of English Catholic life throughout the time of the Gordon Riots (1780), and when he died he left it to his wife’s nephew and employee Richard Charles Brown (1776–1837), brother of the first Catholic bishop of Liverpool. Brown, my 4 x great-grandfather, ran it in partnership with Patrick Keating, styling themselves ‘Brown & Keating, printers to the R.R. the Vicars Apostolic’. They continued The Laity’s Directory until his death, and Brown’s widow Jane (née Hemsworth) took it on for a few years. She gave up in the face of the rival Catholic Directory, that continues to this day. These publications list many births, deaths and marriages for Catholics in England, including many of Irish origin.
Biographical dictionaries
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (OUP, 2004) is the best, covering all of Britain and Ireland up to independence. Also useful are the broader volumes of Who’s Who. For prominent Catholics, Irish or not, see Joseph
Catholic children
Thanks to the great influx of Irish families, charitable institutions for their children proliferated. By the 1860s there were Catholic children’s homes, orphanages and schools in most dioceses. Details are in the Laity’s Directory and its successors, with records in diocesan archives.
Gillow’s A Literary and Biographical History, or Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics (Burns & Oates, 5 vols, 1885–1902).
Wills
Back to 12 January 1858, wills have been proved centrally at the Principal Probate Registry (PPR). Searches can be made there: indexes forward to 1943 are also on fiche at many archives and Mormon FHCs.
Before 1858 wills were proved in church courts, as mapped in The Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers (Phillimore, rev. edn, 2003) and www.genuki.org.uk, and described in J. Gibson and E. Churchill, Probate Jurisdictions, Where to look for Wills (FFHS, 5th edn, 2002). Those with property in more than one jurisdiction, or with the social pretension to be the sort of people who might, had wills proved in the next most senior court – usually the local bishop’s – rising ultimately to the Prerogative Courts [of the Archbishops] of York and Canterbury. The latter – the PCC – included people, usually the wealthier sort, from all over the realm, including those with property in both Ireland and the mainland, money in the Bank of England, or who died abroad (‘in foreign parts’, often abbreviated to ‘pts’) including soldiers and sailors. Between 1653 and 1660, under Cromwell, all wills in England and Wales were proved at the PCC too. Most Welsh wills are at the National Library of Wales. Those for York are at the Borthwick Institute and are largely covered by published indexes. All wills proved at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) are indexed and accessible at www.documentsonline. nationalarchives.gov.uk.
Shipping lists
The journey across the Irish Sea was a domestic one, so virtually no passenger lists between Ireland and the mainland exist. Those that do are arranged by port and date, and don’t state places of origin anyway, making searches impractical and largely fruitless.
Other sources
Naturalisations: see p. 136 (naturalisations in Ireland).
Armed forces : see p 126.
FURTHER READING
A. Adolph, Collins Tracing your Family History (Collins, 2005).
M. Hartigan, The History of the Irish in Britain: a Bibliography (London, 1986).
Irish roots revealed
My cousins Dominic and Ruth Cassidy are a perfectly ‘normal’ British couple: he was born in West London and she in Newport, South Wales. Digging into their roots, however, reveals recent ancestry from Germany, Scotland, Nigeria and Ireland. Dom’s father, who sounds entirely English, is a Cassidy (Ó Caiside, a Fermanagh family, originally physicians and ollamhs – court poets – to the Maguire Princes of Fermanagh), whilst Dominic’s equally very ‘English’ great-grandmother was a Kilduff (Mac Giolla Dhuibh, descended, coincidentally, from the Princes of Fermanagh themselves). Dominic’s mother’s family of Bohane, long-since synonymous with Tunbridge Wells, Kent, were originally Ó Buadhacháin, traceable far back to his 3 x great-grandfather Patrick Bohane, born in Co. Cork about 1804, who became a marine store dealer in Pembroke, Wales. Ruth’s mother’s father was a Nigerian sailor who settled in Newport, whilst on her father’s side her great-grandmother Mary Ann was brought over from Co. Waterford to Newport, Wales, at the height of the Great Famine, by her own mother, Jane White. Her family has a story that Jane ‘was so ill on the voyage she swore to settle in the first house she saw. This was not far from the truth’, Ruth tells me, ‘for she settled in rooms in Canal Parade – a stone’s throw from the river wharf where the family arrived.’
Scotland was originally called Alba. The Scots were Irish invaders, and by the expansion of their kingdom to encompass the whole of Alba, the name Scotland was born.
Scots later migrated into Ireland due to the Plantations (see p. 201), but in the 19th century, there was a great backwash of Protestants and Catholics alike, fleeing the Great Famine. By December 1846, Glasgow had acquired a population of 26,335 Irish paupers. Many moved on to the Grassmarket, West Port and Cowgate areas of Edinburgh, where they lived crammed into the city’s narrow wyndes and closes. Anti-Irish rioting led, in June 1847, to many being sent back to Ireland – but those who survived this trauma often had no choice but to return nonetheless.
Archives
The National Archives of Scotland (NAS), General Register Office and National Library of Scotland (NLI) are all in Edinburgh, and there is an excellent network of local record offices and archives, detailed at the Scottish Archives Network website, www.scan.org.uk/.
Civil Registration
This started on 1 January 1855. Births 1855–1905, marriages 1855–1930 and deaths 1855–1955 can be searched and seen at www.scotlandspeople. gov.uk: coverage is likely to be extended, but for the years not covered you can search at Scotland’s General Register Office.
Births: mothers’ maiden names appear in birth indexes from 1929. Certificates for 1855 and from 1861 onwards show the same categories of information as recorded in England and Wales, with the addition of date and place of parents’ marriage – which, if it is in Ireland, is a massive advantage. Those for 1855 alone also record the ages and places of birth of the parents and details of the child’s older siblings.
Ancient Scottish pedigrees
Rightly or wrongly, the pedigrees of many prominent Scottish clans and of the Scottish kings themselves connect back to the ancient Irish genealogies and thus to the stem of Milesius, the traditional ancestor of the Gaels.
In the 3rd
