Local History

Article by Brian S. Turner. This article is based on a talk given in Armagh in September 2019 by the author, as Honorary President of the Federation for Ulster Local Studies, to a joint meeting of the Ulster Federation with the Federation of Local History Societies, based in the southern provinces. It was first published in Familia: Ulster Genealogical Review, No. 40 (2024).

Introduction

My cousin is married to a man who makes after-dinner speeches. They are usually light-hearted. He is helped in making them light-hearted because he mostly talks about hens, and he does it with a live chicken under his arm. I don’t understand how he does it. Health and safety and laundry both come to mind. But he seems to manage it.

In this article I don’t intend to deal much with poultry. My subject is more complex, and maybe even more difficult to keep a grip on. It’s more difficult because I want to think seriously about the importance, and not simply the attraction, of local history.

I was in the room in Jackson’s Hotel in Ballybofey in May 1974 at a meeting of representatives of local historical societies from all over Ulster. I had come with my friend Fred Heatley, boxer, trade unionist, civil rights activist, author, and a founder of the West Belfast Historical Society. We were in the middle of the worst years of ‘The Troubles’. Thirty thousand soldiers and police had been on duty in Northern Ireland for the General Election in the previous January. Bombings and shootings were sudden and shocking. The Ulster Workers’ Council Strike was about to bring down the Northern Ireland Executive. Factories and power stations were closed. Fear and murder were all around.

The meeting had been called by the County Donegal Historical Society and was addressed by Professor Ted Rhodes from Magee University College in Derry. Its explicit aim was to provide a forum for dialogue and mutual help and understanding among local historical societies in Ulster. Surely these people wanted to understand our history rather than use it for ammunition.

As someone with a father from Cork and a mother from Belfast who had been raised in three of Ireland’s provinces I had a strong sense of family identity, Methodist and Irish.¹Although both sides of my family had personal experience of political and sectarian violence, the upbringing given to me meant that I found myself detached from many of the assumptions and fears which worried, sometimes justifiably, my friends and neighbours in Northern Ireland. At the end of the Ballybofey meeting an interim committee was charged with drawing up a constitution for a new collaborative body which all local historical societies in Ulster would be invited to join. These intentions came together less than a year later in Coleraine, at a conference of 35 societies which established the Federation for Ulster Local Studies, specifically including all nine counties, six in Northern Ireland and three in the Republic.²

This is not the place to detail its subsequent activities, but one memory should stand and be recognised for posterity. In the middle of ‘The Troubles’ I see a cavalcade of cars slowly crossing and re-crossing the Ulster border as an outing of the Clogher Historical Society went from place to interesting place to learn about our common history. Just before our meeting in Ballybofey two of its members had been murdered, one a teacher who had been a British army officer and the other a senator in the Irish parliament.

History has a social function, much in the way that memory has for the individual. It lets us place ourselves in time and space. As Cicero wrote over 2,000 years ago ‘To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.’ Family and local history are close relations. Each can be very introspective but are much more enriching when we find our local understanding leading outwards to other people and places. I wonder if we ever ask ourselves why we are interested in local history in particular? Where did the impulse come from? There is a common human desire to know our place in the world, but within that context there must be personal milestones and stories. In my case, I developed an interest in names, names of people in particular, and names of places. This wasn’t a conscious decision. I wonder why it happened. As I looked back I think I saw a story. At the time I didn’t realise that I was in this story, but in adulthood I began to put it together in a way that made sense to me.

Ballymagroarty

I can see very clearly in my mind a hot summer’s day in the 1950s. It was in a field on the side of a drumlin not far from the village of Ballintra in south Donegal. I was about eight years old and it was the day I learned to make hay ropes. Tommy Johnston and his sons and the Mouse Harkin with the horse and the buckrake and the tumblin’ paddy were doing their work. They were piling the hay up ready to be made into rucks which would need to be tied down and secured with the ropes.

One of the men thought I could be useful. He sat down on a big stone beside the hedge with a pile of loose hay in front of him. He showed me how to put a loop of hay on to the rope twister and he told me to keep twisting as I backed away. He fed more and more strands of hay into the rope which got longer and longer and stronger and stronger as more strands were added to it.

