"I heard a rumour..."
When a rumour turns out to be nothing of the sort.
Kindly note that some topics in this piece will discuss an infant death with some graphic distressing details.
Whenever I do my research, I make sure I can back up my facts, then I post about it. That’s my work ethos, my process. I make sure everyone is afforded the dignity of being remembered, their names spoken.
I post about my research in the hope that it’ll educate and inform others. However, that’s not to say there won’t be a few times when some finds will catch you off guard.
I had written about one particular find. On June 24th, 1954 in the Commodore Hotel, Cobh — an establishment that had been looking out upon the coast since the 1850s was listed as someone’s place of death.
When conducting research along with volunteers with Project Infant, I discovered the death cert of somebody who died there. It was that of an unidentified newborn baby boy. His place of death was given as ‘A wardrobe in Room 45, Commodore Hotel’.
There is not much known about the child apart from where he died & the manner in which he died. The cause was given as:
“Deceased was found dead in a wardrobe in room 45, Commodore Hotel on Thursday 24th June 1954. The cause of death was possibly strangulation apart from the foregoing owing to the brain having become lignified and the decomposition of the tissues of the face, there was nothing to show the absolute cause of death, and there was no food in the stomach or intestines. There was a cord tied around the neck which caused an ante-mortem groove on the skin.”
— Ruling of Edmond A. Rice, coroner for County Cork.
Outside of this death record and the following newspaper article, there is no other trace of this child.
It reads:
COBH INQUEST VERDICT
A verdict of possible strangulation was the verdict returned by a jury of which Mr. John Murphy was foreman at an inquest held by Coroner E. A. Rice, solicitor in Cobh yesterday on an unnamed male infant which had been found the previous evening.
It’s a very small mention but that’s all there is. A burial place has not been located either. Now, this was by no means a new find. I posted about it on Twitter last year.
So, why exactly am I mentioning this again? You see, it was a story I felt had to be shared more than once and not solely on one platform. I did a video about this child on TikTok. Only this time, I got a comment that surprised me. It had ended up being seen by somebody who used to work at the Commodore hotel.
The premise of the story is that we might have heard about some family story, or know of some local rumour that we might not initially believe / think is in any way true. But if this teaches you anything is that in many cases, that our local history does live on, and those rumours might actually have a sliver of truth to them, you just mightn’t spot it at first.
This is such a sad story. You can only guess at the circumstances behind it. The poor child never got a chance at life but at least he is not forgotten.Thank you for sharing it
Thank you for sharing the truth Daniel. Tragic stories can so often become rumours and then facts can become blurred. Heart breaking for all concerned.