I was at a meeting in Abbeyleix Ireland last night and someone mentioned how it would be great to get a collection of old photographs from people in the town – not actually have the people give them away, but to get people in the town to allow their old photographs be scanned and we’d have an incredibe database of townsfolk over the years.

Now that’s partly what we are working on in Abbeyleix Heritage House with the Mulhall collection.  Paddy Mulhall had an enormous collection of photographs and lots of them are old, so old, we don’t know who the people in them are.  We have scanned and indexed most of the photographs and soon, we will be trying to identify all the people, many of whom are dead and gone.  A lot of these photos are of large groups of people, including wedding groups so identifying all will be a lot of work!

At Christmas, there was a Christmas Fair down in Dove House, and we brought a computer down and had two slide shows with a selection of photographs from the collection. It was great to hear people oohing and aahing and wondering if this was that person or what was that or where was that – recognising people and places – some of the buildings are no more and some of them have changed hands and use over the years.

Since then, I’ve gotten through an awful lot more of the photographs we have and in a week or two we are going to show a larger selection from the Paddy Mulhall collection in Café Odhrán – the first week in March I think!  I’ll have to post the date  another day, when I’ve checked up on it!

Anyway, this time we’re going to include scans of other items in the collection, we did have a few for the Christmas Fair, but now we have more scanned.  For anyone interested in their Laois Genealogy or Family History the old photographs are wonderful, but even more so, when a county has a Heritage House such as Laois has with Abbeyleix Heritage House, then it really would be great if copies of old photos were donated to those Heritage Houses.

I was thinking about that recently as I went through my mother’s old photographs after she died.  Here I was with all these photos of classes from schools in Kildare and Dublin and maybe no-one else has a copy of those photos still.  What about other people who have died in my home town this last year, they must have had photos, their families are now gone from the town, what happened any old photos of people from the town.  Do they get dumped ‘cos nobody knows the people in them?  How many people keep these kind of photos?  Yes, the next generation does when it’s a parent who died, but then, the generation after that - they won’t care a bit, not unless they know it’s their grandparent or some family member in them.

So, last night began with a discussion on old photos and how it would be wonderful to have a collection of old photos from people in the town – and yes, in Abbeyleix Heritage House, we are hoping that by showing the Mulhall collection to people and how we can scan and index photographs and hopefully identify the people in them, then we will encourage people to allow us scan their  photographs and build an image gallery of people from the town and the town itself over the years.

The thing is…we’ve come so far, so very far in 100 years.  100 years ago to have your photo taken was such an event, few owned their own camera even.  Today, we all have digital cameras, few of those photos are ever printed off, and if any of us have any kind of computer problem photographs can be lost.

No value could be put on a good photo collection, a collection donated to by many from one area.  I don’t know if it’s ever been done, but maybe we in Abbeyleix Heritage House, with the help of the Mulhall collection and our slide show in Café Odhrán in a week or two, can set the ball rolling!

has to be one of the nicest towns in Ireland!  It’s a couple of months now since I breezed in there to work on the Mulhall collection and every day just gets better and better – whether it’s something new I’ve come across in the collection which sets me looking for something I’ve seen another time, or, whether it’s just spending some time down in Café Odhrán.  Guess with all that goes on I’ll be blogging a lot about it over the next while.

The Mulhall Collection – that’s material which is on loan to Abbeyleix Heritage House and Mr. Paddy Mulhall, he’s the man who used to own Morrissey’s pub in Abbeyleix Laois.  When I tell people in Dublin what I’m working on, they usually say – Hey, I know Morrissey’s, we used to stop there on our way to Cork”.  I think all of us of a certain generation used to stop in Morrissey’s pub  – that certain generation being before the traffic got bad! ;-( These days, people spend so much time in traffic just trying to get to Abbeyleix never mind though it that all they want o do is keep going once they hit the town………..

and what they are missing!  Actually, I missed it too for years and years – Up to last July, all I ever did was by-pass it along the back roads as I went from A to B and then last July, I discovered it again thanks to Heritage House and the Mulhall collection.

Now, it’s such a pleasure to head to Abbeyleix Laois, whether I’m on my way from Dublin or Rathdowney, as I get closer, it’s like “I’m nearly there, I’m nearly there”  are the words in my head.

Where to start, what to start talking about re Abbeyleix I don’t know – guess maybe I’ve started!   Café Odhrán – I love going in there, chatting to someone sitting beside me, like the lady with the mirror today whose car was in the garage, or, Patsy Ward, the owner, when she’s not busy chatting to tourists and telling them how to get from A to B or where to go in the locality or even over to Kilkenny.  When I was younger, Café Odhrán was a shop, the shop at the end of the school ‘lane’, where, in the evenings as we waited for the bus to come we might spend a fw bob buying sweets or something, depending on how much pocket mony we had………that was a long time ago, and for tonight, enough about Abbeyleix Laois

As I was driving along a road today and I went from sunshine into a snow blizard there was a tractor and trailer in front of me.  You could see animals out in the snow beginning to go white like the land and trees around them and I got to thinking about Farmers and their lives.  Generally speaking, we ‘townies’ or people with other professions never think about the way it is for farmers – well, those who have livestock anyhow.  Here I was, out in the snow accidently (‘cos it had been sunny when I set off on my short journey), but there was a man out in the snow ‘cos this was his life and he had no choice, he had to mind his animals.

Other people who have pets can say “It’s worse than having children” ‘cos you have to mind them the whole time – pets are the reason I was out in the snow, I’d said to the dogs “Let’s go for a walk” and I’d decided to head for the woods in Durrow.

