There must have been much rejoicing when John and Martha Stratford’s eighth child arrived in the mid-1730s, about a decade into their marriage.  According to Martha’s second cousin, Pole Cosby, that eighth child, Edward, was their first son.  It is said that John and Martha had 19 children, with 15 of them surviving childhood.  However, there seems not to be any definite record of all the children, or when they were born.  So, it can be said that they had at least nine daughters, very likely eleven, and possibly more.
 
The Stratfords were upwardly mobile members of the Irish gentry in the early eighteenth century.  John was the youngest son of Edward Stratford of Belan, Co. Kildare, and ultimately he succeeded to most of his property, including the town of Baltinglass, Co. Wicklow, and much of its environs.  Martha was the younger daughter of Archdeacon Benjamin Neale and his wife Hannah Paul.  The Archdeacon’s career is a little hazy, but he may have been rector of Baltinglass parish about the time of his daughter’s marriage.  The Co. Carlow parishes of Hacketstown and Rathvilly also vaguely featured in his curriculum vitae.  In any case, he built a mansion in Rathvilly parish, just south of Baltinglass, which he called Mount Neale [now Mountneill].  After his death much of his property, including Mount Neale, and property from the Paul family passed to the Stratfords.
 
The Stratford family were a quarrelsome and litigious lot.  There was always a disagreement going on between some of them.  Sir Jonah Barrington, in his colourful and satirical Personal Sketches, commented that they ‘preferred law to all other species of pastime’.  John and Martha had a not very harmonious relationship with their eldest son, Edward.  Edward in turn was intermittently at loggerheads with his younger brothers, while his sisters appear to have had divided loyalties.  According to Barrington, Edward had a dispute with his brothers about the running of the borough of Baltinglass.  To remedy the situation he decided to nominate his sister Hannah as the borough’s new returning officer, an extraordinary proposition for the late eighteenth century.  It ‘created a great battle’ into which the other sisters evidently waded.  Barrington wrote:
The honourable ladies all got into the thick of it : some of them were well trounced – others gave as good as they received : the affair made a great uproar in Dublin, and informations were moved for and granted against some of the ladies.
 
The order of birth of John and Martha’s eleven, or so, daughters is very unclear.  Almost certainly HANNAH was the eldest, though she has been referred to as Edward’s twin.  She remained unmarried.  If the order in which her sisters wed is any indication of their place in the family, they were born in this order: MARTHA (married 1753 Morley Pendred Saunders), ELIZABETH (m. 1758 Robert Tynte), AMELIA (m. 1760 Richard Wingfield, younger brother of the 2nd Viscount Powerscourt), HARRIOT (m. 1765 Robert Hartpole), GRACE (m. 1778 Rev. Hayes Phipps Queade), ANNE (m. 1778 George Powell) and FRANCES (m. 1781 William Holt).  In addition, there was DEBORAH, who did not marry, as well as two others, MARIA and LETITIA, who died sometime before 1789.
 
Considering that the Stratfords were regarded as wealthy and that they were coming up in the world, the matches made by the daughters were unspectacular.  Amelia was the only one who married into the aristocracy and even that was not a major step up the ladder, as her husband’s father had been elevated to the peerage only 17 years before she became the Honourable Mrs. Wingfield.
 
In 1763 the Stratfords moved up a peg in society, when John Stratford was created Baron of Baltinglass.  This made Lord and Lady Baltinglass’s other married daughters the Hon. Mrs. Saunders and the Hon. Mrs. Tynte, while the unmarried girls became the Hon. Hannah, Harriot, Grace, Anne, Frances and Deborah Stratford.  If Maria and Letitia were alive at the time they too would have been Honourables!  The following year Amelia’s brother-in-law died and her husband became viscount.  She was now Lady Powerscourt and once again ahead of her own mother in the pecking order, as viscountess trumps baroness.
 
