I spent yesterday doing a bit of research into the sixteenth-century Sir Nicholas White. My researches threw up this surprising biographical note:
( William Thomas White of Knoxville )

So there's a certain amount of suspicion in my mind that William Thomas White was pulling together prominent Catholic Irish-Americans with his surname to claim as relatives. But there may be a bit more to it than that.

In my genealogical surfings I have come across this account of the death of my grandfather's eldest brother, John Nicholas Whyte (1864-1906), which I knew from family lore had been quite a scandal at the time. Bizarrely enough it comes from the archives of a New Zealand paper, the Hawera and Normanby Star, from July and August 1906.

( sad story with medical details )

The case was sufficiently visible to give rise to a parliamentary question and debate in the columns of the New York Times; clearly there were competing narratives of a moral panic about Christian Science cultists, and a unjustified witch-hunt against a retired doctor who was following his patient's instructions. (I am quite sure that my great-grandmother was contributing to the first of these.)

Major Whyte was not married and (as far as we know) left no children; I am puzzled however by this street bearing his name on the northern edge of São Paolo, Brazil, but perhaps it is someone else!

2) The 7th Dawn

Yes, I have watched my second film this year - and June isn't even over yet!

This is a 1964 film starring William Holden, Capucine, the Japanese actor Tetsuro Tamba and a young Susannah York, directed by Lewis Gilbert (whose next two films were Alfie and You Only Live Twice). It is set during the Malayan insurgency of the early 1950s, with Tamba playing the insurgent leader, Holden the maverick American, Capucine the woman who has (by implication) been the lover of both, and York as the daughter of the newly arrived British governor. Given that somewhat clichéd setup, it does what it does rather well. I was struck that for a film of the Cold War era about an overtly Communist insurgency it was notably unsympathetic to the British colonial administration; also both female leads play sexually confident characters who are frankly more interesting than the men. The music, by otherwise mediocre composer Riz Ortolani, is rather good the first couple of times you hear it (though suffers from too much repetition).

I actually bought it because I had seen in my grandmother's memoirs that my late aunt was an extra in some of the British colonial crowd scenes; I didn't actually spot her, but I'm bad at faces (and anyway this was several years before I was born).

One of the more peculiar entries in our family history is a brief note about

Sir Maurice Whyte, who served in France under Henry IV and Henry V where at the siege of Rouen, with the Prior of Kilmainham, he led 2,000 Irish, and later made Governor of Montaire under Henry VI. He was called "The Lancastrian", having served under three kings of the House of Lancaster.

This would presumably explain the three red roses on the family coat of arms (see icon); but I wouldn't mind being able to find some slightly better proof of the existence of Sir Maurice. I have a sneaking suspicion that this was all invented to give a respectable background to my Elizabethan namesake.

Well, some of this is easy enough to put dates to. Since Henry V reigned for less than ten years (1413-1422) it is not difficult to imagine a military career that would involve serving under both his father and his son. The siege of Rouen lasted from July 1418 to January 1419, and the presence of the Irish soldiers is well attested, as is the role of Thomas Butler, the Prior of Kilmainham; though British and Irish estimates of the troop strength under his command are more like 500-700, a French source describes "eight thousand Irish savages" as being part of the English forces. There is no mention of Maurice the Lancastrian in any on-line sources, but probably I can get into this the next time I am in a decent university library.

The idea of Maurice having been "Governor of Montaire" needs a bit more exploration. I can't find any Montaire in France; much more likely the story refers to Montoire-sur-le-Loir, now more famous as being the place where Pétain and Hitler agreed on French collaboration with the Nazis in 1940, but which was certainly on the contested border between English and French zones of control at that phase of the Hundred Years' War. I can't find on-line references to any particular local set-up there in the 1420s; other possibilities are Montoir-de-Bretagne in Brittany, and the Château de la Montoire near Calais (though this last appears to have been in French hands between 1410 and 1488). Again, I shall just have to wait until the next time I am in a decent university library.

Would any of you have easy access to the journal The Irish Sword? Only I see that it had a very short article (pages 62-63 of vol 2, 1953) by Richard Hayes on "Irish soldiers at the siege of Rouen, 1418-19".

