitz prefixes indicate Norman surnames.
• Matheson's 1901 Varieties and synonymes of surnames and Christian names in Ireland : for the guidance of registration officers and the public in searching the indexes of births, deaths, and marriages gives a wonderful collection of examples of variations
• These spelling variations in Christian names (first names) and surnames (last names) are inevitable due to:
• evolution of language
• anglicisation: Norah/Nora/Honora/Hanora/Hanoria/Hanna/Hannah/Hanah/Ann/Anne/Johanna/Josie/Josephine/Siobhán/Susan/Judy/Judith/Julia/Sheila/Síle
• nicknames, e.g. Peg for Margaret, Delia for Bridget, Jack for John, Paddy for Patrick, Lillie/Lily for Elizabeth, Thady for Timothy, Darby for Jeremiah, Minnie or Molly for Mary, etc.
• poor handwriting
• illiteracy
• present-day transcribers from foreign cultures
• two continents separated by a common language: Mahoney, Costello, Doherty, O'Dea/O'Day, etc.
• the Ellis Island myth
• Middle names did not exist in ordinary Catholic Ireland; migrants to the U.S. frequently turned a patronymic into a middle name to conform.
• Naming patterns: first two sons and first two daughters generally named after their grandparents.
• Witnesses at marriages and sponsors/godparents/gossips at baptisms are generally relatives or neighbours.
• Marriages took place in the bride's parish, and often the birth and baptism of the first child also did, often with the maternal grandmother as baptismal sponsor.
• Older siblings (after Confirmation) were often sponsors for younger siblings.
• Infant and maternal mortality were high and deceased children's names were recycled.

Dates

• Ages didn't matter until 1909 when the Old Age Pension was introduced.
• Birthdays didn't matter until Hallmark Cards was founded the following year.
• The dark 18th century
• Penal Laws
• Catholic Emancipation 1829
• Devotional Revolution
• Famine
  • Stories of the Great Famine of c.1845-52 are scarce in the oral tradition.
  • The Illustrated London News sketches of Kilrush Poor Law Union during the famine illustrate every published work on the subject.
  • The National Famine Commemoration has been held annually since 2008, rotating between the provinces.
  • 
  • It was held in Kilrush Poor Law Union in 2013: facebook blog links
  • The logo was the ILN sketch of Elizabeth Henrietta Kennedy (1842-1925), later 4th Countess of Clanwilliam, distributing clothing at Kilrush.
  • The heroic role of her father, Captain Arthur Edward Kennedy (1810-1883), had been forgotten until he was rediscovered by local history students in the 1970s.
  • The 1740 famine (caused by Arctic winter weather) was proportionally more severe on the Irish population than the 1845 famine (caused by potato blight).
  • Kilcasheen Grave Yard "was a deserted burying place in the year 1739 ... in the ensuing year ... famine and pestilence raged through the country and dead human bodies were to be met with by the roads and ditches".
  • Today's Irish are the descendants of survivors of the Great Famine.
  • Many victims of the Great Famine have no living descendants.
  • The victims' surnames are still our surnames.
• The revolutionary period 1913-1923
  • Ulster Volunteers and Irish Volunteers founded 1913
  • Irish Volunteers split in 1914 over WWI into pro-war National Volunteers and anti-war so-called Sinn Féin volunteers
  • 1916 Easter rising was the high point
  • 16 leaders executed by firing squad, including Con Colbert
  • Public Record Office destroyed in 1922 at the start of the Civil War
  • Beyond 2022 | Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury
  • hostility to government remained and remains

Places

• Ordnance Survey of Ireland (1824-46)
• Historic maps are available online.
• Townlands, parishes, etc.
• Ireland XO
• family farms
• ambition to keep the farm in the family name often realised for six or more generations
• Thomas Lynch Booking Passage
• inheritance, subdivision, primogeniture and emigration
• Land Acts 1870-1903: tenant purchase
• Land War 1879-82: Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Free Sale
• Land Commission 1881
• turnover - 0.3%/300 years
• smallholdings consolidated
• a stick in a gap in a bog
• attachment to parish and county - Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA, est. 1884)
• attachment to farm, home, property, ownership, tenancy, Celtic Tiger, property bubble
• a grave or family burial ground in a nearby cemetery generally went with a farm
• Graveyards
• Kilcasheen later became one of countless cillíní.
• Unbaptised infants, strangers, bodies washed ashore, and those who committed suicide were denied Christian burial in consecrated ground.
• Historic Graves is one of many projects recording old graveyards using new digital technologies.

Family history

• Flesh on the bones
• Reading between the lines
• Go sideways in order to go backwards
• Don't believe everything you are told
• Verify the family legends, using online records, offline records and DNA

Relationships

• Tanistry
• marriage prohibitions, forbidden degrees of kindred, recessive genes, dispensations
• An tAthair Peadar
• Catholic v. Anglican
• marriage within social class, religious group and geographical area
• mixed marriages - ne temere (Easter 1908)
• relatives, relations, friends, Arensberg & Kimball
• degrees of consanguinity
• third cousins
• five-a-kin from col cúigear
• implications of large families and limited travel

Mathematics

• Simple mathematics shows that we are all much more closely related than many realise.
• 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 greatgrandparents, ..., 2ⁿ ancestors on generation n, 1024 ancestors on generation 10
• Do you know your 1st cousins, 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins, 4th cousins, 5th cousins?
• Do you know how many 1st cousins, 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins, 4th cousins, 5th cousins, you have?
• I have documented 40 relatives out to 1st cousins (grandparents' and their descendants), 683 greatgrandparents + descendants, 2672 GGgrandparents + descendants, 7152 GGGgrandparents + descendants, 10278 GGGGgrandparents + descendants.
• We share autosomal DNA with most of these.
• Autosomal DNA is still being used disproportionately by adoptees and descendants of adoptees in search of their biological relatives, e.g. Jim Palmer, Anthea Ring.
• We all descend from Brian Ború.
• So we all have royal descents.
• Probability of relationship: I estimate that there is a 95% chance that any two people of Irish ancestry are 12th cousins or closer.
• The second in line to the English throne has fifth cousins living in county Clare, where their common GGGGgrandmother died on 21 January 1862.
• If a slightly questionable family tree is correct, then the present English monarch is my own 11th cousin.