Читать книгу Collins Tracing Your Irish Family History - Ryan Tubridy, Anthony Adolph - Страница 56

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.’