Patrick Comerford
Book Launch,
‘Clancarty: The high times and humble of a noble Irish family’
by Rod Smith
Kwanglim Room, Wesley’s Chapel,
City Road, London
2:15 pm, 3 October 2024
Genealogy goes through swings and trends in fashion.
At one time, it was the preserve of titled and landed families, families who appeared in Burke’s or Debrett’s peerage. But that was such a sad way of doing genealogy and of tracing family history. It was reduced to collecting the names and dates of lineal ancestors, often failed to look at contexts or touch the real people, and was oh so badly class laden.
Thankfully, the television series Roots in the mid-1970s created an interest in the genealogy of the oppressed, but also recognised the role of collective family memory in creating identity.
For the past 20 years or more, the television series Who Do You Think You Are? has shown us how the stories of ordinary working class families and families from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds have equally colourful and romantic stories to tell.
A new trend has emerged with the popularity and accessibility of cheap DNA tests, which is good for finding long-lost or discreetly hidden half-siblings and lost cousins, but very poor at telling us the real stories that went into creating that sample of spittle.
Genealogy and family trees are always dependent on collective imaginations and identities. In any family tree, some ancestors are counted in and some are counted out. All genealogists make choices that are based on the needs of a family or an individual to provide a colourful illustration of their sense of identity within community, with place and across generations and down through the centuries.
But a new aid that many genealogists are unwilling to give adequate attention to involves the use of mathematical projections.
I was perplexed by the title of Dr Adam Rutherford’s recent book, How to argue with a racist. Genealogy, when properly pursued, shows the inherent stupidity of every form of racism. And Dr Rutherford, in fact, is not arguing with racists – he is totally dismissive of racism, and points out the absurdity of all racist arguments.
One way he does this is through his critical examination of genealogy, its purposes and its methods, in Chapter 2, headed ‘Your ancestors are my ancestors’ (pp 67-107).
He points out that in the study of genetics, there is an assumed generational time of 24 to 30 years, and he points out that in every generation back through time the number of ancestors you have doubles.
What this means is that over a 500-year period, I have 1,048,576 ancestors. By 1,000 years ago, I have 1,099,511,627,776 ancestors – that is, over a trillion people, a number that is about 10 times the number of people that ever existed.
He says, ‘This apparent paradox reveals quite how incorrectly we think about our ancestry.’ Our family trees coalesce and collapse in on themselves as we go back in time. I certainly have a trillion positions on my family tree 1,000 years ago. But the further I go back, the more frequently these positions will be occupied by the same individual multiple times.
He points out that family trees coalesce with startling speed. ‘The last common ancestors of all people with longstanding European ancestries lived only 600 years ago – meaning that if we could draw a perfect family tree for all Europeans, at least one branch on each tree would pass through a single person who lived around 1400 CE. This person would appear on all our family trees, as would all of their ancestors.’
I have taken part in some of the programmes in the series Who Do You Think You Are?. Alan Rutherford recalls an episode in which the actor Danny Dyer found he was 22 generations in direct descent from King Edward III in the 14th century. But, as he points out, ‘the chances of anyone with long-standing British ancestry being similarly descended from Edward III is effectively 100 per cent. It is true for Danny Dyer, and it is true for the majority of British people too.’
It is true for everyone in this room, and it is true for everyone in this new book by Rod Smith that we are celebrating this afternoon.
But it goes so much wider than that. In conversation, a Muslim theologian asked me did I know that as humans we share 50 percent of the same DNA as bananas. Actually, there is some truth to that startling statistic, although it is not the whole truth.
This idea may have originated in a programme in the US run by the National Human Genome Research Institute in 2013 and led by a genetics expert, Dr Lawrence Brody, as part of an educational video from Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, The Animated Genome. That video noted that DNA between a human and a banana is ‘41 percent similar.’
