The Tokyo Connection

Back when this blog started, some 5 years ago, the plan was to showcase the area in which I live (on the North Coast of Northern Ireland), my photography and a bit of family history.  I wrote a lot about the family connections in the beginning, as I had just started researching my family tree at that time.  In the last couple of years I've hardly touched on the genealogy - probably since I've more or less shelved that work, for now at least.  I got back to the early/mid-19th Century ancestors on both my mother's and father's side and then things got a bit trickier.  A lot of Irish records were destroyed in 1922 in the Public Records Office, Dublin in an explosion and fire at the time of the formation of the Irish Republic.  Two-thirds of the original parish records of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths are missing as are virtually all the 19th Century Census returns for Ireland.  There are fragments here and there and many of those relating to Northern Ireland are catalogued in the Public Records Office in Belfast but you need to have (a) a fair idea of the local Parish the person you are looking for belonged to and (b) a lot of luck.  Of the people in my family tree from around that area I only have the sparsest of information - a name and possibly a county of birth and that's not a lot to be going on.

But, of the information I did discover, there were one or two 'family mysteries' that were finally unravelled.  One connection in Philadelphia was particularly satisfying to unearth after a couple of years of searching - particularly so when the person we were looking for turned out to be still alive.  Contact was made, stories were exchanged and a lot of missing details on both sides were filled in.  More importantly, a strong human connection was made - we were very fortunate.  Then out of the blue came another connection that threw us completely... 

I have written before about how we were aware that my Grandfather's Brother had flitted between Philadelphia and Ireland from the 1920s onwards.  He had found himself a wife in Philly and they had a son who ended up in the US Army.  However it happened, my grandfather's brother found himself in the Canadian Army for the duration WWII and was part of the Juno Beach landings on D-Day.  He came through that - albeit with injuries - and settled in England for the rest of his life.  His son, now back in the States after the war, passed away in his twenties.  That much we already knew, but it was around this time that my grandfather's brother broke contact with the rest of his family back here in Ireland and nothing more was heard from him.  Enter the Tokyo connection.  This young English lady who was now living in that far-away city contacted me a couple of years ago with a haunch that we might share a common ancestor.  Specifically, she wondered if her grandfather (now deceased) was my grandfather's brother - the one with the Philadelphia connections who had disappeared off the radar all those years ago.  It seemed like a tall order but not totally crazy as we knew he had ended up in England after the war.  Bit by bit we pieced together the story - or what we thought the story might be.  We got lucky when a couple of concrete pieces of evidence turned up and finally we could say with certainty that Yes, her haunch was correct and we had discovered a whole new side to our families - one which we were all completely unaware of.  Her grandfather, apparently, told everyone he was Scottish, not Irish (the soft Western-Northern Irish accent is often mistaken for a Scottish accent, even today, so that wouldn't have raised too may eyebrows).  Seems he really did want to break ties with his Irish roots - and if it wasn't for the tenacity of my new-found cousin he would almost certainly got away with it.

So this summer we had a short visitation from my new cousin, her Japanese husband and their two children.  The five-year old is, naturally, as cute as can be (that's her on the left, in case you're wondering).  The two-year old is like all two-year-olds, into exploring everything in his surroundings with fearsome speed and bravery.  We had a brilliant couple of days exploring the area, including some places of historical significance to our family and doing a lot of just plain old 'getting to know each other a little better'.  Here they are:

A little bit of Japan, in our garden in the North East Liberties of Coleraine. 
On the Hasselblad, HP5+ in ID-11, Ifford Warmtone Fibre paper.