{"id":2001,"date":"2011-05-17T12:09:40","date_gmt":"2011-05-17T12:09:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dianeduane.com\/outofambit\/?p=2001"},"modified":"2011-05-17T12:09:40","modified_gmt":"2011-05-17T12:09:40","slug":"fact-meets-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dianeduane.com\/outofambit\/2011\/05\/17\/fact-meets-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Fact meets fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/div>\n

Peter<\/a> has been doing some genealogical research over the last couple of weeks, and has found out some unusual things about his family that none of us expected.<\/p>\n

For one thing, he’s looking for a McGuffin. Specifically, Iris McGuffin, one of\u00a0 many, many cousins on his mother’s side. For a writer… how appropriate that there should be all these McGuffins scattered around.<\/p>\n

And something else a little unusual has turned up as well.<\/p>\n

Peter has a female ancestor — a great-grandmother — who appears as an adult in public records of 1910\/1911, though she does not appear as a child or young adult in earlier censuses. After her first appearance, she\u00a0 vanishes without warning. But her name later reappears several times over the twentieth century, until finally she vanishes a few decades ago, not to be seen again.<\/p>\n

Her name is Sara Jane Smyth.<\/p>\n

I wonder when she changed the spelling…\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

…A touch of clarification here: the spottiness of the records is a local problem and not at all unique, as a huge number of birth\/death\/census records in Ireland were destroyed by fire during the Irish Civil War, when the Four Courts\u00a0 and the Custom House were bombarded in the Battle of Dublin\u00a0 (28 June -5 July 1922). As a result, those doing Irish genealogical research are very often forced to fall back on duplicate birth\/death records (when they can be found) in local churches and other decentralized archives.\u00a0 Unfortunately these are all too few, as record-keeping in Ireland before the Civil War was extremely centralized.\u00a0 I’ve run into frustrations of this kind myself when attempting to trace the Irish ancestry on the Duane \/ paternal side of my heritage.<\/p>\n

In any case, having an ancestor be present in one decade, then missing for the next few, then appearing again, is hardly unusual for the Irish-based ancestry-hunter. But the name brought me up short when Peter started showing me the records…<\/p>\n

(BTW, greetings to our Reddit visitors!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter has been doing some genealogical research over the last couple of weeks, and has found out some unusual things about his family that none of us expected. 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