In my last article in
The Harp I pondered on the importance of the spoken word in passing down
community and family history. When I started researching my own family history
back in the early 1990s, both the English and Irish roots of our tree, I was
most definitely inspired by my Aunty Kath.
|
Kath Robinson
and her husband Harry were two of life’s truly decent, salt-of-the-earth
working class people – proud hardworking Brummies who had both grown up in
the cobbled inner city streets of Ladywood, romancing and courting through
the uncertain Blitz years of the 1940s and marrying at St Peter’s RC church
near Broad Street in 1942. True and lasting love not only blossomed for K and
H, but the happiest days of their lives were fulfilled in spite of the
constant threat of Herr Hitler’s bombs, raining down on the factories and streets
of Britain’s industrial heartland.
Kath
was my dad’s second oldest sister. She was born in the far away city of
Ahmedabad in the northern Indian region of Gujarat in 1922, when my
grandfather William was a young soldier in the Worcestershire Regiment. In
those days a long-term posting to the other side of the world meant that
young British privates were unlikely to come home for years as opposed to
months, so their wives were given the unique opportunity of following on to
join them in India. To my grandmother Florence, this was a chance in a
lifetime for a young working class woman from the back-streets of Birmingham.
The
couple were Catholics, both having Irish roots, so their baby daughter
Kathleen was baptised at the church of Our Lady of Carmel in Ahmedabad. My
grandparent’s address was recorded simply as ‘camp’. The sights and sounds of
1920s India stayed with my grandmother all of her life and I remember when I
was a child listening to her Kippling-esque tales of long-ago India. The
images of elephants, monkeys and mamsaabs that she conjured up have stayed
with me all of my life. If Aunty Kath had also inherited the story telling
gene from her mother Florence, then in turn Florence it seems had inherited
it from her own mother, Mary Finn, the daughter of Irish immigrants whose
families had fled from Galway in the post-famine decade of the 1850s.
Whilst
my Aunty Kath never had the opportunity to visit Ireland in her own life, she
had inherited a profound dedication to the Catholic tradition and the Irish
culture of previous generations. Through the stories that had been passed
down to her by her mother and grandmother she was able to paint a rich
picture of the Irish community in inner city Birmingham in the late 1800s and
early 1900s. She recalled to me that some members of the Finn dynasty of old
Newtown and Hockley had left Birmingham to live in Cleveland, Ohio and in her
top drawer she kept a very old and cherished photograph of a nun, whom she
had never met but believed to be an American relative of the family.
Following
my Aunty Kath’s death in 2000, I decided to see if I could trace our family
nun and try to discover the story of the people who left Birmingham for Ohio
in the early 1900s. My research eventually led to a family of sisters from
the Finn line of my grandmother’s ancestors, with married names including
Robinson, McKiernan, Ratchford and Duffey, who migrated to Cleveland together
in Edwardian times.
The
research even identified the nun, Sister Marie Nativa McKiernan. Sister Joanne of the Sisters of the Humility of
Mary in Cleveland, Ohio emailed:
“Yes,
the photo very much resembles Sr. Marie Nativa McKiernan whom I recall in her
elder years. Since the habit is definitely that of the Sisters of the
Humility of Mary, I would be 99.9% certain that this is Sr. Marie Nativa. She
was born in 1906 in Birmingham, England to Thomas McKiernan [born in Ireland
] and Anna Finn McKiernan [born in England ]. Her baptism was at St. Chad
Cathedral in Birmingham on November 18, 1906. She entered this religious
congregation on January 23, 1925 from St. Edward Church in Cleveland, Ohio.”
It is
quite incredible to have traced Sister Marie Nativa on the basis of just an
old photograph and a family story and I am only sad that my Aunty Kath was no
longer alive to hear the results of my research. Whether this little miracle
is down to the power of the internet or, I’d like to think, some higher force
at work, it does go to show the importance of keeping stories alive from one
generation to another and my message to old and young Harp readers alike is,
get talking to each other, put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard and
…write your history down!
|
What do you think Irishness means to people in the West
Midlands? Tell us your story in The Harp.
Readers are invited to join our Facebook page
and visit our blog:
Visit the blog at
Join our Facebook group at
Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment