January 2013 article in The Harp

Join The Harp at The Gathering 2013

Pete Millington launches a new family and community history feature in The Harp with an invitation to get involved online

This year promises to be a very special year for people of Irish descent and heritage all over the world as Ireland celebrates a year-long event called The Gathering Ireland 2013.

Throughout 2013, Ireland will open its arms to hundreds of thousands of friends and family from all over the world, calling them home to gatherings in villages, towns and cities. Communities throughout Ireland will showcase and share the very best of Irish culture, tradition, business, sport, fighting spirit and the uniquely Irish sense of fun.

According to the event website over 70 million people worldwide claim Irish ancestry:

“The Gathering Ireland 2013 provides the perfect excuse to reach out to those who have moved away, their relatives, friends and descendants, and invite them home. The Gathering is the people’s party. It will kick off in spectacular style at the New Year’s Eve Festival in Dublin and will be celebrated through gatherings of the people and Ireland’s major festivals during 2013. After that it is over to you. It is in your hands. Be part of it.”

As someone of Irish descent brought up in Birmingham (my maternal grandparents emigrated from Dublin in the late 1930s and many of my father’s Brummie Catholic ancestors go back to the post-famine migrants who settled close to St Chad’s Cathedral in the 1850s), I have been keenly interested in tracing both my English and Irish roots for many years and through my personal research have been lucky and determined enough to have mined a rich seam of both record and anecdote.

For example, having been interested in disability history for many years and even written a book about the history of Birmingham’s Disability Resource Centre, I was astonished to discover my own g-g-grandfather John McDonnell was a co-founder of a union called the League of the Blind in Dublin in the 1890s.

In future editions of The Harp I hope to share this story and some of my other family research with readers, but more importantly we wish to invite you to tell us your family stories of Irish migration to the West Midlands and their descendants.

Here at The Harp we want to celebrate and participate in The Gathering Ireland 2013 by sharing stories and photographs of Irish people in the West Midlands and also by sharing tips about Irish family history research. To help us build an evolving archive of West Midlands Irish family history, we have also set up a Facebook page and a blog so we can publish all of your stories and pictures online, whether or not they make it in their entirety into The Harp.

Visit the blog at

http://harp-gathering.blogspot.co.uk/

Join our Facebook group at

http://www.facebook.com/groups/420135884725856/

Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com

Pete Millington