In the unlikely event...

When you uncover something you weren't expecting!

Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash

Let’s face it, as much as we would love to be able to uncover the stories of the normal person, we won’t be able to preserve everything due to a plethora of reasons. Some reasons include there could have been an accident that led to documents being damaged, things being thrown out before their true value was uncovered or something as simple as it just was not talked about.

Bit of context, I had changed my college course to something a little more me, studying Culture and Heritage. One of the things we do is go on field trips, and yesterday, our first trip was to Cork Public Museum in Cork City. My lecturer had given us a guided tour around part of it. After it was over we went and explored the place on our own.

I went looking at a variety of artefacts from death masks to amazing craftwork on dresses and robes. Then I went to the exhibits, one of which was on the Irish Civil War, I went looking at the story being told on the boards in the room and went to take a look at the photos they had on one side.

When looking at one photo and all the names on it, one caught my eye and at first I thought I read it wrong. It said Pax Whelan, the name of my great-grandfather.

This was a surprise for me to see as I hadn’t seen many photos of Pax during the Civil War period. The photo was of men in the IRA at Mansion House in Dublin on April 9th 1922.

Caption: Anti-Treaty officers of the 1st Southern Division who were delegates to the IRA convention held at the Mansion House in Dublin on 9 April 1922.

[I did a close-up shot, Pax is the one standing to the right of the banister on the stairs.]

The classmates I was with I think thought I was kidding at first when I pointed him out with a shocked look on my face looking at a relative of mine in a museum exhibit. [Like, what are the chances of that happening?]

I will say, that I knew from the start of my genealogy journey six years ago that Pax was a Commanding Officer in the Second Waterford Brigade in the IRA. But in terms of how much we knew, we knew very little as this was not something that Pax had ever mentioned. When Pax passed, his eldest grandchild was in his early thirties and the youngest was in their mid-teens. So, even though it was not something to mention around a child, neither Pax nor his four children ever mentioned much about what he did during the Civil War.

Every time I do research into Pax, I always glean something new.

So, in the unlikely event that you think that there really isn’t a chance you’ll find something new — remain hopeful!