My eight-year-old self didn’t think about it then. But much later I was able to look back down the rope to see the man sitting on the stone carefully adding to its length and strength. His name was Jim Magroarty. And the field was in the townland of Ballymagroarty. Ballymagroarty is the place where the Magroartys used to keep the revered ‘Cathach’ of the O’Donnells, the Columban relic which was used as a talisman before battle. The whole scene was a parable about the connection between people and place, and indeed, of the notion that the weaving together of different strands can be a source of strength rather than representing the weakness of conflict.

Drumclamph

Not long after this I was on the small farm of my uncle and aunt in the townland of Drumclamph in west Tyrone, where my aunt’s family had lived for hundreds of years. Rooting around in the house one rainy day I discovered an old map of County Donegal, and Ballymagroarty was marked on it, and Ballintra. Before that I really hadn’t any idea that people who made maps far away would know anything about my world. But here were the names of places that I knew, printed on a very old map. I was impressed.

On the same dusty shelves, I found an old photograph album. As I leafed through there were tents and people with strange clothes and feathers on their heads. They had been taken when my aunt’s Uncle Willie from Drumclamph lived with the Lakota Sioux band of Chief Sitting Bull in Dakota in the late nineteenth century. I mention it now just as an example that the local connects to the universal, and to emphasise, as Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney did, that there is a big difference between parochialism and provincialism. The provincial is always looking over its shoulder at some imagined superior, whereas your parish and my parish can talk to each other as equals.

Human scale

I don’t mean, by all this, that local history is just about nostalgia, although that is generally a blameless emotion to which we are all subject. I also don’t mean that local history can only be a hobby, although there is nothing wrong with it as a hobby. I do mean that local history is not a small version of national history. Its particular value lies in its capacity, indeed its duty, to see people on a human scale. It enables us to challenge stereotypes – or not? Sometimes it might even verify stereotypes. But usually not.

A real danger for local history is that, instead of examining stereotypes, it can fall into the trap of glorifying them. We all know that the present states of our island were born from violence and the threat of violence and we are still trying to get away from that inheritance. It may be significant to note that local historical societies in Ulster had their greatest spurt of growth and interest when the tensions of the late twentieth century were at their height. It was as if, while some people simply wished a plague on all houses, others felt compelled to try to better understand what they thought they knew. In less stressful times local historians need to rekindle their confidence as a civilising influence on our society.

I think we can contend that local historians are in a good position to examine stereotypes. They can look people in the eye, as it were, and not opt for generalisations which, in the nature of things, must be the case for those working on a bigger canvas. We may live in our own small corners but this is not a provincial restriction. What is local is human, it speaks the language of home but it can also help us to appreciate the universal. Those who look beyond the narrowest confines of local and family history will find wonderful projects going on in Ireland to illustrate the point.

I have a particular interest in townland study and we now have excellent demonstrations of how good these can be. They make me value the memories of Ballymagroarty and Drumclamph. I could draw a map from my head of the farm in Drumclamph, and show where the well is, or the field boundaries, or the bend in the road called Knockaticor, or where the barn owls nest. It’s the fine detail of a little patch of Ireland. But that fine detail also shows me the wet ground that the bog oak came out of. That was the bog oak that was shipped across the Atlantic by the rich American relative, portaged past the rapids of the St Lawrence River in Canada, and floated down Lake Michigan to Chicago where it was made into four large long-case clocks. One of them came back home and now stands in the entrance of the Ulster American Folk Park near Omagh.

This is the kind of story which can be retold in many Irish families. These stories can be found, examined, and shared by family historians. They connect our localities to the national and the international in ways which can be helpful to our understanding of our places in the world.

Since its foundation in the 1970s, the Federation for Ulster Local Studies has been campaigning for appreciation of our heritage of townland names. The use and knowledge of these names was severely threatened by the British Post Office’s demand that rural dwellings should be identified by number and a road name which was often invented for the purpose. The Post Office specifically said that the use of townland names was unnecessary, and many feared that continued use of their customary address would risk disruption to important communications. But, as well as providing spatial rather than linear information, these names are a precious repository of our history and language. How many people across the world have had their horizons expanded by knowledge of, or by searching for, an ancestral townland name? The names also remain a familiar entrance to appreciation of the Irish language from which most of them come, and serve timeless purposes for the location of landholding and environmental assets as well as nurturing a sense of local identity.