In 1776 John Stratford was elevated to the title of Viscount Aldborough, but this did not change the status of his daughters.  However, the next year he became Earl of Aldborough and his daughters’ prefix of ‘Honourable’ was replaced by ‘Lady’.  This had no bearing on Amelia’s status as she already was the wife of a peer.  By then all of the Stratford daughters ranged from young adults to middle-aged women.  John Stratford had long been a wealthy landowner with social aspirations.  With his newly found position as a peer in the 1760s, and a houseful of daughters, it might have been expected that better matrimonial alliances would have been a priority for him and Martha.  For whatever reason, there were no advantageous marriages.
 
John died less than six months after gaining his earldom.  His son Edward became the 2nd earl and he too had aspirations to greater social connections, but his sisters who married in the following four years did nothing to enhance the family’s grandeur.  All three married with their mother’s approval, as she was a party to each of their marriage settlements.  One married a student and future clergyman, while the other two settled for fairly ordinary gentlemen.  Considering that each of them had a dowry of £4,000-£5,000, you might expect them to catch the younger son of a peer at least.
 
In relation to this generation of the Stratford family, original documentary sources are supplemented by Ethel M. Richardson’s Long Forgotten Days (London, 1928) and Ronald W. Lightbown’s An Architect Earl: Edward Augustus Stratford (Thomastown, 2008), and by an article, ‘Recollections of Visits to Belan House, Co. Kildare, in the Early Victorian Period’, by an anonymous female writer, published in the Journal of the County Kildare Archaeological Society, Vol. V, No. 5 (1908).  Mervyn Archdall’s 1789 revision of John Lodge’s Peerage of Ireland, or a Genealogical History of the Present Nobility of the Kingdom listed nine of the daughters of John and Martha Stratford, including the little known Maria and Letitia, both of whom were stated as deceased by that time.  Archdall’s source on these two daughters was ‘Information of the Earl’, their brother.  Strangely Archdall omitted Frances and Deborah, both of whom were alive and well at the time.  Richardson likewise listed nine daughters, omitting Maria and Deborah.
 
No one seems to have carried out a full inventory of the Stratford offspring.  Over the years, daughters’ names have been thrown about and the total of nine has been quoted, without a careful head count.  Assuming that Maria and Letitia actually existed, and there is scant evidence of that, there were at least eleven daughters.  Certainly there were six sons.  If there were 19 children altogether there are two others unaccounted for, and their gender is unknown.
 
The following is a very brief summary in relation to each of the eleven daughters of whom there is record:
 
Hannah: Apparently she was the eldest, named after her maternal grandmother, Hannah Paul (Mrs. Neale).  However, Lightbown refers to her as Edward’s twin, and Edward was preceded by seven girls.  Certainly Hannah was the eldest surviving unmarried daughter, as she was referred to as Miss Stratford before she became Lady Hannah, evidently at about the age of fifty.  By all accounts she was a formidable woman.  Apparently her opinion held sway with her parents.  According to Barrington’s lively account of the dispute over the borough of Baltinglass, she was an ally of her brother Edward, the 2nd Earl.  Hannah died unmarried in 1801 at 8 Great Denmark Street, the Dublin residence her brother the earl had used before building Aldborough House.  At that time she was possibly in her mid-seventies.
 
Maria: According to Archdall’s revision of Lodge’s Peerage of Ireland, Maria was deceased by 1789.  The only other evidence of her existence is the ‘Portrait of Lady Maria Stratford, daughter of 1st Earl of Aldborough’ which was sold at auction in 2019 as part of the contents of Fortgranite, the residence of the Dennis family, descendants of the Stratfords.  Despite her want of biography, Maria’s picture fetched £18,000, three times the guide price.  The portrait was attributed to James Latham, an Irish artist who died in 1747.  If it was by Latham, Maria must have been one of the older daughters.
 