The scientists working with Dr Brody compared the protein sequence from each banana gene to every human gene. Essentially, they took all of the banana genes and compared them one at a time to human genes. Their study shows that about 60 percent of our genes have a recognisable counterpart in the banana genome. ‘Of those 60 percent, the proteins encoded by them are roughly 40 percent identical when we compare the amino acid sequence of the human protein to its equivalent in the banana.’
It may seem shocking that so many genes are similar in two such vastly different things as a person and a banana. But actually, it’s not. ‘If you think about what we do for living and what a banana does there’s a lot of things we do the same way, like consuming oxygen. A lot of those genes are just fundamental to life,’ Dr Brody says.
As humans, we not only just share a high percentage of DNA with bananas – we also share 85 percent DNA with a mouse and 61 percent with a fruit fly. The remarkable thing is that, despite being very far apart in evolutionary time, we can still find a common signature in the genome of a common ancestor. And all of this is because all life that exists on earth has evolved from a single cell that originated about 1.6 billion years ago.
As Dr Brody says gleefully, ‘In a sense, we are all relatives!’
We are all related, but for a long time we have told our stories in different ways, not realising that your story is my story too.
It is a delight to be part of this book, and not just because I have written one of the forewords, taken one of the photographs, and am quoted on the back cover. But there is a way in which the story of the Trench family – and the story of the Guinness family in Rod’s previous book ( Guinness Down Under) – is your story and my story too … and not simply because of DNA tests or mathematical projections.
As Rod points out, the members of the Trench family not special because of an accident of birth or perceptions of inherited privilege. They lived a mixture of high and humble lives. They are part of the broad canvas of Irish history, and they must not be relegated to the margins and the footnotes of Irish social and political history to the footnotes of Irish history.
As I say in my foreword, the way we understand the place of landed, titled families in Ireland and their contribution to Irish life has changed profoundly in recent years.
This reappraisal has been helped, in part, by the Lthe works in refer to at the University of Galway and Maynooth University, and the work of historians in response to the ‘Decade of Centenaries’, including the Easter Rising in 1916, the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War.
In the past, writers were often dismissive of the roles of families such as these, caricaturing them as oppressive or capricious landlords, portraying them as quaint or eccentric, or finding them relative to nation-building narratives only when they included writers such as William Butler Yeats or George Bernard Shaw, or identified with nationalist causes, as with Henry Grattan, William Smith O’Brien or Douglas Hyde.
Too often, the Irish identity of these families was easily questioned or traduced, with pejorative labels such as ‘planters’ or hyphenated stereotyping such as ‘Anglo-Irish’ that doubted their identity and that implied Irish identity depends on particular cultural, linguistic or supposed ethnic backgrounds.
The recent and unsettling rise of populist racism in Ireland is a consequence of cultivating a definition of Irish identity that is neither broad enough nor tolerant enough, that is not visionary enough, to embrace the variety and breadth of ethnicity and culture that contributes to the mosaic making up the full, beautiful, diverse and rich picture of Irish identity.
The contribution of the Trench family to that mosaic is both rich and beautiful in its scope. They were French Huguenots in their origins, so offering an early contribution to linguistic and religious pluralism in Ireland. And their lives have embraced church life, and the cultural, political, architectural, educational and social life of Ireland.
Thankfully, this new book, lavishly illustrated, thoroughly researched and beautifully produced, introduces the truth that the stories of families such as this must never be confined to the margins and the footnotes of Irish social and political history.
In a blog posting last week, I quoted Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) and his opening sentence in Anna Karenina: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
As you read this book, you will find, contrary to Tolstoy’s oft-quoted saying, that the Trench family has, at times, been a happy family, like all happy families, and at times an unhappy family, ‘in its own way’ too.
But is that not so with all families? It is certainly true of the different branches of Comerford family too, as I know – at times, a happy family, like all happy families, and at times an unhappy family, ‘in its own way’ too.
But then, why should we be surprised? We all share many common ancestors, somewhere in the recent past – recent in terms of European and human history. Enjoy this book, for it offers insights into the stories of your family, and your story too.
What I had planned to say at today’s book launch (Patrick Comerford)
