Paul Malpas

First of all I would like to apologize to anybody who reads this blog on a regular basis.  I have been very busy and have only managed to squeeze in one blog in the last week.  A cousin of mine died  a week ago, trgically young at 54 years of age and I went over to England last Thursday to a very emotional but lovely funeral.  A funeral is a very necessary and cathartic experience for all that have been  touched by the deceased’s life.  The tentacles of humanity, stretching out and gathering in all those people, who have at some stage  had their spirit lifted by the finished life-force, for one final celebration.  It is happy and sad and necessary and this particular celebration was made all the greater by the beautiful panegyric of the priest, Father Bernard Sparks, a great and longtime friend of the family.

I left the gathering after a couple of hours and went back to my daughter’s house in a very contemplative mood.  For reasons I will not bother you with, I had not seen the lady, my first cousin, for a number of years.  As you all grow up and move around and settle into a path of life, touch can easily be lost and this is what made this death all the harder for me.  At one time I was so close to her and her family and now I would not have recognized her in the street.  She died before I knew her and yet at one time I knew her well.  Somehow I had missed out on a good life and that is a big miss.

Away I came and the following morning was more than pleasantly surprised from a comment I received on a blog I wrote  on 12 January 2010 called The Importance of Blogs. I had just heard that Catherine, who has just died, was terminally ill and I dedicated this blog to her and her family.  It traced her mother’s  family tree back to the Famine in Ireland, it was a piece of their history they were unsure of because of their mother’s premature death, nearly 50 years ago.

This comment was from a lady who had just read this blog and realized that she was a second cousin of mine and Catherine’s, her grandfather and my grandmother were siblings.  She was from a branch of the family that had gone their separate ways in the 1930s and for whatever reason  touch had been lost.

That is why the blog is such an amazing and powerful tool if used properly.  You often think that once a piece has been posted, that is it, gone and forgotten, but the internet and blog field leaves it there like a bright shiny cherry on a tree waiting to be picked and eaten by passing strangers.  It is there for evermore, hopefully to be appreciated by everyone and that is what happened.  So now as one cousin goes another comes to light and hopefully will not disappear as quickly.

As I was writing these words this morning, there came news that  will only double my efforts in this field.  My daughter, Katy, has entered the final stages of pregnancy with the anticipation of twins.  She is slightly premature but the experts say that this is normal with multiple births and that mother and foeutuses are fine, with estimated weights of 5lb with still four weeks of cooking  to go.  However she will now have to go into hospital for their delivery,  a thing she dreads.  She was looking forward to a home birth and had an army of midwives lined up to take care of any eventuality.  She will have to be forthright and clear minded and not let these tinkerers of mortality, the doctors, try to bully her into treatment she does not want, just to suit the timetable of the maternity suite.

My wife has flown the coop and is now in Dublin boarding the Holyhead boat with a rolling pin in hand.  God help the doctors at Stepping Hill Hospital.   I am left with the young fellah, a mop and bucket and various dusters and told to make sure the house is perfect on her return.  That might not be until these twins are weaned so I have plenty of time.  The male’s station in life as with all things historic is a lonely one, but I suppose I have the pub and my blog and all the interesting things that both these channels deliver, but I must get on, the mop is doing a lonely dance in the bucket of hot water I prepared earlier.

I reccommend writing a blog to everybody, or even a diary if you must.  Every person should try and put pen to paper or more realistically these days, put finger to keyboard.  It becomes that person’s indelible mark on life, of massive interest to the ensuing generations and hopefully to todays people.  One of my big regrets is that none of my precedents ever  performed this task, to let us know what it was really like, although my mother did the next best thing and saved every relevant piece of paper she could.  I do understand of course that life is too much of a daily struggle to afford time for the future, but if only they had.  Take my own case in more modern times; I was that busy working six and seven days a week that I had little time for my own children, never mind the generations ahead.  Like everything in life it is a discipline and the sooner this discipline is grasped and held onto the more lessons children can learn from their forebears.  I only grasped this  late but since then I have written everthing down.  God help the person charged with making some kind of sense of it all because it is only the ramblings of a half-wit.  125,000 words of a memoir,written in a month, three years ago, and the subject of drastic rewriting and editing ever since and thousands of pages of drivel and sense in equal measures which are scattered about the office where I sit.  One day I will devise a filing system before it is too late.

