What I did on my summer vacation, part two

In July, Dublin is about 20 degrees cooler outside than in New Jersey. I’m told they make up for it in milder winters. Even so, that didn’t placate me as I frequently tightened my sweater around me to brace against the wind. We were lucky, though. It barely rained the entire time we were in Europe, and everywhere we went, we heard about the terrible storms that had deluged them the week before.

Dad and I had arrived at our hotel around 9:30 AM, and were told that we couldn’t check in until 3:00. Tired and icky from our overnight flight, we dropped off our luggage and headed straight for the National Library. There was research to be done!

We located the microfilm to church records of what we hoped was our ancestors’ parish. All marriages and baptisms between 1813 and 1890 were on the same roll. Just as I feared, many of the pages were in illegible handwriting. Many of the pages were almost too faded to read at all. The first half of the roll was just written in haphazardly until a form was created. And yes, it was all in Latin.

I scrolled to the birth records for March 1868. And there it was. “Thoma” and “Margherita,” parents “Francis” and “Elizabeth.” And a note at the end of the page – “Thoma et Margherita sunt gemini” – they were twins. It was the baptismal record for my great-grandmother’s older siblings. We’d pinned down the first names of their parents. That was going to be a great help.

Then I scrolled down to 1878, hoping to find Mary that easily. No dice. I searched all the way backwards over the previous ten years, back to the twins. I found another sibling in 1871, and the writing was so faded that I could only identify the names of the parents. I squinted, and the first name seemed to be some latinate form of Patrick, the other brother.

We had barely been in the country a few hours, and we had already found crucial information. We knew the church parish and parents’ first names. Time to check in to the hotel and take a nap.



Now that we were sure that the tombstone transcription we’d read online before we arrived was our family, we now knew that Francis had died in 1881, and Elizabeth in 1885. This raised some questions: It said Elizabeth had died aged 60. That meant she’d had her first child at 43. Not common for 19th century Irish catholics. Even more confusing, Francis died aged 70, which meant he’d had his first child at age 57!

The next day, we walked across the city center to the National Archives, which contained microfilms of the 1901 and 1911 censuses. We wanted to know what happened to Thomas after his siblings left for America.

(After this vacation, I am now an expert at microfilm machines. Just saying.)

He’d taken over the family farm with his wife Marianne. In 1901, they’d lived in a house with stone walls and a thatched roof, two rooms and three windows in front. They had a stable, a cow house, a calf house, a dairy, and a piggery. (Dad and I spent much time giggling at the word “piggery.”) By 1911, they’d added two sheds, a fowl house, a boiling house, and another piggery!

They had no children, but Marianne’s niece lived with them in 1911. Now we had yet another mystery: The tombstone transcription said that Thomas had a son that would have been born in 1899. He didn’t show up in either census. Marianne died a couple of years after the 1911 census. The couple was well into their forties. Another Irish catholic family with no kids?! ( Hey, it’s a stereotype, but it’s what we were going by!)

We walked back across the city to the General Register’s Office, where all the civil registries were kept. Here’s how they roll: Unlike the other buildings we’d been to, this one charged you for searches. There are large index books, one for each year of the registry since 1864. Red books were for births, green books were for marriages, and black ones were for deaths. To search a five year span of one kind of book, you had to pay four euros. To have someone in the back photocopy the entry you think might be one of your relatives, it costs two euros. Of course, there was only one copy of each index book, so if someone else was using it, you had to wait. Most of the workers behind the desk were pretty lenient and let you check any book you wanted, but one bitchy lady made me put the 1878 book away when I’d paid her for 1869-1873. Grr.

Thomas and Margaret’s birth was tracked down pretty quickly (“Two for the price of one!” The worker cried with glee when I turned in the photocopy form) and it was on that form that we discovered that my great-great grandparents were illiterate – they signed the certificate with an X. I thought of checking for Francis and Elizabeth’s marriage certificate. We were in luck – they got married in 1864, the first year of mandatory registry. On the form were the names of their fathers, which we hadn’t known before. We managed to find a birth record of a Mary registered in Carlow right before the place closed, and we turned in a photocopy form before we left.

After much anticipation overnight, we returned there the next morning to find out that we had the wrong person. We then decided to search for the death records of Francis and Elizabeth. The records gave cause of death. Francis had died of prostate cancer, which he’d had for a few years with no medical attention. (If he’d had no medical attention, how’d they know it was prostate cancer? Did they do autopsies in 19th century rural Ireland?) Elizabeth had died in a mental asylum, which she had been in for a year in a half, still in depression over the death of her husband. Eep.

I decided to do a methodical search to find Mary and Patrick’s birth certificates – I searched every birth book between 1868 and 1871 and wrote down everything I found and didn’t find. It was then that we found Mary’s birth record – the one piece of information my dad needed for the dual citizenship application. She was born in 1871. She was the faded record I’d seen in the church microfilm two days earlier. I’d found my great-grandmother’s real birth year within hours of arrival, and I’d missed it! Upon returning to the library later that day, that record definitely read “Maria.”

While I was back in the library, we searched for two other things. One was a birth record of Patrick. We couldn’t find him in the civil records, and it was easier to search for free in the one roll of church records than pay to search through giant books and wait for photocopies, as we had been doing. This time, I knew to start searching in 1864, and he turned up almost instantly. Patrick was born in 1865 – he was the oldest child, which was different than what we had thought. I also scrolled to the church records of Francis and Elizabeth’s wedding – which gave the names of their mothers as well as their fathers.

Across the hallway from where I was with the microfilm machines, my dad was in the genealogy room’s computers, checking out a record of Irish land value in 1852. (Apparently the survey was so time consuming they never did it again.) There he found that Francis and Elizabeth’s families each rented farmland in Rutland. Dad tracked down a map with the farm boundaries marked off – the farms were next to each other. So my great-great-grandparents were living next door to each other, and their parents probably married them off when they realized that they were getting older. How…depressing.


There were still some questions that needed to be answered. It was time to head to County Carlow.