Letitia: Archdall also mentioned Letitia as deceased by 1789.  The only other reference found to her was Richardson’s ‘to complete the long list, at the very end, came the little Lady Letitia, who appears to have died early unmarried’.  Her position ‘at the very end’ may have come from Richardson’s imagination rather than real evidence.
 
Martha: The first of the children of John and Martha to marry.  Her husband was Morley Pendred Saunders of Saunders Grove, just north of Baltinglass.  The ceremony was celebrated at St. Anne’s in Dublin on 20 February 1753 by George Stone, Archbishop of Armagh.  That little social coup may have come about by ecclesiastical connections through the Neale family.  Stone started his rapid rise through the ranks in 1733, when he became Dean of Ferns.  In the same year Martha’s grandfather, Benjamin Neale died in office as Chancellor of Ferns.  Martha was still alive in 1800, when she was bequeathed a legacy by her brother Edward.  Her many descendants included the Tyntes of Tynte Park and the Dennises of Fortgranite, both in West Wicklow, as well as the Saunders family.  The 2019 sale of Fortgranite brought an end to her progeny’s association with the Baltinglass area.
 
Elizabeth: In 1758 she married Robert Tynte of Old Bawn, Co. Dublin, and Dunlavin, Co. Wicklow.  He died in June 1760 near Bristol, on his way to Bath ‘for the recovery of his health, which was much impaired’.  Their only child was born posthumously.  This was the future Sir James Stratford Tynte, who was created a baronet in 1778, while still a minor.  He married his first cousin Hannah Saunders, Lady Martha’s daughter.  Lady Elizabeth remained a widow for the rest of her life.  According to Lightbown, she died in 1816.  The Tyntes of Tynte Park were her descendants.
 
Amelia: She married Hon. Richard Wingfield in St. Anne’s parish, Dublin, on 25 September 1760.  Four years later she became Lady Powerscourt.  Her husband died in 1788, but she was still alive in 1807, when she testified in a Chancery case concerning the will of her brother Edward.  According to Richardson, she died in 1830, by which time she would have been in her late eighties at least.  Among her living descendants are Sarah Ferguson and her daughters the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie of York.
 
Harriot: She also married in St. Anne’s parish, suggesting that the Stratfords’ town house was in that area of Dublin at the time.  The wedding took place on 30 May 1765 and her husband was Robert Hartpole of Shrule in Queen’s Co. [now Co. Laois], then a grand house in decline.  Richardson mentions an account of ‘when she, suffering the agonies of smallpox, gave birth to a dying baby boy’.  According to Lightbown, Harriot died in 1775 (in which case she was never ‘Lady Harriot’).  Her only surviving son, George, was the subject of one of Barrington’s Personal Sketches, in which the Stratfords were lampooned.  He died in 1795, bringing an end to the Hartpole line that had been associated with Shrule for generations.  Hannah’s daughter Martha married Charles Bowen and her daughter Maria married John Lecky.  The historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903) was one of her descendants.
 
Grace: In 1778, the year after the death of her earl father, Grace married Hayes Phipps Queade.  The ceremony also took place in St. Anne’s parish, on 1 September.  As Grace’s mother was born no later than about 1708, Grace must have been in her early twenties at least by the time of the marriage.  Her husband was a scholarship student at Trinity College, Dublin, aged about twenty-one, and the son of a clergyman.  He graduated the following year and was ordained in 1780.  Apparently his first appointment was not until 1799, when he became curate at St. Anne’s.  Considering his youth and lack of prospects at the time of the marriage, it is not surprising that Grace’s marriage settlement stipulated (with Queade’s consent) that none of what she brought to the union would be ‘at the disposal or subject to the Controul of her said then intended Husband’.  Grace died in or before 1803, when her will was proved.  In 1805 Queade married his second wife, Narcissa McNemara.
 
