Maddens-in-Ireland

Maddens-in-Ireland
Hello all
I too was hoping that we could have one place to have the ancestry stuff. Someone of us got the name of a person( and a phone number) who has the parish records. Can you post it here? I would like to pursue the birth record for Nanny and that is our best lead.
I saw Smithwick's in the grocery store today. In honor of all of you Phil's been buying and drinking as much Guiness as he can find.
love,
Maureen

More Ancestry 'stuff'

In case anyone ever wants or needs it, I thought it would be good to put as much info as we have about our history in this one place. Laura has a copy of Nanny & Pop's marriage certificate, as well as Uncle Marty's birth certificate, and this is what she shared with me:
Married on 8/3/1920
Pop was 28, and Nanny was 26
Pop lived @ 122 Calumet St. Roxbury
Nanny Lived @ 25 Coroperthwaite St. Cambridge
Date of Record 8/5/1920
Priest, Dennis A. O'Brien 34 Holyoke St. Cambridge Mass
Record of Marriage in the custody of the City clerk as entered in Volume 22,
Folio 954 of said record, city of Cambridge, county of Middlesex on Feb, 4
1992....weird that the date from the city is 1992?? I also have my Dad's
actual birth certificate which was also filed in Cambridge, they were living @
387 Concord Ave. in Cambridge, it says Pop was 33 and Nanny was 30, the Dr.s
name was T.F. Brassil.

Also... by reading the blog and viewing Christina's photos on www.twitfoto.com I realized that Dan and Christina spent some time in Ennistymon. That is where Pop's birth would have been recorded. Too bad we didn't realize it at the time! But it means we collectively covered a fair amount of ground in visiting Nanny's AND Pop's past.

I'd go get a Smithwicks, but it wouldn't be the same without all of you.
love, kathleen

Tynanwoods Day Twenty One

November 4, 2006
Day 21: Bog butter on toast; get thee to a nunnery

Today we planned to get an early start out of Dublin, hauling our four duffels, four backpacks, two bags of food, three satchels of dirty laundry, and four tired carcasses into the Opel Astra and head back to Ennis. And we would have if the car had started. It was dead in the underground garage six blocks away, where it had been sitting since we first arrived in Dublin a week previous. Apparently someone in our party left an interior light on; we're still awaiting forensics from the CSI team to determine who.

Xtina waited for the Irish Auto Association to show up while I stayed at the apartment wrangling the bags and the kids. After a while a guy showed up on a scooter with a portable car battery and jumped the Opel. The cost? Absolutely free.

(Xtina has come up with a nickname for me based on my extreme reluctance to drive: Dan The Car Coward. Xtina is, of course, Her Majesty, Queen Shopsalot.)

Around noon we hit the south road, N7, toward Limerick. En route we stopped in Roscrea, a charming little town entirely surrounding a Norman castle built in 1280. The Roscrea castle looks a lot like the one at Bunratty: A great room on the first floor with a fireplace big enough to cook a buffalo; kitchen, dining, and sleeping quarters are on the upper three floors and narrow winding stone staircases climb to towers in each corner.

Near the entrance is a dungeon known as an 'oublietter' (from the French for 'to forget'), a 2' by 2' hole in the floor with a grate over it, leading to a square basement maybe 20 feet deep. You got in (or out, if you were lucky) by a rope ladder. The castle guide said the Normans would put someone in there and forget about them. The castle also featured a machiolation over each entrance and a 'murder hole' in front of the portcullis through which boiling oil would be poured over unwelcome visitors (a feature that would come in quite handy today when Republican fundraisers come knocking).

In the 18th century a British family named Damer bought the castle and built a large Queen Anne style residence on its grounds. Their descendants still live there. But the bottom two floors are a museum dedicated to the relics found nearby, including a 35kg (80 pound) hunk of petrified butter dating from 988 AD. The bog butter explains a lot about the current Irish diet (strangely, ancient jars of mayonnaise were not also found nearby).

