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fionnabhair
2007-04-28 04:37 pm UTC (link)

The Four Courts burnin down you mean? My history profs used to complain about that all the time - I sometimes thought that was the real reason most of them dislike the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War. They did complain a lot about that kind of research being a bitch due to lack of records.

My great-uncle was actually in the Four Courts when during the Civil War, as he was an old school IRA man (and then he got shot in the head, and, because he was stupid, decided to go on hunger strike, and died).

Tracking my father's side of the family is really difficult, as our second name has changed from Irish to English and back again about seven times in four hundred years. All I know is that one of our patriarchs was a minor poet from Armagh in the 1700s - who drank, and drank.

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mary_mac
2007-04-28 07:16 pm UTC (link)

Exactly. Personally am of the opinion that both sides needed to grow up, preferably before they managed put massive holes in their national heritage, but I am a historian, and thus biased. Between the Penal Laws and the national streak of imbecility, Irish genealogy is way, way more harder than it has any right to be. OK, nobody could spell, but its not like anyone ever went anywhere!

It gets even more fun when, like my aunt, you apply for a job in the British Foreign Office and they want your parent's birth certificates, and your parents were both born before 1921...these are the kind of enquiries which prompt the nice lads at the National Archives to offer to photocopy some ashes on a page and/or tell the people concerned where they can put their birth certificates.

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