Anne: James Shiel, an ally of the 2nd Earl, in a letter of January 1778, quoted by Richardson, observed:
Lady Ann sings to admiration the song in ‘The Beggar’s Opera,’ ‘I’m like a ship in the ocean lost.’
At the end of that year Anne married George Powell, apparently a distant cousin who attached himself to the Stratford family and later became agent to Anne’s brother Edward.  Anne was still alive in 1798 but must have died soon afterwards.  Her earl brother died on the second day of the nineteenth century, 2 January 1801, and eleven months later his widow, Anne Elizabeth, married George Powell.  That union lasted only a few months before Anne Elizabeth also died.
 
Frances: She was the last of the sisters to take a husband.  She married William Holt of Dublin on 26 April 1781 in St. Anne’s parish, with her brother-in-law, Rev. Hayes Phipps Queade as celebrant.  She had two children, Edward Stratford Holt and Hannah O’Neale Holt, both mentioned in her will.  In the late spring of 1792 it was known in the family that Frances was dying.  On 30 April Lady Aldborough and Lady Hannah went to visit at her home in Crumlin, Co. Dublin.  According to the 2nd Earl’s diary, quoted by Richardson, they brought home ‘her only child’ to stay with them in Dublin ‘as her poor Mother is not like to live’.  A few days later ‘little Miss Holt’ was brought back to visit Frances.  On 15 May Lord Aldborough wrote ‘Lost my poor sister Holt’.  Three days later he entered:
Went to Crumlin, to do the last sad office to my departed sister in attending her remains to St. John’s.  After the burial service was performed, had the coffin replaced in hearse, and Conveyed to Family Vault in Baltinglass, and grave intended for her in St John’s closed.  Spent the rest of the day at home.
The ‘Family Vault’ was not a vault as such, and should not be confused with the much later Stratford Tomb that is to be seen now in Baltinglass Abbey.
 
Deborah:  Debby, as she appears to have been called, remained unmarried.  She was little mentioned until her later years.  After the death of Edward, the 2nd Earl, in 1801, the next brother, John, became the 3rd Earl of Aldborough.  At some stage John and his wife decided to lead separate lives.  He remained at Belan House, to which he succeeded along with the title.  After his wife’s departure his sister Debby lived at Belan with him, leading a quiet life.  The anonymous ‘Recollections of Visits to Belan House’ paints a picture of Lady Deborah’s management of the household:
She was a notable housekeeper, always carrying a large bunch of keys, and keeping her store-room filled with all sorts of good things ; she distilled herbs, roses, and lavender ; she doctored the tenants, or thought she did so, for though they accepted her medicaments, they threw them all out, doctor’s stuff, as they called them, not being to their taste. At Christmas time she laid in great stores of raisins and currants, and, with the help of a boy named Hagarty, stoned all the raisins and prepared the Christmas fare herself. This same Hagarty must have had a bad time ; she watched him closely when stoning the raisins, and, if caught putting one into his mouth, boxed his ears so soundly that he tumbled off the high stool on which he was perched.
Eventually the earl’s daughter, Lady Emily, came to live at Belan, and Lady Debby departed.  The anonymous writer added:
In a short time she retired from the scene , and lived a very retired life in Dublin in a large house, I rather think in Leeson Street.  Her fine jewellery and a considerable sum of money which she took with her from Belan she carefully kept sewed up in her mattress.
 
There may be portraits of various of the Stratford sisters in existence.  Apart from that of Maria, the only other encountered on this journey of discovery was one of Elizabeth with her young son James Tynte, reproduced in Lightbown’s book.

​A week ago I attended a marathon of an event.  It lasted from 10.30am to sometime about 9pm, long after I had left.  It was absorbing.  It was full of surprises, good and bad.  It was a glimpse into the past, and it said a lot about the present Irish economy.  For anyone from my locality who attended it, there was no doubt a tinge of sadness as well as great fascination.
 