So, there was this farmer out about his working day, other people who were having trouble cos of the weather were able to turn round and go home, businesses were closing for the day, but not the farmer.  As I drove along behind him thinking about his life, I remembered the first time I came to realise that Farmers lead different lives to the rest of us in some ways.  That was Christmas Day a few years ago, I went to dinner in a friend’s house – a farmhouse.  Straight after dinner her son went out to milk the cows, he’d come in for his dinner from doing something else with the cows and none of that was Christmas as I’d know it – Christmas being a day where the only thing that gets done is the cooking of the  dinner and then after Christmas Day comes St. Stephen’s Day which is pertty much another day of doing nothing – or was – in the days before all the shops being open on that day.

I also remembered asking a friend why they had chosen Cashel as the place for their wedding reception – to me, you go to a wedding and it’s a full day out.  Some weddings, when they’re away from home you go off and then book into a local hotel and stay till the next day – Not so for farmers – the animals still have to be tended to.  So, my friend told me that his family were from Limerick and farmers and the wedding reception had to be held in a place which was mid-way between the town where the marriage took place (another county) and county Limerick, so that the family could get home to do their work.

That’s the way it is today, it’s the way it was yesterday and it’s the way it has always been.  The Farmer’s life is different to that of other people with jobs that have a fixed time frame. The farmer who has livestock is pretty much on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – unless he can employ someone to come in and do the work for him and yes, there are rich farmers or organised farmers who aren’t so tied down by their profession, but that surely can’t take from those who are 100%

The importance of the District Electoral Division(see Wikipedia)   is something that dawned on me yesterday as I talked to a friend down in Cork.  He’s an extremely knowledgeable person about townlands and parishes and where they are and who lives there and all of that, but he wanted to know where he could find listings of townlands in DEDs.

The thing is, it wasn’t that he was having problems identifying his own family,it was the families of others with common surnames for the area .  The problem was a simple one, simple for anyone to come across that is, in that in so many parishes all over Ireland you have more than one townland of the same name.  Then, if you are unlucky enough to find that you have two families of the same surname living in each of those two townlands and the children are the same ages or names or thereabouts -  how do you identify which of these families is the one you want?

The trick then, is that if you are familiar with the geography of the area, the layout of the townlands in relation to one another and if you can see a grouping of the townlands in that District Electoral Divisionyou can home in on your family of interest and ignore the other one.

Where do you find the listing of these townlands is the question?  They can be found in the book ‘Townlands in Poor Law Unions’ edited by G.B. Handran or else, I have a few on my Laois Genealogy website such as the County Laois  townlands in the County Carlow Civil Registration District, those in the Athy Civil Registration District and those in the Donaghmore Civil Registration District but none of those is a major district for the county itself.  Athy and Carlow only have a few townlands in the county and Donaghmore was dissolved way back, my Donaghmore web page lists the townlands that used to occur in that Poor Law Union or Civil Registration District. 

The G.B. Handran book is not the definitive guide to the Townlands in Poor Law Unions as there was an update in 1904 and you can use the Townland Index in the National Archives in Dublin when you are checking this out.

This problem may not really arise too much for those of you researching your Laois family history, but it’s definitely very important for down the Cork/ Limerick area, the area known as Sliabh Luachra and it’s just something that I was given to think about yesterday, and I’ve not got any solutions and don’t know of very many listings of townlands in DED’s which are online for anywhere much.

Maybe if some of you ahve come across on-line listings for anywhere in Ireland you could let me know.  Please and thanks

I’ve been through the whole trying to lock up my Laois Genealogy website bit and that didn’t work out for me ‘cos of the way life was. “The best laid plans of mice and men” as they say! Now, for the moment, I’m going back to depending on people who appreciate the work I put into Laois Genealogy and From Ireland clicking on the Google ads on those websites, taking a few mins of their time. Doesn’t cost them a penny and they might find something they like! I’ve spent the last few days working on having all the pages on Laois Genealogy similar to one another and getting all my links to work, whilst at the same time trying to sort out the mess I have as regards files with all my various back ups cos of computer problems. I’m almost there, just got my Parish Record files to get through now. Been a hard slog, working on pages till my eyes are too tired, going to bed to rest or sleep….most mornings up at 4 or 5 a.m. – telling/asking myself “Been here, done that, worn the T-shirt – so why?” Never been able to answer that one, no different now. I guess, it always boils down to the fact that I love what I do and in that, I’m a very lucky person

I think I’ve been through two lap tops and and am now on my second notebook since my the motherboard on my PC died back in September of 2007 or 2008, and of my 3 websites, Laois Genealogy is probably the main one which has survived and not lost too much of the work I'd put into it

Maybe some of you have noticed, maybe someone might even comment on this entry…I’ve ‘locked’ up some sections of this site – my gravestone photographs and parish record folders to be exact.

Most of the site is still accessible to all but those two folders can only be accessed if you have a password.

Thing is, the whole lot costs me so much money, if you even knew half of how much you’d be boggle eyed. So, now I am going to begin bringing graveyard indexes on line and lots more photos and 1901 census details and wills and all kinds of other stuff that is not freely available or isn’t even available anywhere outside of Ireland.

I’m going to charge people a very reasonable sum to access my password protected folders – just 5 Euro for two months access initially. Some of the information I have is available through the indexes which are open, and if anyone wants to get the details then all they have to do is go to a Family History Library and order in a film for about the same cost, so I’m not being unfair here.

Jane

I’ve talked about changing the website home page and I meant the layout of it. I’m not finished yet, and it’s never going to be one of these fantastic looking webpages that I see every so often on the net and wish I could have any of my sites looking like that! I’ve got no training in web design and unless I go off and do some course or other what you see here is what you get. The content is good though