FitzGerald

I haven't made a concerted effort to research the FitzGerald branch of the family, but have always made a note of anything I came across - names or places - that I knew were relevant to their story. Sometimes my curiosity got me and I'd spend some time persuing a line of thought that led from a stumbled upon clue. And when once in a while something seemed to be perversely obscure I might have gone after it with a bit more gusto.

I ended up with an interesting little collection of stuff, which after a while like bits of unsorted thread abandoned in the bottom of a workbox was threatening to get lost in an absolute tangle. So I decided to get it sorted out so as not to go backwards at least. Someone else might want to take up the quest and might as well start from where I left off rather than back where I started anyway.

Dublin, at Merrion Square

I already had some good stuff before I started. Best of all was Granddad's own stories about some of the people, and the places they frequented. And also a handful of copies of civil registrations - three funerals and a wedding as it happens - that our father and Kate Robinson had managed to track down between them. Not always easy, in Ireland, as so many of the records there have been destroyed, and civil registration didn't begin properly until 1864. Protestant parish records for the most part went up with the great fire in 1922, and Catholic church records are a bit patchy anyway because of the wretched penal laws. Census records were systematically disposed of. So information can be hard to come by.