This event was the sale of the contents of Fortgranite, a gentleman’s residence just a few miles outside of Baltinglass.  For over two hundred years it had been the home of the Dennis family, but recently it was sold and now we were picking over the family’s heirlooms, their more personal possessions and the things they had forgotten in the less visited corners of the ancient house.
 
As well as wanting to purchase a pair of Victorian bookcases and some genealogical books, I had the mad notion of ‘saving’ one of the many portraits for Baltinglass.  The house was crammed full of the images of the Dennis family’s ancestors.  Most of them were from the Swift family.  Apparently they had come to Fortgranite from Swiftsheath, Co. Kilkenny.
 
In the male line the Dennises originally were Swifts.  Meade Swift, a first cousin of the famous Jonathan Swift and a second cousin of the poet John Dryden, was the father of Thomas Swift who married Frances Dennis.  Frances’s brother Lord Tracton died without issue in 1782.  He left his estates in Co. Kerry to his nephew Rev. Meade Swift on condition that he adopt the surname of Dennis.  In 1780 Rev. Meade Swift had married Delia Sophia Saunders of Saunders Grove.  Through this marriage the family’s connection with the Baltinglass area had come about.  It was their son Thomas Stratford Dennis who was the first owner of Fortgranite.  It would appear that the property came with his marriage in 1810 to his first cousin Katherine Martha Maria Saunders.  The last resident owner of Fortgranite was their great-great-grandson Piers Dennis, who died in January 2016.
 
The Swift portraits were not the ones I was concerned about.  I got it into my head that the Stratford family portraits should remain in Baltinglass, where they had history and context.  In my mind’s eye I could see them on the walls of Baltinglass Courthouse, a building almost contemporary with Fortgranite.  Unable to interest anyone with money in being philanthropic, I innocently decided that I might manage to ‘save’ one of the portraits.  Who could possibly wish to go beyond the guide price to purchase portraits of complete strangers by unknown artists?  Well now I know that the answer to that is many people.  The Stratford portrait I was least interested in was that of Lady Maria Stratford, about whose very existence I was previously unaware.  The guide price was €4,000 to €6,000 but Lady Maria was fought over by a number of people before someone bidding over the phone got possession for €18,000.  It must be said that the catalogue indicated that this painting was attributed to James Latham.
 
So, why did the Stratfords interest me, and why where their portraits in Fortgranite?  Robert and Mary Stratford had a residence in Baltinglass in the 1660s.  Their son Edward, though he lived in Belan, Co. Kildare, purchased the town of Baltinglass and many of the townlands in its vicinity from the Carroll family in 1707.  His son John Stratford did much to encourage the development of Baltinglass.  He married Martha daughter of Rev. Benjamin Neale (apparently Rector variously of Hacketstown, Kiltegan and Baltinglass) and through the marriage acquired further local property, including Mountneill, Co. Carlow, a few miles south of Baltinglass.
 
John and Martha became Baron and Baroness Baltinglass in 1763, Viscount and Viscountess Aldborough in 1776 and finally Earl and Countess of Aldborough in 1777.  Their eldest son, Edward, was the more famous 2nd Earl.  It was he who build Aldborough House in Dublin and founded the industrial town (now village) of Stratford-on-Slaney, a few miles north of Baltinglass.
 
The Dennis family were descended from John and Martha through their daughter, Martha Saunders.  The last of the Stratfords was the 6th Earl.  When his residence, Stratford Lodge (where Baltinglass Golf Club is now located), went up in flames in 1858 four Dennis brothers were among those who attempted to save its contents.  Whether the portraits were there at the time is unclear but they came into the possession of the Dennis family either then or on the death of the last earl’s mother.  In any case they adorned the walls of Fortgranite for over 130 years.
 
