Dublin Your Pleasure, Dublin Your Fun

The 1911 Census of Dublin, Ireland, went online today. It may be searched or browsed by place.

On Sunday, April 2nd, 1911, a 28-year-old maths professor called "Edward de Valera" filled out his census form at home at Morehampton Terrace in Dublin. Across town, Oliver St John Gogarty did the same. In the marital status column he wrote "single", then crossed it out and replaced it with "married", apparently remembering Martha, his wife of five years.

Some entries are missing, of course. They include those for the suffragettes Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Anna Haslam and Louie Bennett, all members of the Irish Women's Franchise League, who decided to boycott the census in protest at not having the vote.

When a policeman interrupted one of their meetings on the night before census day to remind them that it was illegal not to fill out the form, the women told him they had arranged for airplanes and submarines to remove them from the soil of Ireland for the night of April 2nd. [Link]

Blogger Seeks Blarney

Lisa at Small-leaved Shamrock has announced the birth of a bouncing baby blog carnival.

If you have a blog about your own Irish genealogy or about Irish heritage and culture in general, you are invited to participate.

Our first edition will be about something everybody loves: a good story. What is your favorite Irish story? Show us that you've got the gift of blarney. Here's the specific request:

Of all of the colorful Irish characters that you've learned about throughout your search for family history or your study of Irish heritage in general, surely you've come across some good stories. Share your favorite story about an Irish ancestor or other Irishman or Irishwoman with us on this, the inaugural edition of the Carnival of Irish Heritage & Culture.

If the only story you can think of concerns a man named "Paddy O'Furniture," keep thinking. The deadline for the first edition is November 19.

From Cork to New York

I found time this evening to watch From Cork to New York—a dramatization of Annie Moore's journey to America written, produced, directed, and acted by 11-year-olds from Scoil Oilibhéir in Cork, Ireland. (You can watch the trailer here.)

My school projects at that age involved gluing macaroni to poster board. These kids commandeered a train and reenacted a transatlantic sea voyage on film, then got people on another continent to watch it. I guess they don't have macaroni in Ireland.

Paris Is One of Us!

Paris Hilton reportedly will attend the Flat Lake Festival later this month in Ireland, where she will research her family tree and find out if she's related to British pop star Lily Allen. Kevin Allen—Lily's uncle and one of the festival's organizers—says, "We believe Paris wants to come to the festival which is at my in-laws' place at Hilton Park, to check out her Irish ancestry. They may be related."

A tongue-in-cheek notice on the Festival website provides other, even more dubious details:

We've ... been informed today of a glamorous visitor to the Festival. After receiving nationwide press interest in the Damien Hirst Art charity auction, We've extended an invitation to Paris Hilton. Sources close to the American star say that Hirst is her favourite conceptual artist and that she may bid for the Hirst painting entered into the auction.

Due to us banning telephone bids though, Miss Hilton will have to personally make the trip to Hilton where she could also confirm an ancestral link to Hilton Park country. Rumour has it that her great grandfather, oil tycoon, Waylon Hilton, is a descendent of the Hilton dynasty. By accessing the family archives she could well return to the US with clear evidence of her illustrious family lineage.

More plausible rumors have it that Paris's great-grandfather was some German-Norwegian innkeeper named Conrad Hilton. She does, though, have Irish ancestry.

[Photo credit: Peter Schäfermeier]

Obama's Old Irish Home

Church of Ireland rector Stephen Neill says he has found Barack Obama's ancestral village in Ireland. It's a place called Moneygall in Co. Offaly.

"I would be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that this is categorical evidence of Mr Obama's link to this part of the world," said the rector.

It was initially believed the would-be president's third great grandfather Fulmuth Kearney was the only one of his family to have sailed from Ireland to New York aged 19 in 1850. But the newly-uncovered records show other family members had in fact emigrated to America since the 1790s. [Link]

Update: Megan has more details on the search for Obama's roots. The records found by Canon Neill were the final piece of the puzzle she and her Ancestry.com cohorts had been working on since the Senator's Irish heritage was first revealed in March.

