Wills of Irish Soldiers

Ireland is very generous in making genealogical material in the National Archives free – an example that other parts of the British Isles have not generally chosen to follow.  The 1901 and 1911 Census for Ireland (including counties that are now Northern Ireland) are available and a huge resource for anyone with Irish ancestors.

Recently, facsimiles of the Wills of soldiers from Ireland who died in the First World War have been made available.  These are touching documents in which soldiers scribble their last wishes – often leaving their effects to their mothers.  They also provide additional information such as addresses, regiment served and date of death.  What a lovely way to commemorate the fallen.

http://soldierswills.nationalarchives.ie/search/sw/home.jsp

Using Family History

Family history is not just about trees, gedcoms and data.  It is about the social history and background of that information.  Many writers use family history to explore wider themes.  I have just finished reading Patricia Craig’s Twisted Roots (Blackstaff 2012) which looks at the complexities of a family history in the context of Ireland, and more specifically in Northern Ireland.

We think we know about a divided society, the adherence to the tribal ways and the lack of connections between factions, but this book illustrates the relationships that exist within that ‘divided’ society.  The author’s family roots include a founder of the Orange Order, members of the historic IRA, planters, Gaels and the rather sad tale of a German governess who ‘fell from grace.’  It is peopled with a wide range of characters including tough matriarchs, farmers and coachmen.  It challenges a lot of firmly held beliefs about some aspects of Irish history – and it is an entertaining read.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Twisted-Root-Ancestral-Entanglements-Ireland/dp/0856409049/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362773657&sr=1-1

Read carefully

I was adding a very routine record to one of my trees on Ancestry when I suddenly noticed something interesting.  In 1911 a grandchild was noted as being born in Coolmain Castle, Ireland.  The family I was researching were, until I noticed this little detail, Scottish.  Suddenly there was an Irish connection.  I checked the probate record for the child’s father who had died two decades later and there was the widow’s name ‘Stawell’.  I check Coolmain Castle on a couple of standard, well-validated sites and there are the Stawell family.  A whole new family emerge – a Scottish merchant living in England has a son who has married into the Anglo-Irish.  All kinds of interesting sidelines and connections develop.  This is why family history is so fascinating – and why it pays to look at the detail on records.

The ‘First’ Lady Mason

Sometimes a story, hit on by chance, just demands to be told.  Most off us assume the Freemasons were, historically, an all-male fraternity.  But, looking for information on the St Leger family I came across evidence that this was not quite true.  It is this type of quirky information that makes family history research so interesting – and sheds light on areas rarely seen,

The Hon. Elizabeth St Leger was born in 1693 to a notable County Cork family.  Around 1710 a Lodge Meeting was held in the family home, Doneraille Court; it was presided over by her father Lord Doneraille and her brother, along with a Mr Aldsworth, who would  become her husband 1713.  The young Elizabeth witnessed at least part of the ceremony from a nearby room; when she attempted to leave her prescence was noticed.  To ensure her silence the Lodge decided to initiate her and she  eventually became a notable member of the Craft.

In a memoir published after her death the incident is noted in some detail

 

“Part of the wall dividing the Lodge Room from the library was being removed for the purpose of making an arch and thus connecting the two room; some of the bricks in the dividing wall had been removed and only loosely replaced.  While the alterations were in progress, Viscount Doneraile and others met in the Lodge Room for Masonic purposes and to confer degrees.  On this particular afternoon, Miss st. Leger had been reading at the library window and, the light of the winter afternoon having failed, fell asleep.  The sound of voices in the next room restored her to consciousness and from her position behind the loosely placed bricks of the dividing wall she easily realised that something unusual was taking place in the next room.  The light shining through the unfilled spaces in the temporary wall attracted her attention and, prompted by a not un-natural curiosity, Miss St. Leger appears to have removed one or more of the loose bricks, and thus was easily enabled to watch the proceedings of the Lodge.”

Friendships

I have just put up a page on Ethel Birks and Dora Painter.

http://jenjen999.wordpress.com/ethel-birks-and-dora-painter-lifelong-friends/

These two single women lived and worked much of their lives together.  Both teachers, they ran a small school in Portsea.  Family histories often fail to note these types of relationships – most trees do not have the capacity to include them.  But they are deeply important – and reflect the diverse ways that our ancestors lived.  Just like modern people, they did not all conform to the ‘happy family’ structure, and often found different ways to live.

