We are family

By Paul Flower on Nov 3, 09 12:43 PM

I've been in Dublin, shaking the family tree. This odyssey began earlier in the year when my mother became reacquainted with two of her brothers, and met some family she didn't realise she had back in the emerald isle.

Within these meetings and subsequent conversations the story was repeated that my mother might have been adopted. It was a story she was aware of but had been unable to prove its veracity, and over the years it'd been put at the back of her mind.

Now resurrected by her wider family it became something we decided to look into. Unfortunately we discovered that it's not quite as easy as they make it look on TV; the key problems being that adoption wasn't legal in Ireland at the time of my mother's birth (1942) and my mother had become estranged from her 'parents' long-before their eventual deaths.

Still we took up the offer of visiting long-lost cousins, uncles and their various siblings in order to look around and present ourselves in person at various offices. We were not alone. Genealogy, it appears, is big business in Ireland. The office where most of the births/deaths/marriage records are kept, The Irish Life Centre, was over-crowded when we arrived there necessitating a 30 minute wait to sit at one of their tables.

The research room within the ILC resembles nothing more than a medium-sized library annex - with rows of tables and a smaller space containing all the indexes. You stand in a queue to fill in a form and pay €2 to look at up to five years of indexes - from these you can trace births or deaths (but not both at the same time) by surname in years split into quarters.

Should you wish to see the documentation relating to those births/deaths you can pay a further €4 per copy for each, limited to six copies per day - any others have to be posted to you. The sheer quantity of people in the room, filling out forms and handing over Euros made it very difficult for a novice such as myself to have even the vaguest clue of what I was doing - and the staff were clearly too busy with others to be able to help. Some of those 'others' had been in the room for over 8 hours doing their research, far more professionally than I was able.

Consequently we were reliant on the advice of some excellent social workers, people who've clearly seen it all before and had the enviable ability to empathise. They were able to point us in various different directions of places where records are kept of the various Irish orphan's homes and adoption societies, noting which were linked to the areas of Dublin we were concentrating on. Their assistance was invaluable and may have led us to some vital information - which we'll only know for sure when we've sent off copies of all of mother's existing documentation.

There were also the family stories of course. Welcomed into the homes, cars and bosoms of our Irish family, we were almost embarrassed by their levels of hospitality. Irish families clearly keep their friends and family close, and socialise more than their English counterparts - or maybe just more than me. It was a fascinating experience to hear stories and see photos of distant family and discover the notion that my mother may have been the daughter of two young & unmarried trainee doctors.

Dublin is a fantastic city to visit; I've probably been there far too many times. Sadly, at the current rate of exchange, it must also rank as one of the most expensive places you can go. It isn't helped by the fact that most of the shops are similar to those we have in England and list both € and £ prices - making it clear that the prices were set when the £ was worth about €1.40 rather than the €1.09 it's currently worth.

The price of alcohol is the biggest shock though. Taxed at 21.5% the cost of spirits in particular was a little scary. I had decided to buy my relatives a bottle of Southern Comfort at the shocking price of €29.99. You can imagine that I wasn't best pleased on returning to England and finding it on offer at two bottles for £25. It'd have been cheaper to buy it and ship it over. Maybe there's a business model here - and the reason why a lot of Dubliners travel a short distance to shop in the north!

Of course it's the thought that counts, and the thought that haunts right now is the one where you meet lots of incredibly friendly and accommodating people, widen your family circle immeasurably and then find out that they're not family after all. I'm sure it won't matter much, but it's considerably more sobering than the price of a Dublin pint.