The importance of being Ernest

Article for September 2016

Fellow genealogy enthusiasts amongst our readership will no doubt be aware of the pitfalls of online research, especially using the popular commercial websites such as Ancestry, Find My Past or The Genealogist where members post up their family trees and then cross-reference them with others, sometimes adding whole generations of newly discovered ancestors from someone else’s tree to their own at two clicks of the keyboard. The risk of this otherwise fantastic facility is when an inaccurate connection or piece of information is replicated by many other amateur researchers and we accept something as a given-truth simply on the basis of the volume of other people publishing a particular fact. Some of those so-called facts will also come from other sources, such as Wikipedia or seemingly authoritative websites.    

I’m pleased to say I served my apprenticeship in the years before the explosion of online data, when research required endless viewing of scratchy old microfilm reels on the 6^th floor of the old Birmingham Central Library. The records were more scarce, even random and took a sharper focus to transcribe, but it did therefore make you more discerning as to what you accepted as relevant fact. It can be both frustrating and demoralising to discover you have been following the wrong branch of your family tree, but one has to be always open to the possibility of red herrings and wishful thinking. The prospect of having to delete three or four generations and dozens of earnestly adopted ancestors can be initially devastating when you suddenly discover you’ve been barking up someone else’s tree, though genealogy, like history generally, is an objective science and our responsibility is to seek the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (the embellishment can come later).            

Back in the November 2015 edition of The Harp I wrote about an Aston Villa player named Ernie “Mush” Callaghan who won a bravery medal in WW2 for rescuing trapped workers from a Birmingham factory which had been bombed in a German air raid. I also wrote in my article that Ernie held the record of being Villa’s oldest player until his record was taken by Brad Friedel in 2011 and I attempted some research into his Irish heritage.  

I wish to thank John Vaughan for responding to my article, pointing out that I had quoted the wrong year of birth for Ernie which had therefore led me to researching the wrong age, marriage and general ancestry of the Villa hero. In my defense (no pun intended as Ernie was a defender), I had obtained his birth year of 1907 from other sources including Aston Villa themselves who based their (now superseded) player record on 1907 instead of his actual birth date of 1910.

John explained that there were two men named Ernest Callaghan born in the Newtown area in the early 1900s, one being Ernest Henry Callaghan (1907-1972) who married Edith Partridge in 1937. The other was Ernie Callaghan (1910-1972) who married Winifred Alice Thorne in 1934. The two men were second cousins, the older Ernest became a transport engineer, found living at 27 Church Vale in the 1939 Register, whilst the slightly younger Ernest (or Ernie) was the Aston Villa defender nicknamed Mush.

I am relieved to say that the main points of our story are still factual, Ernie Mush Callaghan was the man awarded the British Empire medal for his rescue efforts as a volunteer police officer in WW2 and he also became the groundsman at Villa Park on his retirement as a football player …and lived in a cottage in the ground!

John told me: “I've written to the club, as they have used Ernest Henry's dates. This may make the oldest player record incorrect, although Brad Friedel now holds that! Ernie’s brother Henry Victor played at least one game for Villa reserves and another brother Arthur used to help with the Holte End scoreboard. Ernie's father was Thomas Callaghan a canal boatman who was in Upper Sutton Street as was Ernie in 1939.”

“Thomas' father was also Thomas and his father was James who was both Ernie's and Ernest Henry's great grandfather. Coincidently my 2x great uncle was Thomas Callaghan (Ernie's first cousin x1 removed) and he was also a professional footballer who after a season at Manchester City moved to Scotland and enjoyed some success with Partick Thistle and St Mirren. He was killed near Ypres in 1917.”      

As for the Irish heritage of both Ernest Henry and Ernie Mush Callaghan, John filled in the family tree for us:

“James Callaghan the tailor who was born about 1806 in Navan and married at St Bartholomew's, Edgbaston in 1835 started quite a dynasty. Another great grandson of his, William George Callaghan, was a boy sailor who died on HMS Indefatigable at the Battle of Jutland.”

I wish to thank John Vaughan for his help in sorting out the story for us and for flagging-up the difference between Ernest and Ernie. If you have a story concerning the Callaghan dynasty or any other great Irish families of the West Midlands, do get in touch and we will make every earnest effort to publish your tale.

Who were the Scotch Irish?

Article in the August 2016 edition of The Harp

In the last edition of The Harp I looked into whether the city of Birmingham had ever had a history of serious sectarian division and was both pleased and relieved to find that generally, or at least in modern times, it had not.

