A History in Peril?

Memorial at Bombay Street, Belfast

No where was I more aware of history being a blink away than in Belfast. Our black cab tour took us to many of the spots that were scenes of violence only a matter of decades ago. The hardest thing on our tour was to get close to the murals and memorials which see clusters of cabs and buses trying to get their passengers close to the scenes of past action.

It was difficult to relate the busy peaceful scene to the newspaper and TV news coverage of the troubles. Squinting hard it might have been possible to equate the current scene with the war torn streets where people had to take their lives in their hands to carry out their daily activities. No one was covered in glory over that conflict.

Things were peaceful in May when we were there. It probably seemed that strife was in the past until 2016. Now it remains to be seen what will happen when Ireland’s current borders become further divided in the long drawn out lead up to Brexit. 

 Never again!

 

Absorbing History

 

Street in Rouen

  

To many their surroundings were everyday things that they probably took for granted but walking down the street in Rouen to see the cathedral was like walking back in history. Not that it was easy to follow our tour guide through the crowded cobblestone streets. It probably didn’t help that we kept stopping to take photos and ended up far behind our group.

There was more space for the crowds in Rouen than had been available when we went to visit Monet’s house and gardens. There were so many people there that we didn’t have enough time to go into the house. The gardens were magnificent and almost made up for the people blocking some of the view. Another day might have been different, but it was a sunny Sunday, the first nice day in a while, a very good day for a walk to take in history. 

Notre-Dame de l'Assomption de Rouen

 

That one day was a teaser and the first time I had stepped foot in France. It showed me that finding out about history on a tour is a limited overview at best and can turn out to be hard to access because of weather, crowds and other distractions. The tour only covered a limited number of places and my friend who wanted to see Rouen was unable to visit the church significant to her family history as it was too far away. Mass market tours might not be the best thing for family historians on the hunt. The moral of the story is that historical tours are fun and informative for the average tourist but if you want to know more it would be better to spend time tailoring a visit that fits in the history you want to absorb.

Monet's Japanese Garden

Links to Ireland

The Potato Famine of the 1840’s caused an unfathomably enormous loss of life in Ireland. The famine was also the cause of a huge wave of Irish immigration to many countries but most particularly to the new world. The statues of famine victims on the shores of the river Liffy as shown in the image above are a commemoration of this chapter of Irish history.

While the famine is the most famous episode in Irish history, it didn’t include my direct Irish ancestors who left Ireland before the 1840s. But the Irish have been leaving the country for generations. The exhibits in the Epic Irish Immigration Museum covered many more times in Irish history when people left in droves due to famines, wars or other momentous events. Perhaps some other historical event caused my ancestors to leave their native land.

I hoped that advice from the Family History Centre in the Epic building would get me further ahead in my search. Unfortunately not, although I was advised to book a consultation with an expert on London ancestry at the Society of Genealogist in London. I will have to see if I can get an appointment for the time that I am in London. I am determined to find out more about my Cavanagh line. We’ll see how that works out.

Tenement Tours

Hallway at 14 Henrietta Street, Dublin

Want to know more about how your family lived? Why not visit a museum that tells you more about dwellings like those they may have lived in? While in Dublin I went on a tour of their tenement museum. The tour and exhibits there focused on 14 Henrietta Street’s history. Like many other buildings in inner cities, it started its life as the home of the well-to-do with well appointed rooms for the public eye and more basic accommodation for the necessary offices, such as kitchens and servants’ quarters.

But times and neighbourhoods change and what was a fashionable address in earlier years may fall out of favour. What happens to those once great houses? They get repurposed and go down in the world. A lot of them end up to be tenements in slums like those on Henrietta Street in Dublin. After the fashionable set moved on, 14 Henrietta Street was taken over by businesses, then housed soldiers for a while. It wasn’t until an enterprising man thought to partition the rooms and rent out every part of the building that Henrietta Street became a true tenement. As many people as possible were squeezed into the place.

There was even a family of thirteen occupying the area of what is now the reception area of the museum. It was smaller but less dank that the basement they had occupied and offered more light. Lack of light was a problem in the buildings. There was no lighting on the stairs which made coming home after dark tricky. Hallways must have been gloomy places but maybe it was better not to see the walls painted in their distinctive red and blue and notice the true state of the place or the vermin which shared the accommodations.

I still haven’t been able to find out where my Cavanaghs came from in Ireland. I am not sure if they lived in Dublin but looking at the changes that were wrought in the building on Henrietta Street gave me a better idea of the surroundings my ancestors in East End London found themselves in.

Stories in Family History

Bridgend Hotel, Islay, Scotland

Do stories grab you? Perhaps you are a reader of fiction but even if you rarely open a book, stories can still catch your attention. Stories can include the latest office gossip, riveting local, national or international news or statements of claim or intent. Stories and people have been linked since early history.

Stories can be a gateway to family history. They were in my case. My first forays into genealogical research flowed from the stories that I heard growing up. Well, that and the questions I asked my family. Early on, most of the questions were to my mother because I started with her line but, strangely enough, it was my father who told me that her Gilchrist line came from Islay.

How did he know that? I never asked while I had the chance. (Those missed opportunities seem to happen a lot with family historians.) Perhaps he learned that from my great aunt, Peg Gilchrist. Auntie Peg researched family history way back in the days before computers. I have no idea when she started but she had the advantage of being two generations closer to our Scottish roots than me. It was likely the saga of the trek from Scotland to Ontario was still in living memory even if the family had moved further west by the time that Auntie Peg must have started her research.