Townland names are often thought of as rural, but they can also be relevant to urban studies as holding historical or topographical evidence, or explaining landholding, or telling why a sudden bend in the road follows an old boundary. The Federation has had some success in its long campaign to save popular knowledge of townland names, but not enough. I’ll illustrate the actual effect of rural road naming by telling you another story, from the townland where I have lived more than half my life. It is the townland of Lisban in the parish of Saul in the barony of Lecale in east County Down.

In the 1980s, without giving him any warning, I sat down with my neighbour, Mick Taggart, and asked him to start in Lisban and to work outwards naming the townlands as he knew them. In a fairly short time Mick had named 160 townlands – his country. And one of the things I noticed about Mick’s grasp of his environment was the continual association of people and place. He would make remarks like, ‘Ballycruttle, that’s where Danny Fitzsimons is’, or ‘There’s a wee bit round the back of Maxwell’s, what the hell do you call that?’

Mick was about 70 when we tried that experiment. In the next few days I asked another man from Saul, aged about 40, to name the townlands around him. He managed 13. Then I separately asked his 16-year-old son. He named only the townland he lived in.³

There is a Europe-wide plan to revolutionise the way our localities are identified for the purposes of postage. More significantly perhaps, to facilitate internet merchandising. In itself this may not be unreasonable, but we need to be careful about unintentional or careless damage to our cultural continuity. In our age of technology, we must expect change. But for people who know the treasure house of our names, we must not allow them to be swept aside as collateral damage.

The local historian: the late Malachy McSparran conveying local history on the beach at Cushendun, County Antrim, in 1985.

Generosity

Some people use local history to hug it to themselves – I know something you don’t! But the spirit of local history must be generosity, and that is usually the case. Local and family historians generally delight in sharing their knowledge, in print, or talks, the internet, and in journals such as this. Thinking of generosity brings memories of the late W.H. (Bill) Crawford who became the first treasurer of the Federation. His friendly accessibility and knowledge when he worked at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland influenced and encouraged a generation of local historians.

Bill was also significant in demonstrating the importance of two-way communication and respect between amateur and professional historians. The revolution in communications and the availability of sources has transformed our study and there has been an amazing amount of good work done in local history in recent years: for example, the work of Eamon Lankford and his collaborators in Cork, in saving and explaining not only townland names but thousands of minor place-names is a very remarkable achievement. The Cork Place Names Archive ended up as 130 volumes, plus field notes.

Two Ulstermen, the recently-deceased Raymond Gillespie from Belfast and Paddy Duffy from Monaghan, in their work based in Maynooth University College have demonstrated how local history can illuminate national history and show the details of its warp and weft. And they have devoted much time and energy to inspiring others to take up the cause. Many of us know the stream of publications for which they have been directly or indirectly responsible. This is generosity in action, as are the multitude of local journals and other projects produced voluntarily.

Let’s mention stereotypes again. What pictures do we summon up when we think of Orangemen or Hibernians, nuns, Anglican clergymen, 1798 rebels, publicans, Ulster Scots? If any of these people lived next door to us do we think that the stereotype would tell a fully accurate story?

Another memory comes into my head. It may mean more to Ulster people than to others who are unfamiliar with the unhelpful tenacity with which people hold on to the idea of ‘Catholic names’ and’ Protestant names, as if a name, or DNA, could adhere to a religious denomination. The scene is on the Tyrone farm I mentioned before. Six people were working all day loading straw bales on to a trailer and bringing them to the barn. It was hard work. I know, because I was one of them. My uncle was also there and four other men. There was Willie Burke and his brother-in-law Rob Kerrigan, and the brothers George and Tom McElholm. Two of them were Methodists, one was Church of Ireland, one was Roman Catholic. Which one?⁴

I mention that story to challenge a common perception in Ulster, and in other parts of Ireland, that people’s names are an invariable indicator of their religious affiliation, and a whole raft of other supposed attributes including their politics and biological bloodlines. Local historians know better than that. They know that dividing communities into two is dangerous and simplistic.

But I mention that story for another reason. Because I want to demonstrate trust. I trust an audience genuinely interested in family and people to read it in the spirit in which I mean it. To encourage respectful reflection on the intricate fascinations of our history, and to refuse to join the incessant calls for confrontation. Our interests can bring us to places where we can delight in telling each other about where curiosity about our native or ancestral land has led us.