As for the portraits, they included one of the original Edward Stratford, one of his son John (1st Earl), two of John’s wife Martha and one of their son Edward (2nd Earl).  To me, these historical characters were part of the story of Baltinglass and their images bring to life an aspect of our heritage.  I determined to at least bid for the ‘cheapest’ of them, the nicer of the two of Martha Neale.  The guide price was €1,500-€2,000 and I was sure it would sell for less.  I never got to take part.  The bidding started at €1,500 and the portrait sold for €5,000.
 
Martha Neale may not be a well-known historical character internationally but she possibly was the earliest woman associated with Baltinglass of whom there is a surviving image.  Genealogically she made her mark on the world.  As the mother of at least fifteen (family legend says nineteen) children she produced thousands of descendants.  Among those living today are the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie of York, the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes and the acting brothers Ralph and Joseph Fiennes.
 
During the auction various military jackets went for huge prices.  Much attention was given to a letter dated 1901 from Winston Churchill replying to Capt. (later Col.) Meade J.C. Dennis, who took exception to his comment on the conduct of the Boer War.  With the interest shown in military memorabilia it might have been expected that the letter would fetch a hefty sum, but this was not the case.
 
One portrait that went past me unnoticed, because it was surrounded in the auction by several Swifts, was that of ‘Miss A. Plunkett, niece of the first Lord Aldborough, Countess of Antrim’.  This was Anne Plunkett, a granddaughter of the Edward Stratford who purchased Baltinglass in 1707.  She was also the great-great-great-great-grandmother of Winston Churchill.  I doubt Churchill was aware that the man he was replying to in 1901 was his fifth cousin twice removed.
 
It wasn’t necessary for me to find space in my house to accommodate Martha Neale, and she left Baltinglass after all.  However, I learned that she and the other Stratfords of whom I was concerned went to ‘good homes’ in Ireland.  This is reassuring to know.  The Dennises were the last descendants of the Stratfords living locally, some three and a half centuries after Robert and Mary Stratford first came to Baltinglass.  ‘The end of an era’ is a dreadfully hackneyed phrase.  But in this instance the auction was just that, and I was there to witness the end.

​Oliver and Margaret Walsh may never have been internationally recognised figures, but they had a significant impact on the world.  Were it not for them the Abbey Theatre might never have been founded, the word ‘Disneyland’ would mean nothing to anyone, and the course of the Second World War might well have been different.
 
When Margaret Borrowes married Oliver Walsh she was probably looking forward to a happy life, to having children, and to the relative comfort she was used to.  The Abbey Theatre, Disneyland and the Second World War were far from her thoughts, as they were then unimagined developments of the distant future.  Oliver and Margaret lived in Ireland in the seventeenth century.  The happenings of the twentieth century were for their famous descendants to influence.
 
By the standards of the time Oliver and Margaret were prosperous people.  He was what was termed a ‘gentleman’ and he had the means in 1639 to purchase lands at Ballykilcavan in what was then Queen’s Co. (now Laois).  Margaret was from Gilltown, Co. Kildare, some twenty miles away.  They both witnessed the 1641 Rebellion, in which her father lost heavily for his support of King Charles.  They were again bystanders when in 1649 the wrath of Cromwell descended on Ireland.
 
Cromwell died in 1658, and so too did Oliver Walsh, bequeathing his DNA to posterity.  Three years later his and Margaret’s son, another Oliver, married Editha Hunt of Dublin.  About the same time their daughter Mary married a young man from Warwickshire named Robert Stratford.  With the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, Charles II was trying to perform a miracle of loaves and fishes in confirming Irish land to Cromwellian soldiers while restoring the same land to dispossessed royalists.  It was a chaotic time ‘when land was cheap and money dear’, and Robert Stratford snapped up some bargains, buying or leasing various properties.  One of these was the town of Baltinglass, Co. Wicklow, and he settled there with Mary.
 
