A Family Affair, but ...

Last Monday evening, upon my arrival at bellringing practice, I announced that I was there only as a result of the financial crisis in the health service - I like being melodramatic on occasions.  Asked how this was, I explained that I ought by then to have been driving north to catch the 0400 ferry from Cairnryan to deliver something medical (I knew not what) at Queen's Hospital, Belfast in the morning.  However, when I left the office the job had yet to be confirmed, and I later had a call to say that it wouldn't be happening - their budget wouldn't extend to a courier delivery, however urgent it might be.  I later discovered that I'd got the name wrong anyway - it's actually the Royal Victoria Hospital, but that's irrelevant to my tale.

This is only the latest of a number of recent episodes that are in keeping with an interest I've developed over the last half dozen years or so in all things Irish.  Last weekend saw the return for the winter months to the airwaves of RTÉ Radio 1 of The History Show.  One of the features of the first programme in the series, which I listened to as a podcast during the week, focussed on the Famine of the 1840s and included a graphic description of the sort of hovels in which the poorest people of rural Ireland were living at the time.  There was also a mention of various centenaries that will be marked in coming years, and of the recent centenary celebrations in Belfast of the signing in September 1912 of the Ulster Covenant.  These included a surprisingly peaceful march through Belfast by about 30,000 Unionists, to the accompaniment of several marching bands.  That event even made the national news bulletins on the day.

As I'd tracked my father's family through the 19th century, I had noted the absence of my great-uncle George from among them.  For many years I had assumed that he had died and that I simply hadn't picked up his death in the records.  Last year I discovered what had happened him.  In one last push to try to settle the mystery, I found that he'd joined the army, and had been discharged because of injury in 1876, to settle in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh.  In recent months I've been tracing the lives of some of his nine children, although this is difficult without easy access to the General Record Office of Northern Ireland (GRONI) in Belfast.  Last weekend I discovered that two of his sons (my father's cousins) had died in World War I, one on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the other in northern France some thirteen months previously.

In one of my earliest blogs (you can re-read it here), I wrote about a perceived unfairness regarding Northern Ireland and its being part of the United Kingdom.  Perhaps one of the most public expressions of this - and it's my guess one of the least recognised - was seen this summer in connection with the Olympic Games.  What was 'our' team called? 'Team GB'.  And what do those letters stand for? Great Britain, which is the name of the larger of these two islands off the north-west coast of Europe.  The other is Lesser Britain, or more commonly Ireland.  The country being represented by Team GB is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  So why wasn't it called Team UK?

Going back to the Ulster Covenant ... how many UK citizens are aware of it, I wonder.  And yet, only just beyond living memory, this was one of the key events in a schism that has shaped our country as it is today, and gave birth to one of the few countries of Europe that has known continuous peace for almost ninety years.  I don't propose to turn this blog into a history lesson - let those readers who are interested research it for themselves.  Suffice to say that it's a wonder to me why the Unionist majority in Northern Ireland remain so steadfast about being part of the UK, when those this side of the North Channel seem consistently to ignore them, rarely include their affairs in our news bulletins, and I suspect that if truth were told, would rather they just weren't there to embarrass us.

As I've researched what I must call the 'Irish branch' of my family, I've found myself wondering about their feelings, their attitudes to what was going on around them.  How Irish were they?  What did they reckon to the possibility of being governed by a parliament in Dublin? I've now discovered that at least two followed their father into the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (although when he was under arms it was still known as the 27th Regiment of Foot).  Their mother was born in Fermanagh (probably in Enniskillen) only years after the worst of the famine, and all the children were born in Enniskillen.  But still I ask, how Irish were they?  Three of the four eldest girls married men who had been born in England, one in Battersea, one in Liverpool (although of an Irish family), and one a soldier born in Hampshire. 

My great-aunt died in 1906, and when I couldn't find her husband in the 1911 census, I concluded that he and at least the two younger children might have travelled to England and become lost in the hundreds of Evanses recorded here.  As I wondered how to segregate these individuals from the host, I now find that the records for the two sons killed in the war show that - on enlistment, at least - their father was still living in Enniskillen.  There are clearly many questions still to be answered, and as many if not more that will never be answered, but that won't stop me wondering!