[Note: a writer for the Sunday Tribune, Helen Lucy Burke, tasted the bog butter in 1987, which at time of its discovery was thought to be cheese. She described it thusly:

Close up, the boulder smelled cheesy, ripe, even athlete's footy. An inviting piece had crumbled off and lay at the base. I palmed the fragment, and at a suitable moment popped it in my mouth, rolling it on my tastebuds. The flavour was definitely cheesy, and though unpleasing, not revolting either. The texture was oddly granular. It came closest to a Wensleydale cheese which had dried out: Wensleydales are only tolerably fresh.]

We drove through a spectacular sunset over Limerick, the horizon glowing deep orange like a pizza oven, followed by a full moon rising. We arrived in Ennis after dusk and checked into the Temple Gate Hotel, a lovely 3-star hotel in the heart of the city. In a previous life it had been a convent for the Sisters of Mercy, but 10 years ago it was converted to a hotel. Xtina's aunt Nula was educated there, and she says the Sisters showed very little Mercy. The old chapel had been turned into the hotel's bar and and is now a great room for weddings and such; the stained glass windows sport the logos of Bulmer's and Stella Artois.

We stashed the kids in the room -- they seemed ecstatic to be on their own and away from us for a few hours -- and had a pint in the library off the lobby, underneath the ubiquitous portrait of Joyce. We moved from there to the hotel pub, where more pints were consumed, dinner had, and Xtina went wild on the hotel's free Wifi hotspot -- uploading photos to the blog, chatting, calling people on Skype. It was like finding an oasis of connectivity after weeks in the Netless desert. Every so often one of the kids would come downstairs to find us and lodge a complaint about the other one, but they seemed to be having a good time.

Around 10 pm the "band" came on: An older couple who looked a little like Mary Travers and Peter Yarrow if you squinted (or had drunk three pints). He played guitar and electronic keyboard and sang backup; she sang lead and banged a tambourine. Their voices were fed through the keyboard, giving them an oddly robotic sheen.

They launched into The Carpenter's "On Top of the World" which then sequed surreally into "Help Me Make it Through the Night" without changing tempo or melody. So we went from 'on top of the world looking down on creation' to 'let the devil take tomorrow, Lord, tonight i need a friend.' In a place where nunneries become bars, it seemed like a apt metaphor. Then again, maybe it was just the Guinness.

Tynanwoods Day Twenty

November 3, 2006
Day 20: Of pens and penitentiaries.

Friday, our last full day in Dublin. Everyone is totally exhausted. We walked through St. Stephens Green, jumped back on the Dublin tour bus. The tour guides vary wildly on this bus -- our first guide was an older Irish gentleman, very dry sense of humor. Even Cole remarked on how good he was. Our second guide kind of mumbled his way through everything, made corny jokes, then looked at us expectantly, waiting for the laugh. Our guide this time was an older woman with an even dryer sense of humor and very clear ennuciation (which is important, when you're trying to compete with trucks rumbling by). She recommended the tour of the Kilmainham Gaol (jail), where 14 members of the 1916 Easter Uprising were executed, and which was also the set of the Daniel Day Lewis film, In the Name of the Father.

We hopped off at the Jail and signed up for the tour. Our guide, Sabeena, was Polish or maybe Czech. She spoke English, sort of. She recited the facts in an odd rhythm that was hard to follow and without any passion, repeating herself two or three times and using phrases like "huge big" to describe, well, large things. This was a shame, since the place was so filled with history and blood. It would have been great to hear a true patriot tell the tales. We did, however, have fun threatening to leave the kids behind in one of the cells.

From there we took the bus to the Writer's Museum on Parnell Square, north of the River Liffey. This was a bit of a disappointment as well. For one thing, there was no mention whatsoever of me or Xtina (though Katherine Tynan had her own spot on the audio tour). It was two rooms with long text displays, first editions inside glass cases, busts and paintings of Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, etc., and the typewriter Brendan Behane allegedly threw through the window at McDonough's Pub. It was mildly informative but the kids were bored silly.

Then we took what has become our 'usual route' home -- over the O'Connell Street Bridge, past Trinity College, through the crowds and buskers and street performers on Grafton to the light rail station at St. Stephen's Green. I'd hoped to hit one last pub, stroll through Temple Bar on a Friday evening, but the kids were dead set against any more walking. So we stayed in and watched Irish telly.

