Who do you think you are? What family history can – and can’t – tell us about ourselves

By Kate Domaille

In this article, Kate Domaille begins with a practical mission — tracing her Irish ancestry in search of the documents needed for an Irish passport. But what starts as a hunt through family records becomes something much deeper: a journey into poverty, migration, survival and resilience. Through the lives of her grandparents and their families in early twentieth-century Dublin, Kate reflects on how the struggles of previous generations shape the opportunities of those who follow. Along the way she asks the bigger human question behind every family tree: do our ancestors help us understand who we are?

Kate is a university lecturer and a Humanists UK Accredited Celebrant.

Who do you think you are? This question has been posed by the popular BBC TV show for 23 series! For anyone unfamiliar with it, this show gives celebrities access to records to trace the stories in their own families. I’ve always viewed it with some scepticism, as if following stories along branches of the family tree of people who lived in different times could possibly tell you who you are. It’s seductive though – and certainly informs the advertising campaign for the heritage site Ancestry.com, luring us in with the promise that we may uncover that our grandmothers were suffragettes and our grandfathers helped to start the first trade union. The reality, as I’ve just discovered in my own reach back to the past, is that it can be very hard to connect one’s own life story with people who lived in circumstances so different from our own.

I set out to explore the Irish side of my family with a single purpose: to get myself onto the Foreign Births Register and obtain an Irish passport. My Irish grandparents were both born in Dublin in 1900, and I knew very little about their history. I was only three when my grandfather died, and although my grandmother retained her Dublin accent, occasionally gave us shamrock, and passed on the Catholic faith (!), she never talked about her life there. I knew only the bare facts: that they had settled in Plymouth and had four children in England, one of whom was my mother. My mother regarded herself firmly as English, so I never thought of Irishness as an important part of my heritage.

My grandfather joined the Royal Navy in 1916 and served through the First World War, the interwar years and into the Second World War, when he was captured by the Japanese and held as a prisoner of war for three years. These were the heroic headlines about Grandad that surfaced in family conversations over the years. His earlier story, however, was far more tragic – the story of growing up poor in North Dublin in the early 1900s. Overcrowded tenements were commonplace, bringing with them tuberculosis, bronchitis and asthma – diseases that claimed the lives of many of my grandfather's cousins and two of his siblings while they were still children. On my grandmother's side, much the same misfortune befell the family. Time and again, the discovery of a birth record was matched by a record of the same child's death.

By 1915, my grandfather was an orphan. His mother had died of tuberculosis the previous year, and his father fell from a ladder while cleaning the gutters of a wealthy man's house in Parnell Square. The inquest was reported in the local newspaper with the rider that “he brought his own ladders”, as though this somehow explained his death in a workplace accident.

There was now no one to care for my grandfather and his younger sisters, and no income to support them. Both his elder brothers had enlisted to fight in the First World War. The sadness of this story was tempered by discovering that one of those brothers had married in 1915 and that his new wife gave the younger siblings a temporary home.

I hadn't set out to discover so much death, loss and time spent in the workhouse on both sides of the family. I was simply searching for the documents needed to register as a foreign-born Irish citizen: the birth, marriage and death certificates of my grandparents. But there was no record of my grandmother's birth anywhere, which is how I became so drawn into my grandfather's family history. Her own family – like many poor families who moved from place to place in search of survival – were officially invisible in Dublin.

My grandfather's family was easier to trace. They all appear in the 1901 census, where the older children are recorded as being literate and attending school. I spent many hours getting to know them through official documents and records. Ancestry.com was helpful in places, particularly for military records, while IrishGenealogy.ie proved an excellent resource, although far from complete.

What I discovered above all was how poor families did whatever they could to survive. They took whatever work they could find as labourers, and from 1915 many Irishmen enlisted in the British Army because it offered food, clothing, and a roof over their heads. One of my great-uncles contracted tuberculosis and died in barracks before he could even be deployed – another tragic reminder of how harsh life in Dublin could be. I also discovered from the service records of two other great-uncles that the army could be harsh in return.

To survive, people often told lies. My grandfather claimed to be 18 when he joined the Royal Navy, although he was only 16. The Navy eventually discovered the deception and punished him, but he had been orphaned the year before – what else was a desperate sixteen-year-old to do? He lied again when he returned to Dublin to marry my grandmother in 1924, describing himself on the marriage certificate as a dairyman. It was probably a sensible precaution. Ireland was emerging from three years of civil war, and admitting to serving in the Royal Navy was hardly the wisest thing to do in the tinderbox of a country struggling towards independence.

The records provide glimpses into the past, but to understand what life was really like you need other sources. Of course, those who could have told me what it was like have long since passed away. I had often wondered why my grandmother had such airs and graces. Their house was modest, yet full of doilies and antimacassars. But as I reflected on why she and my grandfather came to England while all their siblings remained in Ireland, her carefully cultivated manners began to make sense.

The Royal Navy gave my grandfather steady employment, and marriage brought my grandmother to England. They were provided with a home, raised four healthy children in a country less blighted by the diseases of poverty, and saw them all attend grammar school, with the youngest going on to university. They had recognised that leaving family behind in search of a better future could offer a path out of hardship. Their story is the story of countless migrants. Sentiment has to be set aside when survival is at stake.

So who do I think I am? Well, I am at least a proud dot in that vast and unhappy history of Irish struggle. That’s who I am.  And who are you?

As for the Irish passport? I'm on the register – next step is to apply for the passport!

Further information about Kate

www.humanist.org.uk/katedomaille