Tag: Genealogy

It’s been a while…

10th August 2023 / Abigail / 2 Comments

A little Lego Valkyrie symbolises the difficulties of life.

It feels like so much has changed since I last posted here. The last year has been a difficult one and so far there’s no relief from that. When I last wrote a post I had just been diagnosed with autism and was waiting to see if I also had ADHD. Well that diagnosis came through so I am now getting my head around being AuDHD, as it tends to be known online. It’s a strange piece of information to arrive at at almost 50 and I still can’t help but wonder what my life would have been like if I had had the support and understanding that seems a lot more available to today’s children. It’s been rather a year of reinvention and looking back on the intervening months it feels like I’ve reassessed almost every bit of my life – not all because I’m looking at the world through newly-recognised neuro spicy lenses.

But that wasn’t all. In the depths of the first pandemic winter it seemed as if the quiet darkness of lockdown would bring a reassessment, an interlude for a collective taking stock. Even by the second pandemic winter it was becoming clear that a great readjustment wasn’t really going to be forthcoming. Brexit had left a stain so deep that it clouded the perceptions of those who heralded it as a new dawn. It left a space that could be filled by nonsense, by conspiracy theories and even more fake news. With the pandemic those lies blossomed into something even darker and they haven’t gone away. Even as the threat of sickness recedes I still find myself using sanitiser whenever I touch something outside. I wear a mask less often but always have one on me. I guess this is normal behaviour after a major public health risk but it has meant that life has been held at arms’ length for a very long time now.

But it wasn’t just the state of the country, the state of the world, of the planet that kept me away. My default view of humanity is that it’s on the road to nowhere and I’ve always been fascinated by dystopias so the current hell scape I can deal with. In the southeast of England we are on the nursery slopes of a dystopia anyway. If you can tune out the Brexity lunacy it’s dealable with. No the reason why I haven’t written ANYTHING in a long time is because I’ve been trying to work out where my voice has gone.

Last year I turned 50. It wasn’t a great year – our beautiful cat reached the end of her life, I became a victim of academic cost cutting and my teaching has dwindled to a tiny amount. The kind of knocks that leave you somewhat hollowed out and diminished. For my birthday I finally took the plunge to look into my DNA. I’ve worked in genealogy and it was always something I was interested in trying. I wanted to find out if my research was correct – I had found evidence in my genealogical research that my dad’s family had been Anglo Indian rather than colonial as my mum had always lead me to believe. I wrote about that discovery at the time but was always conscious that all the evidence I had was circumstantial. So I took the test. Going in I thought I had a pretty good idea of the outcome. I thought that on my mum’s side was Welsh and Russian (actually Georgian) as that was what I had been told all my life. I grew up with Russian fairy stories and dolls because my mum was proud of her Slavic heritage. There was a history there, with details, names, dates. That side seemed unremarkable and predictable. I was interested in my dad’s side. The results took a while, as these things do, but when they came they once again made me question my own identity.

You see they revealed that firstly, my research was good. I kind of knew that. I trust what I now know as my hyperfocus super skills. If a fact is there for a subject I’ve got my teeth into then I will find it. There is Indian blood in there but a very long way back, about the same percentage as the Irish bit of my DNA. I’d worked out a very long time ago that I didn’t qualify for Irish citizenship under the grandparent rule. When I started researching my dad’s family it became clear that the direct line couldn’t have come from Ireland for a very long time – in fact both the Irish and the Indian probably got into the mix at roughly the same time, when Patrick Rieley married Sophia in Chennai in 1815. Since Sophia was a pupil teacher at the Freeschool attached to the Female Orphan Asylum it was probable that she was a child of a European father and an Indian mother, a quick assumption that speaks to the sad truth about such families. So going back as far as Patrick and probably Sophia’s mother a generation before, that’s not going to leave a very large percentage of either nationality in the DNA.

The surprise was the far greater percentage that was missing. I had always been told that my maternal grandfather was Georgian and his meeting my grandmother during the war resulted in my mother. That should have meant a biggish chunk of around 25% Georgian…which wasn’t there. In fact there was nowhere in that direction anywhere. My grandmother was rather known within the family as a bit of a spoofer but this news gave me a new respect for the sheer breadth of her spoofing. She had created a phantom lover with a phantom family. His mother, my phantom great grandmother had supposedly turned up for my mother when she was about 6. My mum told me the story as gospel. But those results couldn’t be that wrong. Despite the fact that I have it on good authority that my golden eyes, pale skin and dark colouring are typically Georgian it turns out they are just a mix of Welsh, Irish, Scottish and Indian. I’m happy with that but what unsettles me is the sheer depth of the fantasy that grew up around my mother’s parentage. It shaped her, it affected her relationship with her real dad (and judging by the amount of Welsh in me he was definitely her dad) and both she and, I think, my gran believed the story. I have an inkling why the phantom was more attractive than the truth but it will take a lot more unpacking before I can put all my thoughts on that into words.

It was putting thoughts into words that has been the difficulty these past months. Turning 50 was a much bigger deal than I had expected. It’s a time of reckoning, a time for re-evaluation and it really didn’t help to have so much other stuff whirling around in my head and coming to the realisation that the forgetfulness and constant aches and pains were actually part of a fundamental shift. I’ve been used to a particular hormonal pattern for most of my life, to suddenly realise that that was coming to an end is both liberating and terrifying – if I could remember the words for either of those feelings.

Then in February this year we became another statistic. One of the households chucked out of rented accommodation because of financial pressures on landlords. We found somewhere new and it is lovely but it’s been a huge upheaval. At least I know now why I don’t react to change very well.