Tynanwoods Days Eighteen & Nineteen

November 1 & 2, 2006
Days 18 & 19: Zoos & booze; sneaking into Mecca

Wednesday: most of the Gang of 20 left this day. We spent the afternoon at the Dublin Zoo inside Phoenix Park with my cousin Jeanne and her three-year-old Daniel. Jeanne flagged a cab back to the hotel while we took a bus back to the south side and drank a pint at The Duke, where we began our Literary Pub Crawl two nights earlier. We took the light rail home. I decided to not buy tickets this time, since they're expensive and nobody ever asks to see them. It's almost an honor system. And tonight we discovered the almost: after we got on, two light rail employees came onboard right next to me and started asking to see tickets. There's apparently a stiff fine for riding the rail without paying. I did my best to become invisible, and it worked -- we got off at the next stop without being thrown into the hoosegow. But when Ava took my hand as we walked home she said 'Dad, you're shaking.' The adrenaline. So much for my life of crime.

Later we had dinner with Jeanne and Daniel at O'Neills Pub, competing with soccer matches blaring on screens in every room. While we were there the (well) lit pub crawlers came in, and I chatted briefly with one of the actors.

Thursday: We caught the Dublin Tour bus, which we referred to as the 'jump on jump off', since the tickets are good for 24 hours. The bus runs along both sides of the River Liffey and comes with a live tour guide who points out the various sites -- the smallest pub in Dublin, the statue of Molly Malloy, and so on. The top side of the double decker bus is open to the air, which both makes it easier to see the buildings and also butt cold in early November.

Our first jump off: St. Patrick's Cathedral, which among other things houses the corpse and death mask of Jonathan Swift, who was dean of the cathedral for 30 years when he wasn't writing a few things on the side. We wandered about, admiring the gothic architecture and the stained glass. Ava discovered the votive candles, so we lit one for every dead relative I could come up with. (Starting with my Uncle Bill, whose generosity made this whole trip possible.)

We jumped back on the Dublin Tour bus and jumped off at Mecca, aka The Guinness Brewery at St. James Gate. Our aim was to just eat lunch in the cafe and catch the 360 degree view of the city from the 7th floor bar. When we discovered we had to pay a 30 euro fee for the tour -- whether we wanted to tour the plant or not -- that made Dan a very cranky boy. While Xtina wandered through the gift shop trying to convince me to buy some Guinness boxer shorts, Ava wandered off behind the ticket counter to check out a waterfall she heard flowing (yes, there's a waterfall inside the plant). I followed her, Cole followed me, and then Xtina showed up five minutes later PO'd that we'd abandoned her. But we were in the plant and it didn't cost us a dime, so we headed up to the Brewery Cafe and had lunch (and, it goes without saying, a pint). Xtina had Guinness and Beef Stew, I had fishcakes, the kids had chicken nuggets, and it was the best restaurant meal we had during our entire stay. Even the nuggets and chips were good.

Note: In the elevator up we met a brewery tour employee who did not ask to see our tickets but did explain why Guinness tastes better over here. One, they know how to pour it. Two, they serve it at 6 degrees Celsius, or roughly 44 degrees fahrenheit. Apparently the Brits serve it too warm (9 degrees) and the Americans too cold (3 degrees). I think possibly the warm and inviting environs has something to do with it as well.

Ancestry Search

In search of a birth certificate for Nanny, to help out all of those who might be interested in applying for an Irish passport at some point:

On Tuesday (Oct 31) Maureen & I went to the Ancestry Branch of the National Library of Ireland, at 2 Kildare Street, Dublin 2, Ireland. (Tel 353 1 6030200; email info@nli.ie; web www.nli.ie) The very helpful gentleman there showed us how to use the index to find the civil registration district for each town and village. It is in the civil registration district where births are recorded.

We were given a list of Civil Registration Districts, by County, as well as a map of all the Civil Registration Districts. I was also given the address of the main office in Roscommon to which we can write to request certified copies of birth certificates once you have located the correct one. Applications for such can be downloaded from www.groireland.ie.

