A Very Occasional Blog
I’m a genealogist by profession, and a Fellow of the Accredited Genealogists Ireland,(AGI) I also dabble in local history and the history of Irish golfers, and I’m always writing something!
A Slideshow of Recent Posts
Baltinglass Chronicles Consigned to History
On 16 December 2022 I sold my last copy of Baltinglass Chronicles 1851-2001. What that means is that it’s now more or less out of print after a sixteen-year span. On 14 December I received an order for a copy on the Wicklow Marketplace. That went to someone in the...
Hungry Hill: Daphne du Maurier’s Fantasy Ireland
A few months ago I spent a weekend with friends on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork. On our way from Glengarriff to Castletownbere we drove along the base of the bleak looking Hungry Hill. It’s the highest mountain on the peninsula. During our few days we visited...
The Anglo-Irish Treaty’s Ancestor
The signing, a century ago this week, of the Anglo-Irish Treaty echoed the signing of another document five years earlier. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic was signed by seven men in Easter Week 1916. It was, in a sense, an ancestor of the Anglo-Irish Treaty....
My Name is Aloysius
My second forename is Aloysius. Throughout my childhood, youth and middle age I kept it hidden from most people. I was embarrassed by it and I wasn’t a bit happy that my parents thought to lumber me with such an oddity. It took decades for me to come to terms with...
The Day My Grandfather Didn’t Become a Golf Champion
A hundred years ago this very day my grandfather, Joseph Gorry, reached the zenith of his amateur golfing career. Very probably for him it felt like failure. The events of that day became the stuff of golfing legend in the family. His daughter, Joan Gorry, was...
Gordon Bennett!
Gordon Bennett !!! This photograph was taken on Wednesday 1 July 1903 in South Main Street, Naas, Co. Kildare. What was happening was the weighing of the cars for the 4th Gordon Bennett Cup Race, the first to be held outside of France. The race took place the...
Time Travel – it’s 1975 again!
Today (11 March 2022) my friend Cora Crampton showed me a photograph of a sheet of paper – the one in the image here. It was in the back of a copy of Claude Chavasse’s The Story of Baltinglass (1970) which I gave her (or so she says) several years ago. She...
I’m Mad as Hell!
I’m led to believe that it was Mark Twain who said ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good story’, but who knows? Who cares? Truth is a commodity much less valuable than perception. Get a celebrity into a graveyard, show him any old gravestone and tell him...
Contact