Tom Wants Tract of Turf

Tom Cruise is looking to buy land in Ireland supposed to have once been owned by his ancestors.

Mr Cruise is believed to have visited the area around Kilteevan three years ago as he traced his Irish roots.

The Collateral star was born Tom Cruise Mapother IV in New York in 1962.

The small ruined cottage included as part of the sale of the farm was once occupied by members of the Mapother family, and Mr Cruise's great grandfather Thomas is said to have emigrated from Roscommon to America in the early part of the last century. [Link]

Umm, make that his great-great-grandfather Dylan Henry Mapother, who emigrated in 1850. Correct country of origin, though!

[Photo credit: tomcruise-1 by Alan Light]

The Downside of Digitization?

I learned through Irish Roots Cafe of a provocative new article by Emily Heinlen called "Genealogy and the economic drain on Ireland: Unintended consequences."

Heinlen argues that digitizing genealogical records has had the negative effect of discouraging people from traveling to Ireland and spending money. As more records have gone online, she says, fewer genealogy tourists have made the trip. The number of visits actually increased from 1999 to 2000, but dropped by almost a quarter in 2001, and remained stagnant through 2004.

I'm curious why she fails to address the obvious explanation for a precipitous drop in tourism in 2001. Given the aftereffects of 9/11, I'm not sure that the correlation between digitization and lack of tourists is as strong as Heinlen needs it to be. (You can check out Irish visit stats for all classes of tourist here.)

That being said, some of Heinlen's recommendations to raise more genealogy tourism revenue are worth a read. And listen to the January 30 Irish Roots Cafe Podcast for an interview with the author.

Update: Megan says She's Got It Backwards on her Roots Television blog.

[Photo source: Aer Lingus A330 on approach by Rob Colonna]

The Life of Brians

Brian Joseph Cantwell was Googling his name one day when he discovered another Brian Joseph Cantwell living two states away. The men established that they were not closely related, but each could trace his ancestry back to the same small town in County Kilkenny. So, they arranged to meet. In Ireland.

[I]t must have confused our innkeeper, to get online reservations for the same three nights from two Brian Joseph Cantwells. Me and my family from Seattle, and the other Brian and his family from Palo Alto, Calif.

Four years after meeting by e-mail, we two Brians met for the first time in person at the doorstep of Mary Farrell's centuries-old farmhouse B&B on the edge of this small Irish town that produced our great-grandfathers. Flower boxes splashed color beneath every window and the pungent smell of cow wafted on the August evening breeze.

"You must be Brian," said the stocky stranger with the friendly face and thick swatch of snowy hair.

"You must be Brian!" I replied. [Link]

More Points to Ponder

• 34.5 million Americans can claim descent from an Irish ancestor.
• Very few Americans can claim descent from the Irish Elvis.

• 25,870 Americans speak Irish Gaelic at home.
• 248 Americans think they're speaking Irish Gaelic when really they're just drunk.
• 19 places in the U.S. are named "Dublin."
• Only one place in Ireland is named "Dublin," so we win.
  
• 93.3 million people planned to wear green last St. Patrick's Day.
• 37 million people unintentionally wore green last St. Patrick's Day.
• St. Patrick didn't really drive all the snakes out of Ireland.
• He gave them carfare.

The Grass is Always Greener in Ireland

A third of United Kingdom residents suffer from "plastic paddy syndrome," according to a recent survey. There is no known cure.

The survey, commissioned by Rankin Selection Irish Breads, found that nearly half of all English, Scottish, and Welsh people would prefer to be Irish.

Welsh emerged as the least popular with only 13% choosing it, while English was just in front with 14%. Scottish came second with a modest 29%.