We focussed our search on Nanny (Annie Dillon) because we had received verbal confirmation from locals in Williamstown that the Dillon family had lived in Derrywode, just outside Williamstown, in the county of Galway, for many years. The civil registration district for Williamstown and Derrywode is Clifden. He suggested that we visit the General Register Office (GRO), at Joyce House, 8-11 Lombard Street East, Dublin 2 to research the birth records there. The telephone there is 353 1 635 4000 and the website is www.groireland.ie.

On Wednesday November 1 I went to the GRO. You pay 2 Euro for a general search. You may request the "Index of Births" in 5 year increments according to the census. Each year's birth records are indexed in a large volume divided into quarters; thus for each year you must look in four separate quarters for all the births. Names are listed alphabetically by last name. I looked up Dillon, then looked for all Annes or Annies that were registered. Ultimately I searched all the records from 1894 through 1900. I found 19 Annes or Annies, but none in Clifden. Staying in the same geographical area as Williamstown (when I could determine that) I requested copies of 4 birth certificates. Only when you see the copy of the birth certificate can you determine the names of the father and mother and the actual town in which they lived. None of the four I requested were a match for what we know. (You can request up to 5 birth certificate copies in one day; if you want more than that, they will send them to you by mail. Each certificate copy costs 4 Euro.) If you are lucky enough to find the birth certificate of the person you are searching for, you can go downstairs to the General Register Office on the first floor and obtain a certified copy.

I will be happy to scan and send any of the documents I did collect if you want to see them; just let me know

What we know:
We know that Edmund Dillon and Mary or Margaret Nee Dillon had 7 children: Patrick, Michael, Tom, Mary, Margaret, Norah and Annie. We are not certain of Annie's year of birth; we have long assumed that it was 1896.

After striking out on all my searches the woman in the research room admitted that Nanny's birth may never have been recorded with the government. This was very common in those days. IN THAT CASE WE WOULD NEED PARISH RECORDS OF THE CHURCH HER FAMILY ATTENDED IN ORDER TO RECEIVE PROOF OF BIRTH. I do not have the information on the parish records, but I think someone else who was in Williamstown with us may have written down the name or contact info of the person who might have those........ Anyone?????

I did not have time to do the same type of search for Pop's records. What we think we know about him is that he was born to Thomas Madden and Bridget Burke Madden. His siblings were Tom and Jack. Tom had two children - Joseph and Lily. Jack had two children - John and Joe. We believe he was born in Leeds, which is in County Clare. Ennistymon (or Ennistimon) is the civil registration district for his area, and Kilfarboy is his civil parish. I do not have the years that would need to be searched, but I think we'd have to start as far back as 1888 or so.

One can also research the Census records, which we did not do. In that case we would look for the 1901 - 1911 Census for Derrywode to see who was recorded. But that would only tell us that the family lived in Derrywode, and we felt we already knew that.

After I was out of time a very nice gentleman who had overheard my requests for assistance came to me to tell me that there is an alternative to the method I was using. In the Dublin City Library & Archives, at 138-144 Pearse Street, Dublin 2, the records I was researching are on microfiche, and the search is free. That office is open from Monday - Thursday from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm and on Friday and Saturday from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm.

So..... no documents to show for our research. Now we know why people pay thousands of euros to have professionals do this for them!
love, kathleen

Tynanwoods Day Seventeen

October 31, 2006
Day 17: Tricks and treats; Wilde in the streets

Today we got a late start, so Dan could file a column and Xtina could drag Ava kicking and screaming through some of her schoolwork. We wandered up Grafton, through Temple Bar and over the Ha'penny Bridge to the commercial district just north of the Liffey. We each bought a book at a delightful used book store on Abbey Street, then sat in a cafe off O'Connell Square, drinking tea (yes, tea) and reading.

One of the surprises after we arrived in Ireland was finding Halloween costumes in shop windows. Trick or treating has migrated across the Atlantic, though it's still relatively new. We went back to the apartment so the kids could put on the costumes they'd picked out earlier in Galway. Ava was a devil with cute little horns (hair barrets), a red choker and a pitchfork. Cole was a wraith, dressed all in black with a black cape and two plastic swords. Xtina applied makeup to make them look more devilish and/or wraithlike.