Oliver and Editha Walsh remained at Ballykilcavan, which is still today in the possession of descendants.  Their daughter Rebecca married Toby Caulfeild of Clone, Co. Kilkenny.  A century later, in 1795, Rebecca’s great-great-granddaughter, Frances Best, married a farmer called Kepple Disney.  In the 1830s Frances and Kepple’s son Arundel left Ireland with his wife and their infant son, sailing for New York.  They later settled in Ontario in Canada, but the son moved to Kansas.  His son Elias settled in Chicago, where he worked as a carpenter, and it was there that his son, Walt Disney, was born in 1901.  So if Oliver and Margaret Walsh had never married the man who turned his surname into a byword for fantasy and entertainment would never have existed.
 
Returning to the Stratfords, Robert must have done well out of his property speculation in the 1660s, as he was able to marry off his seven daughters quite respectably and leave his son Edward in a comfortable position.  Despite heavy losses incurred in his support for William of Orange in the civil war fought out in Ireland against James II, Edward Stratford prospered.  His son John was eventually elevated to the peerage, first as Baron Baltinglass in 1763 and ultimately as Earl of Aldborough in 1777, the year of his death.  John’s son Edward was the 2nd Earl.  As well as developing the town of Baltinglass, constructing Aldborough House in Dublin and Stratford Place in London, he dreamt up a new industrial town in Co. Wicklow which he called Stratford-on-Slaney.  For decades it was a prosperous textile manufacturing centre but after the industry failed it dwindled to the quiet, pleasant village it is today.  There were four more earls of Aldborough, the last being an eccentric recluse who died in 1875 at Alicante in Spain.
 
In 1697 Abigail Stratford, one of the seven daughters of Robert Stratford and Mary Walsh, married George Canning of Garvagh in Derry.  Their only surviving child was Stratford Canning.  Stratford’s eldest son, George, was a great disappointment to him.  Having got himself into serious debt in London, he was bailed out by his father but in return had to renounce his inheritance.  Then, in his early thirties and still in London, he married a young lady with no fortune, fathered three children and died after less than three years of marriage.  His impoverished widow was forced to take to the stage and she drifted into an even more socially unacceptable position as the mistress of a disreputable actor.
 
At the time of George’s death his second child was a year old.  He was another George.  He spent his early childhood in near penury before being rescued by the Cannings, who paid for his education at Eton and Oxford, where he gained a reputation for academic brilliance.  Entering politics, he rose to the position of Foreign Secretary during the Napoleonic Wars, but lost it after being wounded in a duel with a political rival, Lord Castlereagh.  However, he returned to that office in 1822 following the suicide of the erstwhile Lord Castlereagh, then Marquess of Londonderry.  After a successful five years as Foreign Secretary, in April 1827 he became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.  However, he became ill in July and died on 8 August at the age of 57 after serving one of the shortest terms of any British Prime Minister.  In his day George Canning was regarded as a man who rose from humble origins to the highest political office on his own merit, a unique achievement in nineteenth century Britain.  Though he visited Ireland only once, both his parents were born in the country and he referred to himself as ‘an Irishman born in London’.  He was also a strong advocate of Catholic emancipation, a position that would have horrified his great-granduncle, Edward Stratford, the staunch supporter of King Billy.
 
That Edward Stratford’s daughter Elizabeth married Charles Plunkett of Dillonstown, Co. Louth.  Their daughter Anne married the 5th Earl of Antrim in 1739.  Anne’s only son, Randal, became the 6th Earl on his father’s death.  He eventually married but had no son to inherit the title.  He obtained a new patent in 1785 allowing for his three daughters and their male issue to succeed.  On his death in 1791 his sixteen year old eldest daughter, Anne Catherine, became Countess of Antrim in her own right.  She married Sir Henry Vane-Tempest but their only child was a girl named Frances Anne.  She could not inherit her mother’s title as it was limited to her male heirs, so the earldom passed to Frances Anne’s aunt.  However, on his death in 1813 Sir Henry left his daughter a very rich heiress, with an estimated £60,000 a year.  Lady Frances Anne might have attracted all the gold diggers in London.  However, her mother encouraged the attention of Charles, Lord Stewart, a forty year old widower.  Though he was twice her age, he had a sizeable income of his own and very good connections.  They married in 1819.  Three years later Charles’s half-brother, the Foreign Secretary popularly known as Lord Castlereagh, committed suicide.  Frances Anne’s distant cousin, George Canning, became the new Foreign Secretary and she herself became the Marchioness of Londonderry.
 