I've been fascinated to read of the latest research on the origins of blue eyes, carried out by Dr Hans Eiberg of Copenhagen. It seems that all people with blue eyes (including me, my parents, and my children; but not my wife, whose eyes are green) share a single identifiable mutation, descended from a single ancestor (or, as one Australian headline sensitively puts it, "Blue-eyed people 'inbred mutants'"; compare Der Spiegel's "All blue-eyed people related to Brad Pitt"). The original mutation likely occurred in near the Black Sea 8-10,000 years ago. Since it's a recessive gene, the first blue-eyed people would not have been born until several generations after the original mutation, as his or her descendants began to intermarry.
 
The intriguing thing is why we blue-eyed folks became so prevalent in the northern European population - see this map of distribution of "light eyes", taken from a 1960s textbook.
( map )
 
There's an assumption underlying a lot of the press coverage (also mentioned by Razib Khan in his blog here) that there was strong positive selection for blue eyes in the northern European population at some point shortly after the mutation happened. There is a linkage between blue eyes, blond hair and fair skin, which is supposedly of adaptive advantage in chilly northern latitudes; there also seems to be some kind of link with adult lactose tolerance.  I am struck by the way in which several media sources mention the role of sexual selection, mainly relying on quotes from other geneticists not themselves involved with the Danish research: see here or here. Surely both men and women play a role in this? It seems rather odd to say that blue eyes have persisted and spread because only one gender finds them attractive! (The media reports seem unable to agree as to whether the blue-eye-fancying gender are babes or dudes.)
 
Razib also rightly excoriates the "discovery" that all blue-eyed people are descended from the person with the original mutation. In fact, if that person lived as long ago as 10,000 years before the present, it's very likely that all human beings alive today are descended from him or her one way or another; as I've written before, I'm convinced by the calculations that the most recent common ancestor of all humanity lived in historical times, and the original blue-eyed recessive lived much longer ago.

It's easy (and it's also fun) to mock the press coverage for attempting to sex up the Copenhagen research. All rather fascinating, though, and yet another reminder of how closely inter-related we all are.

Idly googling my ancestors in the hope of getting some genealogical insight is one of my occasional harmless pastimes. I have struck gold for once with this story from the archives of the Correspondence Chess League of America (at least, from context, I guess that is what CCLA stands for): ( Read more... )

Reference has been made to my strange requests, and to bellinghman's obliging me in them. All can now be revealed.

Octocon was held last weekend in Maynooth. The next town to Maynooth is Leixlip. I was aware of a historical family connection to Leixlip, but had never been before. I found what I was looking for - a very interesting memorial in St Mary's (Protestant) church in the town.

Our family's genealogy is fairly well recorded. On the left is the White/Whyte coat of arms as in the received records (argent, a chevron engrailed between three roses gules). On the right is the top half of the memorial in St Mary's Church, Leixlip. You can see why a thrill of recognition ran down my spine:



Underneath the shield is this inscription (and you will have to take my word for it, because the photos are not very good - I should have taken bellinghman's advice and filmed it as a movie, but they were about to start a service and I felt embarrassed):

THIS TOMB WAS ERECTED BY THE LADY URSULA
WHITE DAUGHTER OF THE LORD MOORE

HERE LYETH THE BODIS OF SIR NICHOLAS WHITE
KNIGHT DECEASED THE 4 OF FEBRUARIE 1654 AND
HIS SON NICHOLAS WHITE ESQ DECEASED THE 31 OF DECEMB
1664

So, not just one dead version of me, but two - extra value! The elder Nicholas is my 7xgreat-grandfather; the other was his eldest son (though I am descended from the fourth son, Charles, who lived long enough to fight on the losing side at the Battle of the Boyne).

The right hand side of the shield in the church is taken from the coat of arms of the Moores of Drogheda - azure on a chief indented or three mullets pierced gules. Lady Ursula White was one of the five daughters (and twelve children) of Sir Charles Moore, later the first Viscount Moore (c. 1560-1627). Her husband died in 1654 and is reckoned to have been born about 1583. Her eldest son is thought to have been born about 1612 and died in 1664. She herself died in 1667.

My grandfather, who was into genealogy, named his youngest child after Ursula when she was born in 1939. She died rather unexpectedly ten years ago next month. In certain respects I have followed my grandfather's example.

Thanks to bellinghman for indulging my antiquarian whims. Rather odd to be described as a baroness two days after doing this little bit of research!

22) William Howard Taft: A Conservative's Conception of the Presidency, by Donald F. Anderson (.co.uk, .com)
23) 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs - the Election That Changed the Country, by James Chace (.co.uk, .com)

The last president whose biography I read was John Adams, who shares with Taft the distinction of running for re-election and coming third, which is difficult in a two-party system. (In Adams' case, of course, the voting system was different, and he really came second behind the Jefferson/Burr ticket.) Neither Adams nor Taft had an especially distinguished presidency, but sometimes failure can have more lessons than success.

Taft did not especially want to be President anyway. It is striking that of the many photographs of him in these two books, the one in which he looks happiest - indeed, is beaming joyfully - was taken on 4 March 1913 as he handed over the White House to Woodrow Wilson. Hand-picked by Theodore Roosevelt as his successor, he lacked the basic political skills to survive - his only previous elected office was a judicial post in his native Ohio, and his experience of executive government, running America's newly acquired Philippines colony, gave him no taste of dealing with other political leaders.

Once Roosevelt had lost patience with Taft, he contested the Republican nomination for the 1912 election and was basically cheated out of it by Taft's supporters. He then broke from his own party and ran on a far more left-wing ticket than any major candidate before or since. Taft was crushed in the election and won only two states, Utah and Vermont. The Republican party, which had won eleven of the previous thirteen presidential elections, won only three of the next ten.

Anderson's book (published in 1968) is a decent enough dissection of Taft's character and mistakes, but I had hoped for a bit more of a human dimension. Chace's book, published just after his own death in 2004, has loads of human interest - it starts with Taft weeping at Roosevelt's graveside in 1919 - and I particularly learnt from it about the Socialist leader Eugene Debs, but it was curiously unfocussed, and poorly edited in places.

Both books, however agreed on the two incidents in Taft's presidency which particularly drove Roosevelt to feel that his legacy had been betrayed: the first being a public row between Taft's Secretary of the Interior and the head of the Forestry Service who had been appointed by Roosevelt; and the second a move to reverse an industrial merger which had been approved several years earlier by Roosevelt. Crucial in advising Taft badly in the first case, and actually taking the steps which so offended Roosevelt in the second, was Taft's attorney-general, George W. Wickersham, a New York corporate lawyer memorably described as having the political sensitivity of an ox. His younger sister was my great-grandmother.

From New Scientist.

(Hat-tip to someone on my f-list who posted this in a locked entry.)

Proves what I always said.

7) A Bachelor's London: Memories of the Day before Yesterday, 1889-1914, by Frederic Whyte

This is the autobiography of Frederic Whyte (1867-1941), a distant cousin of mine who was active in the literary world of London in the quarter-century before the first world war. (Indeed, although the sub-title on the cover page of the book is "Memories of the Day before Yesterday", the running title on the right-hand pages is "Memories of Literary London".)

A lot of it is literary name-dropping, often of people I haven't heard of - though there is one amusing moment when Whyte, giving a rare public speech in 1898, is heckled from the audience by both George Bernard Shaw and Bram Stoker, which sounds to me like a truly frightening experience. Thirty years later, Whyte wrote to Shaw to offer his services as editor of Shaw's correspondence; Shaw replied, "I do not think it would be possible to publish much of my correspondence until the year 2028 or thereabouts; but, of course, you would make an excellent editor if you could manage to live so long."

He also writes of Arthur Conan Doyle ("he looked like two stolid policemen rolled into one") as being a fellow-Irishman, which came as a surprise to me but I see on checking that both of Doyle's parents were Irish Catholics. Among the illustrations in the book is this 1919 letter from Doyle, then firmly in his spiritualist phase:




My dear Whyte,

        It was a kindly thought. Many thanks.

        No, this is my swansong - a ^dying duck's
quack in history.

[Presumably the letter is in response to one from Whyte, congratulating Doyle on some recently published book - which might have been the Sherlock Holmes collection, His Last Bow, published in 1917? Of course, Doyle did publish more Sherlock Holmes stories even after this.]

        The rest of my life will be spent in
endeavouring to show the human race how
blind + deaf they have been in not
understanding the great new spiritual forces
which have come in so strange a fashion
into the world.

                Yours sincerely

                        A Conan Doyle

           Apr 19 [1919]




But Whyte also writes with deep affection of various writers of whom I have never heard: Tighe Hopkins, Arthur Diosy, his one-time flatmate Herbert Compton. Funny how history filters out some people.

The book answers my questions about what Whyte actually did for a living, at least up to the point he moved to Sweden (which seems to have been in about 1914). His education was through a suspiciously numerous list of boarding schools (checking the family genealogy I see that his father had died in 1883 when Frederic was 16); his first job, in 1887-88, was as a Reuters correspondent in Constantinople; he then got hired as an editor at the publisher Cassell's, where he worked from 1889 to 1905; he then decided to go freelance, translating books and doing other bits of writing with a couple of other short-lived regular publishing jobs. When I'm next in a decent English-language reference library I'll check him out in the index of periodicals.

There is a chapter about his holidays in Ireland, interestingly not with the Whyte side of the family, though he writes with great affection of George Ryan of the Ryans of Inch, who was both my great-great-uncle and Frederic's first cousin, and of various other relatives who crop up in the family records. Frederic Whyte was pro-Home Rule, and very much an agnostic; his Irish relatives were all fervent Unionists and devout Catholics (in the days when that was a less unlikely combination than it is now); but they appear to have agreed to get along.

There are a couple of other chapters randomly thrown in on the art of translation, and the claims of phrenology (this one featuring heavily both Alfred Russel Wallace and G.K. Chesterton). He also reflects rather ambiguously on the first world war, rather giving the impression that while he thought it was a bad idea at the time (it may not be insignificant that this was precisely the point that he moved to Sweden), from the viewpoint of 1931 he is no longer so sure.

Anyway, an interesting book which enlightened me on various points.

11) A Wayfarer in Sweden, by Frederic Whyte

I'm slowly working my way through the works of Frederic Whyte (1867-1940), who was both my first cousin thrice removed and and my second cousin twice removed. In this book, published in 1926, he writes about Sweden; he married a lady called Karin Lilva from Jonköping in 1916, and their only child, Henry, was born the following year. I never met Henry, though scattyme and I did meet his wife Ingrid when we passed through Stockholm in 1990, a few months after our father died; Henry himself died not long after that. scattyme and I were back in Stockholm earlier this year, and I wrote to Ingrid in advance but got no reply; I see from googling her name now that she died, aged 85, in August, which is sad but not a huge surprise. She and Henry had no children, so that is the end of that branch of the family.

So part of the interest of the book for me is the colour it brings to a few people who are barely even snapshots in the family album. Frederic Whyte writes of himself as being "Irish, though educated in England, and appreciative of England - on this side idolatry!" and as "a somewhat anglicized Irishman". I certainly know that he spent most of his life in England before moving to Sweden when he married (when he was already nearly 50). He writes of childhood memories of "photographs of my father, a civil engineer in India, moving about on a trolley along the lines of the Bombay-Baroda and Central India Railway", which is far more than I knew of his father, an earlier Henry Whyte, who was born at some point after 1829, married a Mary Comy or Comyn in 1859, and died in 1883 leaving two sons and three daughters, including Frederic. He writes a lyrically happy page or so about his own little boy growing up in Jonköping; the younger Henry Whyte would have been nine when the book was published, so about the same age when it was being written that my own little boy is now. My own middle name, incidentally, is Henry, as was my father's, and his father's.

The family history aside, I think this is an entertaining little book about Sweden. Karin, Frederic's wife, contributes a couple of chapters, about the Gotha Canal and the region of Dalecarlia (now generally called Dalarna). But it's Frederic's writing that really shines. I come away determined that next time I go to Sweden I'll do a proper tour - apart from passing through en route to Finland in 1990, and my Stockholm trip earlier this year, my only other visit was a very peculiar conference in Åre last year. Frederic doesn't quite sell me on the northern mining districts, but he does sell me on Gothenburg, and by an odd coincidence I read the two chapters on the diplomatic mission of Bulstrode Whitelocke to the court of Queen Christina in 1655-1656 while waiting in a pub for a British diplomat friend to turn up.

It's also not lost on me that I have lived in Belgium for almost as long as Frederic had lived in Sweden by the time he wrote this book, so part of its attraction is an encounter with a fellow expatriate. We are in somewhat different situations, of course - he married a local, whereas my wife is an exile like me. Also I'm not sure if he had a career beyond his writing - he must have, surely, since all but one of his books was published after 1925. I see that his son Henry published an article called "Glimpses into a Literary Workshop: Frederic Whyte" in a journal called English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, volume 33 (1990), pages 47-62. Must try and track it down.

One aspect of Swedish culture which I confess I had not really thought of at all before visiting the Nobel Museum in April, and which I have barely thought of since, is the writing of Selma Lagerlöf, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909, the first woman and the first Swede to do so. (I confess I have not heard of any of the other Swedish winners either: Verner von Heidenstam, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Pär Lagerkvist, Nelly Sachs, and Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, the last two of these winning jointly in 1974 despite being on the award panel themselves.) Frederic Whyte is very big on Lagerlöf, devoting a longish early chapter to her hero Nils Holgersson and then coming back to her for a later chapter on touring her house in Värmland. My project of broadening my knowledge of Nobel laureates has so far proved more miss than hit, but it sounds like she may well be worth a try.

I've written before about an intriguing episode in 16th century history: the death by poisoning of a senior Irish political figure, along with many of his followers, in October 1546 while visiting London. Thanks to pgmcc and his daughter, I now have a copy of the definitive article on the subject, "Malice Aforethought: the Death of the Ninth Earl of Ormond", by David Edwards, in the Journal of the Butler Society, vol 3, part 1 (1986) pages 30-41.

The Earl was probably the most influential Irish-born person in Ireland at the time, and he had gone to London to sort out a dispute with the representative of King Henry VIII, Sir Anthony St Leger. St Leger apparently swore that only one of them would come back to Ireland, and on 17 October the Earl and thirty-five of his companions fell ill after a banquet at Ely house in Holborn. Eighteen of them died, including the Earl himself, on 28 October.

However, Edwards argues pretty convincingly that the poisoning must have been accidental, from contaminated food. He points out that the dispute with St Leger had been resolved by the time of Ormond's death - in fact, it was largely a misunderstanding engineered by the Lord Chancellor, who was thrown into the Fleet Prison as punishment. Indeed, as he was dying, the Earl actually named St Leger one of his executors, which indicates that he himself didn't think St Leger was responsible. On top of that, it seems that poisoning was a pretty unusual murder method in the sixteenth century.

Thinking it through, I guess this is supported by one more piece of circumstantial evidence: that it took the Earl eleven days to die. That surely suggests a biological cause of poisoning, rather than a chemical one, and I guess that even now you would hardly attempt to poison someone by slipping them some rotten meat, so it makes it more likely that the problem was caused accidentally. (Having said that, if the Earl survived the initial trauma, it was probably his doctors rather than the poison that actually killed him; cf President Garfield, etc.)

We know the Earl was reasonably clear-minded in those dying days because he made a number of deathbed provisions, including the appointment of St Leger as one of his deputies, setting funds aside for his surviving servants to return to Ireland, suitably dressed in black livery, and also making provision for the continuing education of the son of his steward, James White, who was apparently one of the first to die. The son, Nicholas White, later achieved high office in Elizabethan Ireland, and was also a direct ancestor of mine, which is why I developed an interst in the story.

That's enough for here; anyone who wants to see the full article let me know. And thanks again to pgmcc and his daughter for tracking it down for me.

Apparently there is an article in the Journal of the Butler Society, vol 3, part 1 (1986) pages 30-41 with the glorious title of "Malice Aforethought: the poisoning of the ninth earl of Ormond".

The Journal of the Butler Society appears to be available only in the following libraries: University College Cork, National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin, NUI Galway

(wyvernfriend, perhaps you can tell me if there are other libraries in Ireland which have copies of it?)

Anyone with access to any of those libraries? I would be very keen to get hold of a copy of the article!!!