We took the rail back to Ranelagh and the kids knocked on doors where it looked like somebody might be home. It was still dusk, and we were the only trick or treaters in evidence. A couple of people grumbled that we were too early and told us to come back later. But nearly everyone was friendly and warm; at one house, a sweet old lady invited the kids into her kitchen, where they disappeared for several minutes. As Xtina and I discussed whether we should go in and find out if they'd been tied up and tossed into the basement, they emerged with all kinds of odd things in their bags -- digestive biscuits, tangerines, a bag of salted french fries. I suspect the woman was unprepared for the trick or treaters and came up with whatever she could find.

At another home a woman suggested we head to Marlborough Street where more families lived. There we found more homes with Halloween decorations and a few bands of trick or treaters. Xtina and I stood at the edge of the driveways and waved to the parents, chatting briefly with one or two of them. When we expressed surprise at finding Halloween over here, one of them said in rather a resigned way, "Oh yes, we're adopting all of your customs."

It was cold and we'd already walked a good 5 or 6 miles that day, but we headed over to the Burlington to have a farewell drink with the Gang of 20, who were leaving Dublin the next day, then headed off with Phil in tow to the Literary Pub Crawl.

This is a delight, and easily one of the highlights of our trip. It's run by two very funny Irish actors whose names I never caught -- a woman in her mid 30s and a man around 50. We starting upstairs at The Duke, where they performed about 10 minutes of Waiting for Godot, then stood under bell tower at Trinity College, where she read from a letter written by Oscar Wilde about his 1890 lecture on art and aesthetics to silver miners in Colorado. From there we went to O'Neills for 20 minutes of determined drinking, and to the Irish Tourist Office (a converted cathedral) across the street, where the pair performed a hilarious scene from TK about begging in the street during Dublin's 1913 labor strike.

After another 20-minute sojourn to a bar whose current name I cannot recall (but which was formerly known as Monico's), we turned back to The Duke to listen to boozy anecdotes about Brendan Behane. The tour ended up at Davy Byrnes, where an entire chapter of Ulysses is set (though the bar has since been remodeled in a ponce way and is now the kind of place neither Joyce nor Leopold Bloom would ever have set foot in).

All the while, revelers wandered by in costume while fireworks burst over our heads. In adopting all our customs, the Irish appear to have combined Halloween with the 4th of July.

We never found time to eat dinner, so our evening meal consisted of pints for the adults and candy for the kids -- as fine an example of Irish parenting as you're likely to see.

Tynanwoods Day Sixteen

October 30, 2006
Day 16: Victorious Vikings and sweaty superheroes; Ava makes her stage debut

Today my cousin Christie ran the Dublin Marathon -- which was the original inspiration for this entire trip. We took the light rail to Ranelagh, a cute little neighborhood one stop south of our apartment that reminded me a bit of Oakland's Rockridge, and hustled down Sandford road 20 minutes until we reached the 19-Mile checkpoint.

There we found 20 of our dinner companions from the previous night, all wearing white Madden T-shirts. They had managed to catch Christie at two previous checkpoints along the race, making us the sluggards of the group. The runners varied widely in age and gait; many did not appear to be in shape to run a marathon (not that I should talk) and some did not appear to be long for the race. An ambulance zooming down the race route confirmed that suspicion. A few were dressed in costume -- Vikings, superheroes -- but not as many as I'd expected. No running priests or nuns were sited.

After about five minutes Christie came chugging along and we gave her a huge cheer. She stopped briefly to chat and then moved on, and so did we -- back up Sandford road, back onto the light rail to St. Stephens Green, and then a walk to the finish line at Trinity College. By this time the race was well into its 4th hour so the crowds had thinned. We stood by the fence cordoning off the route and listened to the announcer call out selected finishers from various countries and charitable organizations and urging us to cheer them for their efforts. Twenty minutes later Christie was one of them.

I was exhausted. I had never watched a marathon before and clearly hadn't trained sufficiently. Most everyone else felt the same way, so we headed back to the Burlington Hotel and collapsed in the lobby bar for the next four hours, eating butter-and-meat sandwiches and drinking pints until we managed to get our strength back.

