How I found my Irish roots

By

NIALL O'DOWD,

IrishCentral.Com Publisher

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I was always skeptical of the "Yanks" who came to visit my house in Ireland many years ago, all relatives from America on the ancestry trail. There were distant cousins from Detroit and San Francisco, all drawn back to the ancestral land where they had originally come from. My father would spend much time with them, but because most of the 19th century census records from Ireland were destroyed by fire there was only so far everyone could go back.

Now all these years later I understand fully what it must have meant to them to seek out the souls of their ancestors. You see, just last weekend I traced my own ancestors on my father's side - finally. The 1911 Irish census is finally online and, it so far covers only four counties, Antrim, Dublin, Down and Kerry. Luckily, the O'Dowd old homestead is in Kilcooley about seven miles from Dingle in Co. Kerry, deep in the recesses of the Gaeltacht, still an Irish speaking area and one of the most remote, beautiful and haunting places in all of Europe.

The movie "Ryan's Daughter" was filmed a stone's throw from the village. Now my family is included in the data just released by the Irish authorities. My brother in Ireland called me excitedly and referred me to the Kilcooley parish records from 1911 - and there, at last, was our family. It was an extraordinary moment to reach out and touch the souls who came before me and made me what I am today. Some names I knew; others I never would. They are there under the heading, "Residents of House No. 8 Kilcooley, Kerry."

My great grandfather Edward Dowd (the census taker translated the Gaelic form, O Dubhda, to Dowd, but my father later added the "O" back) was the family patriarch back in 1911. He was 72 years old and married with four children. He signed his census form with an X, which meant he was not literate, a fact the census taker duly noted. He had been born just a few years before the Famine in 1839 and had gone through it. He was a farmer and he and wife Mary, 69, in 1861 lived in their two-room house and small farm and raised four kids there.

Now in 1911 they shared the two-room house with 13 others - an incredible amount of people but a fair indication of the awful economic times. There was Michael, my grandfather, and his wife Catherine Kennedy from a nearby town land. They were 45 and 38 respectively when the census was taken on the night of April 2, 1911. I remember my grandmother dimly, my grandfather not at all.

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