So yeah, it’s been a bit of a year or so. I’ve come out of it with a lot more knowledge about myself and after a very long time, I feel I have something to say again.

I’ll try to blog a couple of times a week to get back into the routine of it. After such a long time feeling silenced the thoughts are bubbling up again. It’s been a while but I’m back. Have you missed me?

A Question of Identity

12th February 2015 / Abigail / 0 Comments

My father, Colin Rieley with his bearer and his older sister in India in the 1930s

I’ve grown used to not fitting in. That’s not a plea for sympathy or a “poor me” just an expression of the status quo. I moved to the west of Ireland from London in my teens. Even though I’ve now lived most of my life in Ireland, even though I care very deeply about what goes on here, even though I have dear friends and family here, even though Ireland is my home, on some very basic level I will always be an outsider. Those formative years in London shaped me in a way I just can’t change. They shaped my sense of humour, my political leanings, my values – my reticence. A million little things that make me who I am.

Over the years, on days when that cultural gap felt a little too wide, I thought at lot about where I’d come from, where my family had come from. Having an Irish surname has always been a bit of a double edged sword. One the one hand it proves the fact that I have some Irish roots, on the other hand – it’s spelled wrong. I get corrected all the time on that. Everyone knows how you spell “Reilly”.

So a few years ago I decided to find out where the Rieley came from. Find out where those Irish roots actually were. How hard could it be?

Now, I had some experience of genealogy. My first job after leaving school was working for the Sligo Family Research Society and helping people find their relationship to Yeats. I knew there were one or two issues with the Irish records but I didn’t think I’d have to go back that far. As far as I knew I would have been able to play on the Irish soccer team – not because I can kick a ball of course, but because my grandfather was born here. I knew that my dad had been born in India – that’s him on the left in the picture at the top of this post – but I remembered a story my mum had told me about him applying for an Irish passport at some stage but being told the records had been lost in the Four Courts fire. I knew my grandfather had been born at the end of the 19th century so I didn’t think I’d have much difficulty finding him in Ireland.

The best laid plans…

I started to look for my grandfather and almost immediately hit a brick wall. Apart from one marriage record I couldn’t find him anywhere. I ordered a copy of certificate and found out his father’s name and the fact that he was a bank manager but apart from that, there was nothing. I decided to go back a step and try to find my father’s birth record so I turned to the records of the British India Office and the East India Company, as well as the records painstakingly transcribed by the group FIBIS, the Families in British India Society. With a crash the wall came tumbling down. I found my dad – and my grandfather – and my great grandfather. They were all born in India, and married in India and died in India until my grandfather took wife and children back to England. The more digging I did the more people I found, great sprawling branches of people – all of them born and bred in India. I was back to 1820 and had yet to find anyone who had been born in Europe. I was puzzled with what I found. How had I got it so wrong? Was I misremembering?

Over the years I kept digging as more records found their way on line. I started to discover what jobs people had and time and again, when I did further research, I found that these were typical jobs for Anglo Indians. Could that be a reason why I had heard nothing about this Indian past? Why the Four Courts fire seemed so convenient? Had my family tried to “pass”?

I knew that to be considered Anglo Indian the Indian generally passed down through the maternal line. These were the children of Indian women who had children with European men. Could one of the women in the records have been Indian? The names really do not help.

My best bet is that she was the Sophia who married a Patrick Rieley in Madras (now Chennai) in May 1819. She had grown up in the Female Orphan Asylum. Patrick was a teacher in the Free School. The children who went to both the male and the female orphan asylums in those days were often the children of Indian mothers and fathers from Europe. The fathers’ would leave and the mothers would have no way to look after their children – so they would leave them at the orphanage, where the church tried to turn them into useful members of society. I can’t find Sophia’s birth record so I don’t know for certain, but along with everything else this is what fits. It explains a lot, looking at that sprawling tree. It explains why my grandfather’s brother Terence, who ran away to sea and went to America, would tell the Federal Census that he had been born in Ireland. It also explains perhaps, why he wrote on his draft registration for the First World War, that he was a citizen or a subject of India. It explains why they were such a close knit family, never moving far away from each other, intermarrying – because they were “that” community – neither one thing or the other – both.

My theory is that young Patrick Rieley left Cavan or wherever he was from, having grown up with talk of rebellion. He would have heard stories of 1798 and 1803. He would have perhaps had contact with some of the progressive education reformers around at the time. People like Maria Edgeworth, who thought that Ireland’s troubles could be eased if only the children were taught well and taught together. Perhaps young Patrick thought that he could do something good with that education, that he made his way to India. A generation before he arrived, a teacher at the free school had pioneered the method of peer education known as the Madras system. This system of pupil teachers revolutionised teaching in places with a shortage of teachers. Perhaps Patrick wanted to be part of that legacy.

Whatever reason Patrick went to India for – if indeed he was the one who went there – he started a fascinating history. It’s been exciting tracing all those different branches and there’s a lot more work to do. I’ve only found out the direct line. I still don’t know if any branches of the family stayed, if any are still there. I find it hard to understand why anyone would hide such a story – but of course there were, there are a lot of reasons why people choose to do the things they do. This was not and is not a particularly tolerant world.

When I was very small, even before we moved to Ireland, I was still used to looking different. Every now and then I would get asked where I was from, because my face didn’t fit the standard British model. Over the years, I’ve been told my colouring came from Spain, or the Celts, or the Baltic. Perhaps the reason for the dark hair and sallow skin actually goes back to Patrick Rieley. I never did find those Irish roots but I’ll keep digging. Maybe some very early records didn’t get burnt in the Four Courts fire. It’ll be fun looking anyway.

It’s been a while…

A Question of Identity

The Books

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