19) Sixteenth Century Ireland, by Colm Lennon

I bought this for a couple of reasons. My namesake and ancestor, Sir Nicholas White, was a senior government official in Ireland in the reign of Elizabeth I, but from the available biographies I have never been able to make any sense of what he actually did, and I hoped that reading this book would give me a bit more context. Also, as a student at Cambridge I got to know one of the great experts in sixteenth-century Irish history, who was at that time locked in bitter ideological battle with those who wanted to rewrite the history books to suggest the the English were not always completely wrong, nor the Irish completely right (I simplify the argument slightly). It's many years since I saw the historian in question, but I hoped this book (published in 1994 and revised in 2005) would at least let me know who won.

I have to say that my confusion about Ireland in the sixteenth century has now been raised to new and unexpected levels of bafflement (and I didn't discover who won the historiographical battle of fifteen years ago). I think - just about - that I grasp the main narrative. Up until 1520, Ireland was ruled (in the name of the English King, who was double-hatted as Lord of Ireland) by a hand-picked local magnate, normally the head of the Fitzgerald family. In 1520 the Fitzgeralds fell out with Henry VIII, and from then on English officials were appointed to head up the Irish administration. This led to more or less serious efforts by London to bring all of Ireland under English law (re-hatting the English King as King of Ireland also), and also coincided with the Reformation. The period closes, in 1603, with the end of a major Irish rebellion (the Nine Years' War) at the former Mellifont Abbey, the Earl of Tyrone surrendering to the Queen Elizabeth's representatives (who knew, but didn't tell him, that she had died a few days before).

There are not enough maps in this book, and those that there are are largely confusing, but the most interesting it the first one, showing the actual extent of the area of Ireland effectively under Dublin rule (though even then substantial chunks would have been more under the control of the Fitzgeralds or the Butlers than of Dublin Castle). It is pretty difficult, knowing the political geography of Ireland over the last two centuries as well as I do, to get my head around the fact that in the sixteenth century, it was Ulster that was more or less homogenously Gaelic in culture, and the other three provinces that had a confusingly mixed picture - so, completely the opposite to what I am used to. I certainly had no idea that most of what is now County Wicklow was a Gaelic enclave.


NB Laois and Offaly were "planted" under Queen Mary, and thus brought more or less into the system.

But a lot of things were not clear to me. Why did neither side win more decisively? That, I guess, is the main question. The Irish chieftains were never quite prepared to declare independence or to put their trust in the Spanish (indeed they quite happily slaughtered the sailors of the Spanish Armada in 1588 who were wrecked on the western coast). But at the same time the English were never quite able to consolidate their occasional military victories with better and more durable governance. It was a bit reminiscent of Thessalonica under Ottoman rule, a territory which was very much able to carve its own political identity while partially - but not completely - detached from the metropolis.

The dynamics of the Reformation in Ireland were a completely new story for me as well (including its precursor, the dissolution of the monasteries, which appears to have been widely popular among all sections of the population apart from the monks). Henry VIII's break with Rome in the 1530s, by Lennon's account, had little real impact in Ireland for decades. Not until 1570, when the Pope attempted to depose Elizabeth I, did it become a live political issue, and even then it wasn't until the Baltinglass rebellion in 1580 that Protestant vs Catholic became a significant cleavage point.

It is tempting to speculate as to how this might have developed differently. On the one hand, if a university (under Dublin and eventually Protestant control) had been established several decades before 1592, Ireland as a whole could have been more tightly linked in with English rather than continental European intellectual currents and vice versa, and might well have ended up as a Protestant country in the Scandinavian mode. (As it was, the only printing press in the seventeenth century producing books in Irish was down the road from where I am writing now, in Leuven.)

On the other hand, if the Pope had not issued his 1570 bull (which he didn't get around to until months after the 1569 rebellion in England had failed), the Elizabethan officials could have found a better accommodation with Catholic and Gaelic Ireland than was possible in our time line. In fact very few Catholics took the Papal command to overthrow Queen Elizabeth seriously, but it added an extra hurdle to the integration of the majority of the population into state structures which had actually made significant progress under Henry VIII.

As for my own ancestor: I was grimly pleased to find confirmation of one piece of family lore. His father, James White, of King's Meadow, Waterford, was the steward of the ninth Earl of Ormond (the head of the Butler family, and so one of the top three Irish magnates); while visiting London in October 1546, they and dozens of other people were poisoned at a banquet at Ely House in Holborn, and 18 of them died, including the Earl and James White. This was surely the most massive political poisoning of British history. I would love to find out more details about it.