That was back when queries went out by snail mail. I can remember the days of sending out mail queries and hoping for replies. It must have been even harder back when Auntie Peg started, perhaps in the 1950's or '60s, when fewer information repositories were set up with the genealogist in mind. Still, she was able to progress from armchair research to the more exciting activity of visiting ancestral places. In fact, I have a photo of the Bridgend Hotel on Islay where she stayed.

Huh, that's probably the answer to how my Dad knew that my Mum's Gilchrists came from Islay. He would have remembered stories about Auntie Peg's visit to Islay even if he didn't remember details about her research. When I first visited Islay, I made sure to follow in her footsteps and made arrangements to stay at the Bridgend Hotel like she had. At least I knew that about her genealogy trip, that picture (the one at to the right) and a half page write up about the Gilchrist family are the only parts of her research that I have found. Too bad there weren't any stories about where the rest of her research papers went. 

DNA Update

For me, DNA hasn't led to any of those wonderful revelations that are unveiled on shows like Finding Your Roots. But my knowledge of genetic genealogy is increasing and lately I have made some progress with using matches to further my genealogical research.

One thing I am getting a lot of experience with is endogamy. It seems that it proliferates in much of the ancestry that I research.I received a recent email about a match related to a supposed 2nd to 4th cousin match. It looked promising but any match would be back nine generations according to the paper trail. I think I need to look into this further. The email did show some possible connections with the old country which should be helpful.

That's not the only line where endogamy confuses things. The ancestral lines I am tracing go back to some isolated groups where there were limited possibilities when it came to a mate (or mates); groups such as Colonial Americans, and Scots from the Western Isles. My ancestor hunt also includes Acadians which I suspect have their share of intermarriage. Another group that may have been prone to marrying back into a common gene pool were English nonconformists. There are repetitions of the surnames, Strange, Devonshire and Rolls in the nonconformist lineages I pursue. But my DNA news isn't all about the strange matches that endogamy brings.

DNA Facebook groups were a bit of a bust for my lines at first. Recently, my name actually showed up as a GEDmatch match on a post on the Irish DNA Registry on Facebook. There were Irish locations listed! Can this be the break that helps me get my Cavanagh family out of London back to where they came from? That remains to be seen.

The McPhees - Scots or French?

Lochaber on the west coast of Scotland, possible place of origin for the McPhee clan

Decades ago, I became aware of the conundrum that was the McPhee family. Visits to the family farm in River Bourgeois happened often in this large family. When I was there, the talk was in English and French. I remember thinking it was odd that the family name was so Scottish when they were in such a French part of Cape Breton. At the time I supposed that some time in the mid 1800s, a lone male McPhee wandered into that part of Nova Scotia, married an Acadian woman and had been assimilated. 

Until last week, my research didn't go very far into the McPhee line. It was then that I received an email about one of the DNA kits I manage. The email mentioned a 2nd to 4th cousin match with a connection to Scotland. Intrigued, I got out the bits and pieces I had and spent a few nights on Ancestry. Turns out my theory of the assimilated lone male McPhee in the mid 1800s was a bit off the mark.  

The McPhee line I am researching goes back in River Bourgeois and other parts of Isle Madame in Cape Breton for four generations. That's many generations of assimilation into Acadian/French culture and there are names in that line like Louis and Regis that fit into the French mindset. Before the move to Cape Breton, the fifth generation back appears to have been started by John McPhee who was born in Quebec around 1756. 

It's all very interesting but doesn't really answer the question of why this French family had the Scottish surname of McPhee. The timing of John McPhee's birth in Quebec is suggestive. 1756 was just a few years after some momentous upheavals in both the Acadian and Scottish worlds. 

1755 was the year of the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia but the Acadians in Cape Breton were not driven from Isle Madame. In fact, Acadians came from outside the community to settle there.* Ten years prior to the disruption of the Acadians, the Scots, particularly the Highland Scots, had gone through a major upheaval of their own, when Bonnie Prince Charlie and his supporters were defeated at Culloden. There were a number of McPhees named in the muster rolls of Prince Charles' army. Could the father of John McPhee, born in 1756 in Quebec, be one of the men who had fled from Scotland as they were hunted down by Cumberland's army after the defeat?#

 River Bourgeois (Inlet) Lighthouse

There are many things to speculate about as my research uncovers information about this McPhee line and I hope to find many more answers. The questions keep coming, not the least of which why there is a 2nd to 4th cousin DNA match leading back to Scotland when I can count 8 to 9 generations of this particular McPhee line in Canada. Is this a case of more endogamy in action?

Sources:

*Vernon, C.W. Cape Breton Canada at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (1902). Global Heritage Press Inc, Campbellville, Ontario, 2006

#Livingsone, Alastair, Christian W.H. Aikan, Betty Stuart Hart. No Quarter Given: The Muster Roll of Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s Army, 1745 – 46. Neil Wilson Publishing Ltd. Glasgow, 2001

  

Images:

By Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right, CC BY-SA 3.0, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13290738

By Dennis Jarvis from Halifax, Canada - DGJ_4958 - River Bourgeois (Inlet) LighthouseUploaded by X-Weinzar, CC BY-SA 2.0, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18631638