A mutual love between the Irish and Scottish was also revealed with 58% of Scottish people choosing to be Irish and 72% of Irish people opting to be Scottish. [Link]

Kiss Me, I'm an Irish Warlord

From Reuters.com:

Scientists discover most fertile Irish male

Tue Jan 17, 2006

By Siobhan Kennedy

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Scientists in Ireland may have found the country's most fertile male, with more than 3 million men worldwide among his offspring.

The scientists, from Trinity College Dublin, have discovered that as many as one in twelve Irish men could be descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, a 5th-century warlord who was head of the most powerful dynasty in ancient Ireland.

His genetic legacy is almost as impressive as Genghis Khan, the Mongol emperor who conquered most of Asia in the 13th century and has nearly 16 million descendants, said Dan Bradley, who supervised the research.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

Effort to Destroy All Irish Censuses Falls Short

From Yahoo! News:

Ireland-Canada deal will put census online for 70 million

Tue Dec 6, 7:20 AM ET

DUBLIN (AFP) - Details of two 100-year-old Irish censuses are to go online for an estimated 70 million people around the world who claim a connection with the country, Heritage Minister John O'Donoghue revealed.


Under a new cultural agreement between the Irish and Canadian archive offices, all the details of Ireland's census in 1901 and 1911 are to be indexed and made available for free on the Internet.

[snip]

The 1901 census is the earliest surviving such document for all the 32 counties of the island, including the six in British-ruled Northern Ireland.

The data from previous censuses dating back to 1821 were either deliberately destroyed, pulped during World War I because of a paper shortage or were lost in a fire at Dublin's Public Records Office during the country's civil war in 1922.

[Read the whole story]

Missing Any Irish Friends?

Serious researchers of Irish genealogy have long depended on the eight volumes of The Search for Missing Friends: Irish Immigrant Advertisements Placed in the Boston Pilot, edited by Ruth-Ann Mellish Harris, Donald M. Jacobs, and B. Emer O'Keeffe (Boston, Mass.: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1989-). Now these records are coming to the Internet, albeit in abstracted form, through Information Wanted, a website of the Boston College Irish Studies Program.

The Missing Friends advertisements, dating from 1831 to 1921, were placed by those seeking information about an Irish immigrant to America, and contain a varying amount of identifying data.

The advertisements contain the ordinary but revealing details about the missing person’s life: the county and parish of their birth, when they left Ireland, the believed port of arrival in North America, their occupation, and a range of other personal information. Some records may have as many as 50 different data fields, while others may offer only a few details. The people who placed ads were often anxious family members in Ireland, or the wives, siblings, or parents of men who followed construction jobs on railroads or canals.

Anyone finding a relative will still want to consult the original text, but the online index will surely help speed their research in the right direction.

Light Summer Reading

From the Mayo News of June 1, 2005:

Ó Muraile to be honoured in his native parish

KNOCK native, Nollaig Ó Muraíle, who was this year awarded the prestigious accolade of Mayo Person of the Year, will be the special guest at function in Carty’s Lounge, Knock on Friday night, June 3.

Nollaig was honoured by the Mayo Association in Dublin in this their Centenary year for his extraordinary achievement in transcribing, editing and indexing Leabhar Mór na nGenealach, The Great Book of Irish Genealogies by Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh

Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh, who has been described as one of the greatest Irish hereditary historians, originally compiled this work in the 17th century. [snip] Many important genealogical and legal works survive solely because of his endeavours. The Great Book of Irish Genealogies has remained unpublished for over three hundred years. Previous attempts to publish this work in ended in failure.

At the suggestion of the late Cardinal Tomas Ó Fiaich, Nollaig Ó Muraile set about the task of transcribing and indexing this huge manuscript. The work, consisting of five volumes, over 3,500 pages and approx 1,000,000 words, has been described as a monumental publishing achievement comparable to the ‘Annals of the Four Masters’. The culmination of 33 years hard work has now made the whole of Mac Fhirbhisigh’s Book of Genealogies available in print for the first time.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

3,500 pages? I'll read it when I'm done Joyce's Ulysses.