His son Sir Nicholas gets one rather confusing mention in Lennon's book as a counsellor of the English envoy Sir John Perrot in the mid-1580s (an association that eventually led to them both dying as prisoners in the Tower of London in the 1590s). It doesn't get me a lot further. I know from other sources that after his father and the Earl were poisoned, he benefited from a legacy in the Earl's will to study law in London, and earned some extra as a tutor to the children of an up-and-coming political lawyer called William Cecil who, as Lord Burghley, more or less ran England for most of the reign of Elizabeth I. Burghley and White remained in correspondence for years, and most of their surviving letters were published in the nineteenth century. White's access to the London establishment certainly helped him get fairly high political office back in Ireland, until it all went wrong for him.

But he was far from unique in having such access to the king or queen of the day. One of the questions most frustratingly unexplored in the book is the close contact between the Irish magnates and the English monarchy. The Irish leaders were at least barons and usually earls; they therefore had far easier access at court in London (if they chose to go there) than the succession of bureaucrats sent to Ireland to actually try and run the administration. Often they had spent their childhood in England as hostages to their parents' good behaviour, in the hope that, when they grew up, they would go back to Ireland and co-operate nicely. (It never worked.) This very signifcant dynamic seems to have operated throughout, and clearly made a difference to the freedom of action of Dublin Castle, but since it happens off-screen - I suppose Lennon is focussing very tightly on Ireland the island - we never really find out much about it.

So, a rather frustrating book. I still want to find out more, but it may take actual library work, some year when I have a few weeks off.

Slate on ancestry. I agree. (Though it's a bit sad to print a serious article like this purely in the slipstream of the ludicrous Da Vinci Code court case.)

Inspired by trying to remember where http://www.yournotme.com/ is (there are 16 people called Nicholas Whyte in the UK, apparently), I'm using this entry to bookmark the following:

UCL's surname profiler, which shows Whytes of Great Britain concentrated in eastern Scotland (Angus and Fife in 1881; shifting north by 1998), and my wife's maiden name concentrated in North Yorkshire in 1881 and mysteriously absent in 1998.

US Census Bureau - gives you total numbers and ranking of your name in the US. (Whyte is the 4460th most common name in the US, with a frequency of 0.003%, ie about 1 in 30,000. Nicholas is the 64th most common first name, with a frequency of 0.275%, 1 in 36.)

Nice map of US surname distribution. (Whytes very much absent from the Deep South; concentrated in New York and Washington. My wife's maiden name appears only in North Carolina.)

There are presumably equivalents for other countries.

I've been doing some more thinking after my post of last weekend.

1) ( Rates of inter-country migration )

2) ( Age between generations )

3) The influence of people with lots of progeny. I have no research of my own to add to this, but I'm sure that most of you will have seen this week's news item about Niall of the Nine Hostages (see full research paper here (PDF)). News reports that he may have 3 million descendants alive today are exaggerated. Under-exaggerated, that is. That's three million male-line descendants - the real number of descendants must be much higher, indeed, Niall himself is at about the right time-frame to be Rohde's Most Recent Common Ancestor (though not in the right place; difficult to see how his descendant line would have penetrated indigenous populations in the Americas or Australia).

I emailed Rohde about my previous post and he was good enough to send a brief reply. I guess my research stops here, but I hope his continues.

A survey about mobility.

(Feel free to interpret both "same country" and "parents/grandparents" as widely as necessary.)

Poll #652831 Ancestry
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

You and your parents

You and your grandparents

About your grandparents

Been meaning to write this up for some time, and I think for the moment as a blog entry rather than a web page.

( Our Most Recent Common Ancestor )

My holiday project is to transcribe my great-grandfather's diary of his Easter pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1858. On 29th March, the Monday before Easter, he visited Bethlehem:

( Read more... )

Anyway, when I have the whole lot transcribed (it will be a bit short of 8000 words) will put it on my website along with existing ancestral reminiscences and post a link here.