That evening the Tynanwoods boarded the tour bus for the first time and headed with the gang to Taylor's Three Rock, a traditional music dinner theatre club about 30 minutes outside Dublin City Centre. And by "traditional," I mean in the same way Don Ho is traditional Hawaiian music, or Al Hirt was traditional Dixieland Jazz, or Beach Blanket Babylon is a traditional San Francisco stage show.

The show featured The Merry Ploughmen, four talented string players with passable voices and a well-rehearsed patter, and five impressively limber Irish dancers. The Ploughmen played the standards (Danny Boy, Jug of Punch, McNamara's Band), told funny stories, urged us to clap and sing along. The dancers did a lot of stomping alternating with high kicking; kind of like Riverdance meets the Rockettes. They also pulled several audience members onto the stage, including my brother-in-law Phil, niece Emma, and Ava. All of them looked like they were on the verge of wetting themselves, but they did a great job. Cole spent this portion of the show hiding under our table, and frankly I'd have been there with him if I thought we both could fit.

It was fun in a totally kitschy, staggeringly expensive kind of way. (There were no prices listed on the prix fixe menu, and now I know why.) Nonetheless I had a good time getting soaked, and that's what really counts. Right?

Tynanwoods Day Fifteen

October 29, 2006
Day 15: Butt tag on the green; goose bumps in the Temple Bar

Our first full day in Dublin. It began with the view of some streetperson on the corner of St. Stephens and Leeson on all fours with his forehead on the sidewalk and his bare ass in the air. I quickly herded the kids across the intersection to St. Stephens Green, a beautiful 22-acre park on the edge of Dublin's touristy heart.

The kids and I played 'butt tag' (fully clothed) in the park while Xtina caught up on her email in the hotel lobby. Then we bopped up and down Grafton Street, an open-air pedestrian mall filled with familiar brand names -- McDonalds, Burger King, Nine West -- and our first siting of a Starbucks in Ireland. Grafton Street bustles; people here walk with a purpose, in straight lines at high speed. It's like being in New York, only the accents are more charming. Once again the gravitational vortex sucked Xtina into shoe stores.

In the evening we met up with my 24 friends and relations at Botticelli's, an Italian joint in Temple Bar, the nightlife district along the River Liffey. But we were assigned exactly one waitress for our 28 diners, so we ended up eating in shifts. Afterward about half of our party headed back to the hotel while the rest hunted for a bar large and empty enough to accommodate us. In Temple Bar the night before a Bank Holiday this proved to be difficult -- it's a big party night in a big party town. Eight of us finally made it to a semi-empty bar on the far end of the district, where we had a pint and called it a night.

Many of the Temple Bar revelers wore Halloween costumes, including several scantily dressed girls who would have looked quite at home at San Francisco's Exotic Erotic Ball, despite an ambient temperature of around 45 degrees fahrenheit. The final score for the night: the legendary hardiness of the Irish 1, puritanical Catholicism 0.

Madden Withdrawal

It's lovely to be home! I hope by now almost everyone has made their way home safely. Jeanne, David and Daniel should be on their way shortly, the Tynan Woods in a few days, and hopefully Martin and Beth have made it without having to travel halfway around the world.

I am suffering Madden withdrawal already! I enjoyed every minute of our wonderful week in Ireland (except perhaps the length of the return trip) and am so very grateful to have had the opportunity to share such a fabulous experience with all of you. (maybe there's a little Smithwicks withdrawal in there too.) And thanks to Jennifer we each have a unique and useful memento to commemorate our trip. I don't know about you, but I'm planning to wear my t-shirt to work tomorrow (the long-sleeved one, in case we're still in a coordinating mode) to both pretend I'm still on vacation and to show all my friends how terrific it is. (Not so subtle reminder: if you haven't already given Jennifer your t-shirt money, please send $16 per person to Jennifer Garrett at 17820 Antherium Drive, Chino Hills CA 91709). THANK YOU JENNIFER for coming up with the t-shirt idea, seeing it through, and carrying them all all the way to Ireland!!!!!!

Where are we going next?
love, kathleen