Lady Londonderry’s eldest daughter, Frances, took a further step up the aristocratic pyramid by marrying the Marquess of Blandford, as he later succeeded his father as Duke of Marlborough.  While her husband served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the 1870s there was a threatened return of famine, and Frances, Duchess of Marlborough set up a relief fund that raised £135,000.  While in Dublin the Marlboroughs resided at the Viceregal Lodge (now Áras an Uachtaráin).  That was how it came about that their grandson Winston Churchill’s earliest memories were of being in a pram in the Phoenix Park.  Though he was a Nobel Prize winning writer, it was through his leadership of the United Kingdom during World War II that his memory became immortalised.
 
Producing two British prime ministers was not the only legacy to the world from the Stratford branch of Oliver and Margaret Walsh’s family.  Many descendants were prominent in politics and the arts.  Included in their number was Charles Stewart Parnell, who led the constitutional Irish nationalist movement from the 1870s.  On the other hand, so was Sir Basil Brooke (Lord Brookeborough), leader of the unionist movement in the mid-twentieth century and Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.
 
Another descendant was Augusta, Lady Gregory, one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre which influenced Ireland’s cultural identity at the beginning of the twentieth century.  The artist Sir William Orpen was hardly aware of Oliver and Margaret Walsh, or his distant relationship to Churchill when he painted the future legend’s portrait in 1915.  There were other artistic individuals hidden in the branches of the extensive family tree grown by Oliver and Margaret.  The architect Sir Thomas Newenham Deane was one of them.  Among his works were the National Library and National Museum in Kildare Street, Dublin.  The popular twentieth century author Elizabeth Bowen was another.  The Canadian-born Hume Cronyn who died in 2003 was a Broadway star and a Hollywood character actor whose films ranged from Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt in the 1940s to television movies made in the 2000s.  Along the way he starred with his wife Jessica Tandy in such films as The World According to Garp and Cocoon.
 
In the world of the arts today the most prominent offspring are the Irish singer-songwriter Chris De Burgh, and the highly successful English acting brothers Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, who spent part of their childhood in Ireland.  Their kinsman, the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, is another Stratford descendant.  Another celebrity descendant is the 2003 Miss World, Rosanna Davison, who is the daughter of Chris De Burgh.  Jemima Goldsmith, wife of the Pakistani cricketer and politician Imran Khan, inherits her Walsh blood from the Londonderrys.  Oliver and Margaret have royal descendants in Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie of York, whose mother, Sarah Ferguson, traces her ancestry from the Stratfords through the Wingfields of Powerscourt.
 
Oliver and Margaret are thirteen generations back from Rosanna Davison and the princesses.  Beatrice and Eugenie are Rosanna’s eleventh cousins.  They are ninth cousins three times removed of Walt Disney.  Most people have no contact with relatives as remote as third cousins, and few have traced their ancestry back any more than about five or six generations.  So most people have no idea of who else might be sharing their bloodlines.
 
Today there are thousands of Oliver and Margaret Walsh’s progeny all over the planet.  They are by no means all wealthy, famous, or successful people.  They are in all walks of life, and most are unaware of the seventeenth century Irish couple whose DNA contributed to making them the individuals they are.  Oliver and Margaret may not have done remarkable things during their lifetime, but without them the world’s history would have taken a slightly different shape.  That should be a sobering thought for any parent.
 
[First published in Ireland of the Welcomes, Vol. 55, No. 1 (January-February 2006)]