I must begin by thanking the Board of Clans of Ireland for the honour bestowed on me today.
While Gearóid asked me to say a few words about how my interest
in genealogy relates to this weekend's wide theme of the
association between people and place in Medieval Irish Society,
perhaps the question should be whether rather than how.
I didn't know whether I should talk about my personal genealogical
journey or about the numerous voluntary genealogical organisations
in which I am involved, but I'll start with the former.
I have thought of myself as a genealogist for almost half a
century, and as a mathematician for almost as long. I have
thought of myself as a genetic genealogist for a much shorter
number of years, not least because the concept didn't exist until
the turn of the millennium. While I have a degree in
mathematical sciences, I am entirely self-taught in the other
fields, but perhaps, with new letters after my name today, I can
stop describing myself as unqualified.
I still have the paperwork to show that I was only 13 when I
invented a numbering system for my ancestors. It was many
years later before I realised that I had been re-inventing the
wheel and that my system was already widely known and used, even
in the English-speaking world, as the Ahnentafel system. I
still try to use it with AncestryDNA.
Back in the 1970s, I knew the names of all eight of my
greatgrandparents and of most of my 16 greatgreatgrandparents.
That still remains the situation today.
To go back additional generations, I could rely on the traditions
that my mother's brother was the fifth consecutive generation
named Thomas Durkan, and that my paternal grandmother's first
cousin was the seventh consecutive generation named Michael
McNamara, but I still have found no documentary evidence to prove
either tradition. Assuming an average of 30 years between
the birth of father and son, I would need to go back not 7, but 17
generations to get to medieval times.
On my maternal side, there is a tradition that my greatgrandmother
O'Neill was from the O'Neill family of The Fews banished from
Armagh to Mayo, but only in Cromwellian times.
Old-fashioned paper research eventually identified a handful of my
fourth greatgrandparents.
On my paternal grandfather's side, a DNA match with a man I
already knew, but to whom I never suspected that I was related,
eventually provided the names, and the grave in County Limerick of
one pair of fifth greatgrandparents named O'Dea, but that brings
me only to an estimated birth date of around the 1750s, only
half-way back to what might be considered medieval Ireland.
It did give me an excuse to set up an O'Dea DNA project, although
the surnames have daughtered out among the descendants of my own
known O'Dea and Nolan and O'Halloran ancestors.
On my paternal grandmother's side, my earliest written source is
again a gravestone, in County Clare, erected by an ancestor again
born around the 1750s, but one generation closer to me, namely
George Blackall.
That brick wall of the mid-1700s on all sides can be blamed mainly
on the penal laws, which prevented record-keeping by the Catholic
church, and on the destruction of the Public Record Office in the
Civil War.
In my case, the one hole in the brick wall is provided by the work
of my distant cousin Sir Hal Blackall in the Public Record Office
before 1922. Like all genealogists, he engaged in guesswork
and speculation. He collected oral evidence which proved
ambiguous. His papers, around the corner in the Royal Irish
Academy, contain conflicting and undated versions of his own
medieval ancestry. But at least he gives me some medieval
ancestors to claim as my own and someone to blame if I am wrong.
Before I conclude, let me return to mathematics and that rough
calculation of 17 generations back to medieval Ireland.
One generation ago, we all had two parents; two generations ago,
we all had four grandparents; and so on, until 17 generations ago,
we all had 131,072 ancestors, or at least that many slots to fill
on our family tree. That's about one sixth of the estimated
population of Ireland in late medieval times, and a much higher
proportion of those whose descendants survived in Ireland through
the wars, famines and emigration of the following centuries.
Maintaining records of that number of ancestors is clearly
impractical for any one individual, and requires a collaborative
approach to genealogy, using something like WikiTree.com, but that
is my subject for the Clare Roots Society meeting in Ennis next
Thursday.
Alternatively, like many of you here today, we can reduce the
numbers by confining our interest to our own surnames and our own
direct male line ancestors.
We don't have to go back much further into medieval times to reach
the point where everyone in Ireland then, and with descendants
alive in Ireland today, is the ancestor of all those in Ireland
today who had ancestors living here in medieval times.
Many of the Irish-born here today, of course, whether we know it
or not, have post-medieval immigrant ancestors, be they
Elizabethan or Cromwellian planters, Huguenots, Palatines or
others.
My own surname, Waldron, as I spell it, appears to have come to
Ireland with the Ulster Plantation in 1609, but to have later been
adopted as the English-language version of similar-sounding
surnames of Gaelic and Norman origin.
Thinking back to medieval times, I like to ask myself as I travel
around Ireland today not "Did my ancestors live here?" but "When
did my ancestors live here?" and also What language did they
speak? What religion did they practice? Where are they
buried? When and whence did they come here? When and
whither did they leave here? Are the people who live here today
descended from those who lived here in medieval times?
It is often forgotten that many, if not most, Irish parishes still
maintain, and indeed still bury their dead of all denominations,
in pre-Reformation medieval burial grounds, such as that for which
I am currently fundraising at Kilcasheen in West Clare, which was
described by Eugene O'Curry as having been long unfrequented by
1740, when his own grandfather re-opened it to bury famine
victims.
The DNA companies like FamilyTreeDNA, which have helped clans and
surname studies around the world with Y-DNA analysis and
comparison, have been joined, undercut in price, and overtaken in
popularity, by those solely doing autosomal DNA analysis and
comparison.
These latter, as well as providing the invaluable lists of cousin
matches which revealed my O'Dea ancestry, are encouraging and
exploiting a huge market in the USA and elsewhere for the
dangerous and ill-defined concepts of ethnicity and race, summed
up in crude estimated ethnicity percentages. These estimates
are very sensitive to initial conditions, namely the reference
populations used, and they effectively tell us only where our
distant cousins might live today. This may or may not be
where our shared ancestors lived in medieval times or
earlier. The same geneticists who come up with these
post-medieval ethnicity labels tell us, after all, that if we go
back a couple of hundred thousand years, we are all 100% African.