One of the really good things about a blog is its neatness, its order.  It cannot get into disarray.  The nicest thing in the main is its inter-reaction with other people.  Because it can be read by everyone, it can be commented on and  it can bring people together.  Equally it can drive people apart, but it is easy to forget those negative sides and just press on.  In my case it has enabled me to come into contact with long lost close cousins, we spent our childhoods together, but with one thing and another, had drifted apart, as each went their own way in the world.  It is for these long lost cousins that I dedicate todays blog.

Once upon a time there were twin sisters, Margaret(1922-1988) and Catherine Crehan(1922-1963) who loved each other as only twins can.  They once had a little sister called Mary(1925-1930) and as with all sad stories these three sisters died well before their time.  They were the daughters of James Patrick Crehan(1874-1958), a native of Ballinamore Bridge, Co. Galway and Mary Creevy(1884-1947) born in Miles Platting, Manchester, who were married in Corpus Christie Church in 1919.

If we take James Patrick’s line first.  He was the eldest of four brothers, Thomas (1876-1856?) who went to New York in 1904 and settled in Corona, Long Island. Lawrence (1877-1954?) who stayed and farmed the family land and Michael (1878-1921) who was found drowned in the Bridgewater Canal in Eccles.  These four men were the sons of  John Crehan, (1839-1921) and Kate Finnigan (1839-1915?) both of Ballinamore Bridge.  Family legend has it that Kate was of the same Finnigan family as those who owned the large store on Deansgate in Manchester before it moved out to Wilmslow in the 1960s.  Both John and Kate had been born before the Famine, and lived their whole lives through the hard years, they had a sense of the history and politics of their time, they could read and write in English and Irish and they passed their knowledge on to their sons.  James Patrick was the only one I knew and he was fully clued up.

If we follow the Creevy line, we find that Mary had a brother Patrick born in 1882 and a sister, Margaret Ann (1891-1965), who were the children of James Creevy (1853-1901) a native of Clane, Co. Kildare and Margaret Lalor (1848-1894) born in Killasmeestia, Borris in Ossary, Co. Laois now or Queens County then.  This woman, my great grandmother, could not write and signed her childrens birth certificates with a “X”.  She had come to England in the 1850s with her parents, William Lalor born about 1810 and Margaret Delaney (1819-1891) who were both from Borris in Ossary.  It is here the trail stops.

As with most things Irish, the easy trail stops at the Famine, lots of time and energy needs to be summoned to advance the trail further if at all.  The family tree lies cold but as with everything on Ancestry.com, people come along with no idea of timeframe and insert your ancestors in with theirs, as the name fits and that is all that matters.  One example was a woman in Buffalo, New York State, who found Michael Crehan on my tree and found he had died in Eccles.  That is all I had put.  She then linked this up with Eccles in West Virginia.  According to her Michael Crehan, he had fathered six children in Buffalo, joined the American Army in 1917, survived the war but never came back to Buffalo.  Our Michael Crehan, worked in England and Ireland, never married and never went to America, although he did fight his own private war in the IRA in the War of Independence (1918-1921).  The lady from Buffalo nearly had me fooled for a time, because if you stretched credence to the limit, her Michael, almost fitted into our Michael’s time span.  The only problem was the six children he would not have had the time to produce, unless of course there was another man in Buffalo doing his work for him.  Irish Americans are prone to this as one Paddy Reilly looks like another from a distance of 100 years.  Just get the name down, do not worry about lineage, seems to be the philosophy.

The building of a family tree is easy it just requires perseverance and patience.  Every one should try it and expect surprises.  What to me is more interesting is what these people did on a daily basis and then it becomes difficult and requires lots of hard work and travelling, but it is very rewarding and sometimes sad.  If only they had kept a diary or did a blog.

All the best in the future to Leo, Michael, especially Catherine, John, Elizabeth and Ann Marie.