ÔWho are you?Ó becomes an international quest

Date Published: {J}

I read with more than usual interest in last week’s Galway City Tribune an item concerning the Galway Family History Society West Ltd, in which they outlined some of the possibilities which people might take up in hunting down their heritage and their forebears.

They deal with West Galway, and are based in the city, but they are part of a burgeoning sector which is built around the business of finding out ‘who you are’, who your parents and grandparents were, and all of the fascinating history which is in the background of every family, not just the ‘nobility’ and those with a title.

It may be one of the best indicators of the rising popularity of such searches into families that at least one television series was made . . . and it showed that, though there may be precious few titles in a family background, the stories can still be fascinating and the revelations extraordinary.

Whole new rafts of information have become available through the computerisation of census returns, the proper and accessible recording of births, marriages and deaths stretching back over the centuries, and, of course, people like Barack Obama ’finding their roots’ seem certain to grow a whole area of tourism which would appear to have a real future.

Computers are making it more and more possible to put enormous amounts of information into the public domain and make it accessible. For instance, there was the fascinating recent publication from Maynooth University of townland populations all around the country before and after the Famine.

The sheer scale of the disaster which befell Ireland became tangible in a very real way, though we had generations of folk memory and parish records and commentaries and diaries diligently compiled by some priests during the Famine years.

If we have estimated millions of people living in the United States who have Irish connections, and even if only a fraction of them wanted to track down their Irish roots, then the records services which are being set up in parishes and townlands around the country, may have a bright future in front of them.

Visitors will be more than welcome ‘in the flesh’, but computers and the internet make it possible to research without so much as booking a seat on a plane.

In other words, you don’t have to be making computers and health products to create jobs – these would spring from the ‘intellectual property’ which is parish records and researchers using them.The fact is that we need to change our definition of what is an ‘industry’. People in education involved in NUI Galway and the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology may think it rather gross to describe the whole area of education of ‘an industry’ – but the spinoff from thousands of students living and studying in Galway, is surely the town’s biggest ‘industry’.

Take well over 20,000 students out of the life of this town, and look what would happen to the rental sector, the shops, the pubs, the everyday life of a town which is vibrant and young – because every few years it gets an entirely new injection of young people.

What prompted this article is that recently I got a contact from the UK. Occasionally, right out of the blue, I get a phone call or a letter from someone I knew as a child more than 60 years ago. It happened recently and I’m not sure that I was very much help, being hardly the most literate ‘computer person’. However, I was able to offer some help . . . but what memories it brought back.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.