In his grandmother’s home in Dingle, {a photograph} on the wall snagged the eye of a younger Liam O’Connor. He didn’t recognise the couple.
“The photo had been there for years, but I only really looked at it that day. I asked my aunt who they were, and she told me they were her grandparents — William and Norry. She was busy, so she told me to ask my grandmother about them.”
O’Connor’s grandmother, Nora, a font of knowledge, sat with him by the hearth and instructed him about her father William’s adventures at sea as a member of the Royal Navy within the mid-1800s, and William and Norry’s life after the navy, when he transferred to the coastguard.
“There started nighttime stories and daytime stories and fireside stories about this man who had sailed all around the world.”
Liam’s grandmother posing within the yard of her house on Green St, Dingle in 1942, with the Sam Maguire cup, the Munster Championship cup, and the Kerry Football Championship cup, which her son Bill helped to win in 1941 with the Kerry and Dingle groups.
The picture is now the duvet of O’Connor’s e book The Sailor and the Seamstress, printed this week. It is a venture 10 years within the making — the writing and researching, no less than. O’Connor’s fascination began a few years prior.
As a younger man, he found a e book in his grandmother’s home the place the births and deaths of his grandmother’s siblings have been recorded, however this “research” was very a lot casual and “pre-internet”.
“In those days, doing any kind of further research was impossible, really.” And so, the story of William and Norry remained at a “loose, background level” for 20 years, says O’Connor.
With the arrival of the web, his analysis took on a extra productive section. The preliminary breakthrough occurred when his early family tree work resulted find William’s date and place of origin. Here, O’Connor says he was helped by a girl in East Cork known as Frances Cronin, who “was more
experienced than me when it came to genealogy”.
Author Liam O’Connor at his house following the publication of his debut novel, The Sailor and Seamstress, impressed by tales handed down via generations of his household. Picture: Chani Anderson
Now armed along with his great-grandfather’s date and place of origin — September 1833, Lahard in East Cork — O’Connor had a place to begin for his story.
His grandmother’s home revealed one other important clue: His great-grandfather’s Royal Navy service report. The service report was a mine of knowledge that O’Connor says he was capable of cross-check utilizing Google.
“The service record gave the list of ships he served on and the dates that he served on those ships. Using the internet, I was able to Google all of those ships, see where they were at those particular times, and I was able to determine where William was serving — in the Baltic, the Black Sea, in China, and Vancouver Island, among others.”
And so the venture moved from “a simple family tree” into deeper analysis, and a narrative started to emerge. O’Connor initially charted all he’d present in a doc.
“I was trying to put as much information into the chart as I possibly could. And like the fella said in the movie Jaws, we’re gonna need a bigger boat, I suddenly realised I was going to need a bigger sheet of paper.”
A newspaper clipping masking the complete naval honours that have been accorded at William’s funeral throughout July 1913 in Dingle.
He started to reshape the data into paragraphs, creating “a little book” that he may give to relations and say, “Look, there’s the history of one line of our family”. But his analysis stored yielding “more and more information” and as he began digging into naval data and journals, O’Connor started studying extra about life on naval ships on the time, and what adventures his great-grandfather could have had.
At the time, in 2013, O’Connor’s spouse Frances, who coincidentally was from the very place in East Cork the place his great-grandfather was born, handed away. He mentioned when his spouse died “I lost the spark for being a teacher and school principal”.
Two years later, in 2015, he retired at 55. His analysis, along with engaged on their backyard, which had been his spouse’s ardour venture, helped “occupy my time” as he grieved.
He confesses he by no means meant his analysis to turn out to be a e book — “I never set out to be a writer” – however the story of William and Norry was compelling, and shortly O’Connor got here up with the thought of fleshing out the data he’d gathered.
Author Liam O’Connor on the desk the place a lot of his debut novel, The Sailor and Seamstress, was written at his house. Picture: Chani Anderson
Initially, he wrote the e book as if William and Norry have been telling their tales to their daughter Nora, O’Connor’s grandmother. He additionally started to bridge the gaps between dates, data, and his grandmother’s tales with a fictionalised model of sure occasions. For instance, in all his detective work, O’Connor was by no means capable of learn how his great-grandmother had ended up in East Cork: “I knew her father’s name and scant details about her family, but the rest of the details are fictionalised.”
But O’Connor knew he wished to create a pleasant life for Norry. Through his analysis he understood a lot about life on the time of his great-grandparents and was ready to make use of this data to develop a sensible story for Norry.
“She was the eldest of her family, and at that time, you got a job for your children at a very early age; it was one less mouth to feed. For girls, this meant in many cases that they went into service in ‘big houses’.” And so he positioned Norry in one among East Cork’s larger homes of the time, Trabolgan House.
“I picked Trabolgan House and the Roche family because there were a lot of nice things said about them as landlords, especially during the famine years. I thought, ‘I’m going to give Norry a few nice years’. So I put her into the house of a nice landlord.”
Liam O’Connor reads from his debut novel, The Sailor and Seamstress, at his house. Picture: Chani Anderson
What O’Connor did find out about Norry was her ability as a seamstress. She had handed this ability right down to her daughter Nora, his grandmother. He additionally deduced, via William’s service data and his great-grandparents’ marriage certificates, that their marriage will need to have been organized, a typical prevalence at the moment.
“Their marriage had to have been arranged because William left Ireland in 1854 and was back in Cork for the first time in August 1869; two weeks later he married Norry in Aghada.”
Though the wedding was a contented one, the tough realities of the time reared their head over time, with the couple dropping their two eldest youngsters inside a few weeks from sickness.
“There’d be breakouts of scarlet fever, meningitis, flus, and all that. Some families had lost two or three children in the course of one year.”
From his grandmother’s tales, he knew that although the losses deeply affected them, “there was a resilience in the people of that era”.
“You just had to pick yourself up. And none of us would be around today if those people just gave up. We’re all descended from those people who survived.”
The restored grave of William and Norry in St James’s Churchyard on Main St in Dingle.
As he prepares for the publication of his e book O’Connor’s spouse Frances looms giant in his thoughts. “She was the reader of us; she could be cooking the dinner and have a book in her left hand.”
He feels she continues to be taking care of him and could be tickled with this newest improvement.
“I regard myself as very, very lucky that these things just happened for me, and I do believe that she’s been looking after me since. She was always looking after me, but even more so now,” he says. “If she was around today, seeing that something I have written is being published, she would just crack up.”
- ‘The Sailor and the Seamstress’ by Liam O’Connor is printed by Gill Books and out now.