As a born and bred Brummie with strong Irish genes but a love of the culture and heritage of the whole of the British Isles, I would personally be reluctant to entrench myself behind any culturally and certainly not religiously based barricade at the expense of diversity and community cohesion. I would but wish that this disposition was shared by all inhabitants of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

In the West Midlands, Irish Catholic families have always lived happily next door to C of E, Methodist, Quaker and Pentecostal worshipping neighbours, as well as a rich abundance of other faiths. The story in parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland however has been different with communities divided along sectarian grounds for many generations.

My own understanding of Protestant culture in Northern Ireland is admittedly based largely on my reading of Irish history from the perspective of the oppressed majority (Catholic) attempting to gain equality and self-determination from an enforced establishment (Protestant). My view is also influenced by decades of seeing confrontational Orange parades on television, which seem to intransigently and triumphantly march around the north of Ireland reminding their Catholic neighbours, through the beat of very large drums, of their historical position at the bottom of the pile.

 

But is this a fair view of Northern Irish Protestant culture? Are my own prejudices giving me a distorted, stereotypical or incomplete understanding? To find out more about the culture of Protestants in Northern Ireland, especially the loyal institutions such as the Apprentice Boys and the Orange Order, I recently bought a large book titled The Faithful Tribe – An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions by Ruth Dudley Edwards. A well-known southern Irish journalist, historian and author from a Catholic background, Ruth Dudley Edwards has also been a noted advocate for the right of northern Protestants to hold their parades. Her book is a fascinating exploration of Ulster loyalist heritage.

Ruth Dudley Edwards gives voice to the working class people beneath the ceremonial regalia – the farmers and labourers, teachers and businessmen, ministers and pensioners. “Many of whom” she says “speak wistfully of the days when their Roman Catholic neighbours would come out to enjoy the parade”.

My only issue with this is not so much the right of anybody to have such an innocuous thing as a parade, but that the theme of Orange Order parades (unless Ruth Dudley Edwards reveals differently) is strongly linked to sectarian themes of the Protestant ascendancy over their Catholic enemy.

In this restricted context it does become difficult to then have an open mind about the wider heritage and culture of the Protestant Scotch-Irish, to have a starting point not clouded by pre-conceived prejudice, justly founded or not. However, this was recently challenged when my new American brother-in-law Mike asked me to research his family tree and I discovered a branch of Scotch-Irish frontier families who had originated from Ulster in the 1700s.

My starting point on Mike’s research was that his father’s family were from Italian migrants into New York in the early 1900s - impoverished southern-Italian farmers seeking a better life in the tenements of Brooklyn. This was comfortable ground for me given the well-documented parallels between the experience of the southern-Italian farmers of the 1890s and 1900s and the western-Irish migrants fleeing post-famine conditions of the 1850s and 60s. As well as escaping similar conditions of poverty and prejudice, both communities shared the Roman Catholic faith which also bonded them to some degree in New York.

Another branch of Mike’s tree were Polish Jews who, again, went to the States to escape terrible persecution and dispossession under Russian occupation of Warsaw in the 1880s and 1890s, many going to the States via London. It was on Mike’s mother’s side that I discovered a branch of original settlers in the 1700s with the surname Elliott. A 4 x great grandfather of Mike, named George Elliott was a frontiersman who had fought in the Revolutionary War of 1775 and then become a rebel in an armed uprising called Shays’ Rebellion where local farmers from Massachusetts, many of whom were former soldiers from the Revolutionary War, rose up against heavy taxation from Boston.

 

Further research showed that the core group of rebels in Shays’ rebellion, including the leader Daniel Shays himself, were Presbyterian Ulster Scots from an American town called Pelham. George Elliott was himself a member of this community, renowned for being the frontiersmen who built the first stockade-towns at the boundaries of colonised America. The surname Elliot is from a Scottish clan, many of whom went to Ulster in the 1600s where an additional letter T was added to the end of their surname. As dissenters, the Scotch Presbyterian community suffered their own discrimination in Ulster which led to a migration to America during the early 1700s.

Suddenly I was feeling a sense of admiration for the Ulster Scots as brave, resilient, visionary and faithful people taking on the huge adventure of travelling into the wild-west, establishing their new communities in difficult environments, whilst also standing up for rights and justice during Shay’s Rebellion and similar local conflicts.  

It’s always good to shine a new light on one’s pre-conceived views!