h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Today is I for Ireland.

My maternal grandfather was born in Dublin. According to Mum's account, he came from an affluent Protestant family but ran away when he was 17. I don't know why - arguments with a stern father, a relationship with a poor girl? He ended up working in a car factory in Coventry, in what must have been the early days of the automotive industry, and met and married my grandmother. They had two daughters, with about 10 years gap between them, my mother being the younger.

When Mum was 11, her mother died and her father was unable
or unwilling to look after her. Mum went to live with her sister, who already had a family of her own. Grandfather became a strange and difficult man - even refusing to go to my parents'wedding. He lived until I was about 13 but I scarcely remember him. He certainly took no interest in me.

Mum never forgave her father for abandoning her. However, if I look at this story with a contemporary understanding of the way the mind works, I would guess that grandfather was depressive. Maybe at the time when his wife died and he was left to cope with a young daughter while still needing to work to live, he came close to clinical depression. In those days- and we're talking about 1925 - there would have been little sympathy for him. He would have been expected to pull himself together and cope.

When I was 11, my family moved from the Midlands to South-East London and more or less lost contact with my aunt. According to my brother, there was a falling-out between her and my mother. My guess it was about the care of their father, who was by then in his late eighties. I can understand my mother taking the view that she shouldn't have to do much for him, because he never did anything for her. My aunt, being so much older, would have remembered him as a younger man, when he was active and charming.

That's a sad story, but I suspect not an uncommon one for the times.

When my father-in-law's mother died, he and his brother stayed with their father, whilst his sister was sent to live with their grandmother. They lost touch completely as children and only met up again by chance when they were adults.

Deb

My great-grandparents were descended from people who left Northern Ireland to come to the U.S., but those ancestors had done so many generations earlier.

The potato famine resulted in a lot of Irish moving to other countries. I sometimes wonder what would have happened to Ireland if the famine had not occurred.

I believe the population of Ireland dropped by about twenty percent at the time of the potato famine, although the western counties were hit the hardest.

[Amy P]