One of my main hobbies is poking about round old graveyards and burial sites...I like reading the inscriptions on the grave markers of people who died two hundred years ago and wonder what their lives were like...and that led on to researching my family tree. Irish records are virtually non-existent 'cos the rebels burned the GPO down, which contained...among other records...all the census forms except for those of 1901 and 1911. So it really is a struggle to get any further back than about 1850...
It wasn't long before I found my Mother had fibbed...not a tiny little white lie but a thumping big one. According to Mother she was an only child sent away to Scotland when she was six years old to board in a convent school...and she apparently never went back home, spending all her holidays at the school.
Mother had four brothers...two half brothers and a sister! One of the half-brothers was a war hero...one of the other brothers was a drunk who ended up in a poorhouse...and another brother married a woman who was a little bit potty.
I was gob-smacked so I was.
And she had an Uncle who was a priest and two Aunties who became nuns...
Most of this information came via a cousin I met on-line through the Ancestry site...and the best part was meeting that cousin and another cousin in Dublin a couple of years ago...
The English side of the family is much easier to trace...it's quite easy going through parish records to get back as far as the early 1600's and sometimes...if those folk had titles...back much further to the 1400's...everything is on line now you see.
But when I began to ferret around in Himself's tree...well...you wouldn't believe what I unearthed. One of his cousins, about six times removed, was transported to Australia in the early 1800's. He'd stolen a bolt of cloth and was actually sentenced to death but it was commuted to transportation for life. He carried on thieving mind you...then there was a vacancy for the post of official flogger and hangman. He applied for the job and earned the sum of fifty-two pounds a year for administering the nasty whip made from hide to the naked backs of various miscreants and hanging others who escaped the flogging, but ended up with rope round their necks instead.
Not the sort of family you'd want to have over for afternoon tea...
Another cousin...slightly more recently in that he didn't die until the early 1920's, was sentenced to penal servitude for life after shooting his wife dead...he was out on parole after a couple of years and lived until he was ninety-two! He'd travelled to Australia on one of the early 'assisted passage' schemes.
I'll be keeping a careful eye on Himself from on...
huff xxx
No Pleasing Some People...
Died at the Tower of London
