Yesterday we watched Wolfwalkers - a shimmering, wild tale of Ireland’s colonisation in the Cromwellian period and its effect on people, landscape and the natural world. It was also a beautiful story of friendship between Gaelic Méadhbh and English Robin 1/7

Coincidentally, yest I was sent a family tree on my mother’s side. My cousin has traced *10* gens of Wades/Mac Uadas (anyone familiar w Irish records will know how difficult this is) to a drummer in Cromwell’s army. He married an Irishwoman & was granted 2000 acres in Meath 2/7

From there the story twists and turns - a Jacobite son converted to Catholicism, was on the wrong side of the Williamite wars and lost all the land; successive conversions to Protestantism & back to Catholicism; suggestions of manoeuvrings in the face of the Penal Laws 3/7

My g-g-grandfather was born in 1826 (before Catholic Emancipation) and died in 1918, age 92. He lived through the Famine (his father died in 1847), and was evicted. His son, my great-grandfather, was a groom in the local Big House. A brother was in the Mogeely Volunteers. 4/7

The women in the line are fascinating: O’Brien, Plunkett, Butler, Coffey, Haughey, Ryan, Barnwell. They are all from different counties, which I also find interesting. How much mobility was there in 17/18th c Ireland? How common was it to marry outside your county? 5/7

Anyway, this family tree evokes some of the themes we’ve been hearing about in @janeohlmeyer’s Ford Lectures: the hybrid nature of English colonisation in Ireland, assimilation & intermarriage, the fluidity of what is oft taken as fixed identities (in this case religious) 6/7

I’m also thinking about the gap between those 2000 acres in Meath in the 1650s and the small 2 up, 2 down house in east Cork that my mother grew up in. And I can’t wait to have a drink with my cousin and find out more. 7/7