Last weekend's Observer reports that Francis Campbell, the new British Ambassador to the Vatican, "will be the first Irishman to represent the UK abroad since the partition of Ireland in 1921". The Zenit newsagency goes a step further, saying he is "the first Irish Catholic to be elevated to ambassador since the republic of Ireland was granted independence in 1921".

Er, no, not really. My cousin Dermot MacDermot was an Irish Catholic who was also a British ambassador almost fifty years ago. His cousin Brian MacDermot was also a British ambassador at the end of his career, but had earlier been Chargé d'Affaires at the British representation to the Holy See (contra the Zenit story that only Protestants were allowed to hold that position from 1917 on).

There are lots of things I don't like about the British state's relationship with my religion. But we should give credit where it is due.

Going through the family archives I came across several bits of information that suddenly came together. My grandfather's cousin, Frederic Whyte, appears to have been a writer of some note. His books include:

Actors of the Century: a Play-Lover's Gleanings From Theatrical Annals (1898):
The Life of W.T. Stead (1925, two volumes) - was reprinted as recently as 1971, a much-cited biography of the crusading English journalist who was drowned on the Titanic
William Heinemann: A Memoir (1928) - also seems to be fairly well known by those studying the publisher and his circle
A Wayfarer in Sweden (1930): "Travellers in Sweden will find this a useful reference book with aninteresting look at various areas of the country. It has hints, tips for travelling, and some history and information about the different areas that can be visited"
[with A. Hilliard Atteridge and Harold Wesley Hall] A history of the Queen's Bays (The 2nd Dragoon Guards), 1685-1929 (1930)
A Bachelor's London: Memories of the Day Before Yesterday 1889-1914 (1931): "Memories of literary London - stories of publishers and authors before the first world war"; "A wonderful evocation of literary London at the turn of the century"

He also translated and edited:

The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama, by Augustin Filon (1898)
Flashlights in the Jungle A Record of Hunting Adventures and of Studies in Wild Life in Equatorial East Africa, by C.G. Schillings (1906) (vt In Wildest Africa, With Flashlight and Rifle)
Grip and I: Our Adventures in Nigeria, by Count Crondstedt (1924)
A Field-Marshal's Memoirs: From the Diary, Correspondence and Reminiscences of Alfred, Count Von Waldersee, Moltke's Successor as Chief of the General Staff of the German Army, 1888-1891; Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces in China, 1900-1901. (1924)
The Life of Benito Mussolini, by Margherita Grassini Sarfatti (1925)
Letters of Prince Von Bulow - a Selection from Prince Von Bulow's Official Correspondence as Imperial Chancellor during the Years 1903 - 1909, Including Many Confidential Letters Between Him and the emperor (c. 1930)
These Moderns: Some Parisian Close-Ups, by F. Ribadeau Dumas (1932)
Sport & Exploration in the Far East - a Naturalists Experiences in & Around the Kurile Islands, by Sten Bergman (1933)

His papers can be found in Newcastle University Library.

Frederic's precise relationship with my family is a bit complex. His father, Henry Whyte, was the son of an Edward Whyte who was the brother of my great-great-grandfather, Nicholas Whyte. So that would make him (clickety-click) my second cousin, twice removed. But his aunt Catherine Whyte married a bloke called George Ryan, and their daughter Caroline then married my great-grandfather, Nicholas Whyte's son John Joseph Whyte, and became my great-grandmother. So by that route, he was my first cousin three times removed.

Judging from my grandmother's diary, our branch of the family was on good terms with Frederic's elder brother Jack, who had no children. Frederic married a woman from Jonköping and moved to Sweden (several of his books are translations from the Swedish); his son Henry was born in 1917 and died in the early 1990s, and we stayed very vaguely in touch through Henry's wife Ingrid - indeed my sister and I actually met up with her in Stockholm in the summer of 1990, with no idea of her father-in-law's literary career (she and Henry had no children, so that is the end of that branch of the family). I shall keep an eye out for Frederic's books now.

Relaxing in the ancestral home for the next three weeks. Suddenly beginning to realise just how much pressure I was under at work before the holiday.

And for some bizarre reason I can't read my work email from here. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.

It seems my grandmother's uncle was Attorney-General of the United States and founded the Council on Foreign Relations. I had no idea.