February 2022

Another year has passed since the last entry in this blog.  It has been a difficult year with the ongoing covid pandemic. But the saddest point was the death of my death mother in October 2021.  She was a wise woman ever interested in the world and her family, with a keen intellect and great sense of humour. She kept up the habit of a daily newspaper to her last days but had given up on television. She enjoyed her radio especially the concerts on Radio 3 and listening to the highlights on the world service thru the night.  She was 101 yrs when she died.  I shall miss her greatly.  She had many insights concerning family history and life in general. It was my father who had the genealogy 'bug'  but his side of the family was not so interesting.

I should mention also the loss of my mother's brother who died in January 2021.  So now that is all of my parent's generation passed on and we can promote ourselves to be matriarch/patriarchs of our own families.

The highlight of the year on the genealogy front has been the finding of a copy of my grandfathers memoirs of his time as a boy in an Irish village 1890 to 1904.  We thought it was long since accidentally thrown away but in a very serendipitous route I found that someone had made a photocopy of this handwritten account. Eventually it make its way back to me minus just one page that had been censored at some stage.

The distant, very distant, American cousins are threatening to visit the emerald Isle.  I shall try and keep a low profile this time if they appear.

I have spent many days over past months clearing my mother's house.  There was a  lot of old furniture and ornaments going back to  a great grandmother's house (born 1860)  and also many thousands of photographs and boxes of diaries and letters.  It has been difficult to let things go.  We all have our own houses now and the younger ones are not interested in 'old' stuff and particularly so when they have no appreciation of the family history and how hard life was for previous generations.   I feel I am dismantling my father's house even tho he died 12 years ago because  so much of his grandparents' things had come down to him.  He was an only child and only grandchild.

Thru DNA matching on my husbands  side, I formed a lovely relationship with a cousin of his and we had some good research results.  Great to have another mind look at same puzzle.    Another cousin of my husband had been killed in 'the troubles' in 1972.  He left a young child and widow behind.  I often wondered what became of the child and we managed to tease out the story and yes, he had emigrated to Australia with his mother but had  been aware of his background and had returned to visit his father's grave at some stage.

I have been managing DNA matches on behalf of three relatives also.  So that makes three on the same line but with different companies and thankfully all seem to correlate back to same roots.

I no longer have access to a good genealogy website so am somewhat restricted.  I shall probably rejoin when I see a good 'deal'.  Covid has had an effect too in past couple of years with no visits to the Gilbert room in Pearse Library or the BMD register office in Dublin.

Sadly there are other people that were very helpful to me that are no longer with us.

RIP Chris Burge 

RIP Gemma Doherty

RIP John Doran 

RIP Mollie Green