Family history
research can be a very consuming interest and anyone with an obsessive amateur
genealogist like me in the family will bear testimony to the hours that can be
spent plotting the tree online or occasionally doing very odd and to all
others, irritating things, like suddenly reversing the car down a lane in the
middle of the family holiday in rural Ireland declaring with great excitement
“Look everyone! A graveyard!”
For the most part,
and I am certain that this will apply to many readers of The Harp, the majority
of the ancestors whose names and occupations we painstakingly discover will be
ordinary working class people living in very basic conditions either in the famine
beset countryside of mid-19th century Ireland, or in the tenement
and back-to-back poverty of industrialising cities like Dublin, Birmingham,
Belfast and Liverpool.
Identifying the
microcosmic part played by your very own ancestors in the rich history of
working class life, discovering your very own Black Country nail maker, Wexford
farmer or poor migrant family taking steerage from Cork to New York as part of
the great Irish diaspora is always rewarding. Even so, as the family tree
becomes increasingly populated by a growing list of labourers named Patrick and
Michael, or their Brummie counterparts William and Frederick, with an equally
sized list of wives named Bridget and Mary, Phoebe and Hilda, discerning the
individual human stories behind the names on a census index or a ship’s
manifest can seem an impossible task.
Occasionally there
are gems to be found, especially through the oral transmission of family
stories and also those spine-tingling coincidences which come completely
out-of-the-blue to suggest synchronicity between past and present or
highlighting a unique family trait that appears to have skipped generations. Twilight
zone incidences of nature over nurture.
Viewers of the BBC
television series Who do you think you
are? may have been struck by just how common it is for people to discover
for the first time a long forgotten ancestor who lived a parallel life to their
own. A comedian or variety performer discovering that great-great-grandfather
was also a black sheep of the family who rejected the family business or jumped
naval service in order to play musical hall dame at Blackpool Winter Gardens.
The modern sports personality finding that g-g-g-granny was the first female to
swim back-stroke across the channel. I’m using poetic license here and could go
on, but I’m sure the reader will be familiar with the scenario.
One such strange
coincidence happened in my own research only relatively recently. Having worked
for disability rights based organisations in the West Midlands since 1990 and
prior to that being a nurse at Moseley Hall Hospital working with disabled
people, I have for a long time been interested in the history of disability and
in 2010 even wrote a book about the history of Birmingham’s Disability Resource
Centre, published with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund. In recent years
I have also been a member of the London based steering group organising UK
Disability History Month.
During all this time
I had no idea that one of my own ancestors, John McDonnell of Bolton Street,
Dublin was a blind man who co-founded an organisation called the League of the
Blind Great Britain and Ireland and was chair of its Dublin branch for over a
decade during the early 1900s.
The discovery came
about when I made contact with cousins of my mother, the Whelan family of
Dublin. Connections with my grandmother’s side of the family had diminished
over many decades, largely because my grandparents had seemingly eloped to
Birmingham in the late 1930s. As sadly happens in these situations, my great
grandfather’s singular disapproval of his daughter’s chosen partner was translated
into a wider sense of rejection which became over accentuated through
subsequent generations. To an obsessed genealogist, making contact with a very
large section of my mother’s family whom I had never spoken to, met or written
to (and didn’t even know the names of many of them) was as close to anorak
heaven as its possible to experience. Long lost relations, who had been made
distant not just by the great stretch of land and sea between Birmingham and
Dublin, but by the fall-out from a specific father-daughter bust-up of some 80
years ago, I am pleased to say are now Facebook friends and regular email pals.
My consequent
research into the life and times of John McDonnell has been a complete
revelation. Growing up in 19th century blind institutions around
Dublin, he learnt the skill of basket weaving and became a wealthy entrepreneur,
running his own basket making factory in north Dublin and then becoming
involved in running the said League of the Blind, a radical disability
organisation even by today’s standards who rejected charity and instead became
aligned to the trade union movement, campaigning for fair pay for blind and
deaf workers. If readers of The Harp will allow me the indulgence I would like
to tell more of John McDonnell’s story in a future article.
What do you think
Irishness means to people in the West Midlands? Tell us your story in The Harp.
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Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com