That two women, both unmarried, lived together was not so unusual in the early 20th century.  A couple of decades earlier the novelist George Gissing had written  The Odd Women.  This novel explores the lives of those women  who never married – simply because there were more women in the population than men.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Odd_Women

By the late 1920s a far more radical novel looked at the sexual choices that women could make – Radcliffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness.  This novel outraged the establishment of the time, and the publisher, Jonathan Cape, was prosecuted for obscene libel.   It was legally published in 1949.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_of_Loneliness

A modern novel exploring the lives of single women in the earlier part of the 20th century is  Singled Out

http://www.virginianicholson.co.uk/singled-out

Two Women Librarians

As I work through my family tree I come across people, not really part of it, but so interesting that they demand a bit of publicity.  Marguerite Duprez Laffy and Belle da Costa Greene were both early 20th century library staff, working for the great, rich Pierpont Morgan whose private library was to form New York’s Morgan Library & Museum.

Marguerite Duprez Lahey (1880 – 1958) was the daughter of Isaiah Anthony Lahey an ‘Importer White Goods’, born in County Cavan in 1839 but lived much of his adult life in New York and Margaret Ayton Duncan, a New Yorker of Scottish extraction.

Marguerite was responsible for the luxurious bindings and cases of many of the finest books and manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library. She first began working for Morgan in 1911, and continued to do so, for over 30 years. A graduate of Brooklyn and Adelphi College, she served a two-year apprenticeship in at New York’s Old Chelsea Bindery and went on to study bookbinding with Paris masters, including Jules Domont. A private woman, not a great deal is known about her life. A 1937 article in Time magazine, written when examples of her work were on display in a major exhibition, described her as “a slender blonde.” Based in her studio which initially was at East Twenty-Second Street, she did all the work of binding herself, selecting and preparing the finest leather, sewing the pages, tooling, and finishing the bindings.  A critic described her methods as ‘fifteenth century bindings by fifteenth century methods.’  She said of her vocation ‘I always wanted to use my hands.’  A 1937 exhibition at the Morgan showcased 150 fine examples of her work.  She died in Paris in 1958, and is buried in New York’s Wood Green Cemetary

Marguerite worked in association with her friend, the  far more extrovert Belle Da Costa Greene (1883-1958).  Belle was brought up in Washington, D.C., in an educated, middle class family.   She had not attended college but gained her library training on the job at Princeton University. She was described an intelligent, vivacious,  independent and beautiful woman with engaging social skills.  Her father was Richard Greener,  the first African-American to graduate from Harvard , however, after separating from her husband Belle’s mother dropped the final ‘r’ from their name and passed herself and her children as ‘white.’  Belle added ‘da Costa’ to her name and implied she was of Portuguese descent.  By 1908 she was working for Morgan, and became one of his most trusted buyers of books and manuscripts.  Beautiful, fashionably dressed and a major player on the art scene she declared “Just because I am a librarian doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.”  One of her lovers was the critic Bernard Berenson.

In 1913 J.P. Morgan died, he left Belle the considerable sum of $50,000 giving her financial independence.  His son made her director of the library in 1934 and she continued to work there until 1948.  She died in 1958.

Reference

The Fine Bindings of Marguerite Duprez Lahey; an Exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, November 7, 1951-January 5, 1952 (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, 1951; illustrated)

Heidi Ardizonne, An Illuminate Life (Norton 2007)

George Hoby (1759-1832)

As I research my own family I come across interesting people who are not part of it, or on the very edges.  Some of them are really worth noting,  and one of these is George Hoby (1759-1832).  He was the son of a wealthy man, Richard Hoby (1717-1762), who had squandered his fortune in gambling, forcing his sons to seek their own fortunes.  George became famous as a boot maker, with premises in Covent Garden and later in St James Street, Westminster.  Hoby was the most fashionable London boot maker of his day, dealing with Royalty, the aristocracy and London’s fashionistas.  He was also  a Methodist preacher.  He was an arrogant, self-confident man – attitudes reflected in his remarks on being told that one of his customers, the Duke of Wellington, had beaten the French at Vittoria

“ If Lord Wellington had any other bootmaker than myself, he never would have had his great and constant successes; for my boots and prayers bring his lordship out of all his difficulties.”

When another customer complained that his new riding boots had split as he walked to the stables, Hoby retorted

“ Walking to your stable! I made the boots for riding, not walking.”

He is credited with innovating the Wellington boot to a design suggested by the Iron Duke himself.  The boots can be seen worn by Wellington in an 1815 portrait by James Londsdale.

His daughter, Elizabeth Hoby was the first wife of Joshua Russell.  Joshua’s son (by his second wife) was to become an apprentice in the Hoby shipyards on the Clyde – from whence one of the great late-19th century shipping fortunes would be made.  The shipyards belonged to a member of the Hoby family and the relationship almost certainly did much to further Russell’s career.