It's interesting to be of an age when one can look back a couple of generations, and forward a couple more. In my case I remember both sets of grandparents, though they were quite old, and thses days I get the greatest of pleasure watching my grandson grow up.
My maternal grandfather died when I was a year and nine months, but one of my earliest memories is of him carrying me around his garden, and I remember studying his face - the same look I caught on my baby grandson's face when everything was new and full of wonder to him.
My other grandparents lived to ripe old ages, and my only regret is that I never thought of asking them about their childhood and growing up, and such matters. I learned pieces here and there, but to think that the whole encyclopedia was available to me, and I never really opened it.
All born in the 1880s/90s, I found out things about them from the census of 1901 and 1911 that I never knew when they were living.
My feeling is that they had life no easier of no harder than many other families of the day - bot lost children - one little boy died from meningits on the morning he was to have made his First Communion; the other family lost three young people to the dreaded TB epedemic that ravaged the country back in the 1920s/30s. Despite all the ups and down, everything was "in God's hands".
I do have lots of memories of them from when I was a child; one of the strangest by today's standards, is of my paternal granny airing her habit on the clothesline on a sunny summer's day, and us children charging back and forth under it, as it flapped in the wind. It seems that if you ad your habit before you died, you gained an indulgence from the church. To her, death was part of life. She eventually got to wear the habit in 1972.
Fast forward the generations, my seven-year-old grandson is not particularly interested in who did what and when. at the moment he just blitzes me with facts about football and hurling and wrestling. He's looking forward to seeing The Rubber Bandits play in Croke Park at the upcoming Dublin v Kerry game.
Sometime in the future, he'll wonder about the past and where he came from. I hope I'm around to tell him. I want him to know about the habit on the clothesline, and about his great and great-great grandparents, what they worked at, and the stories I know of - the things he will never find in any national or parish records.
Perhaps we should all write our family memoirs, not for publication, but for the generations to come. It would be a way of filling in the gap between the old boughs and young twigs.
Mary Mulhall - a mature branch!
