 Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Cappy Swift. Now, Cappy is from the University of Limerick. She runs the Irish Studies Teaching Programme in Mary and Angela College, University of Limerick. She is an MPhil in Archaeology at the University of Durham, a second MPhil in Old Irish Language and Culture at Trinity College, Dublin. Her D-Phil at Oxford examines the history of the Cult of Saint Patrick. She has taught in many universities, served 10 years as Organising Secretary of the Irish Conference of Medievalists and runs summer schools in Old Irish in Limerick, when she's not off gallivanting across Europe with her Pilgrim staff, knapsack and tent. So, it's great that we actually caught her in between one of those trips to actually talk to us here today at such a genetic genealogy Ireland 2015. Would you all please give Cathy Swift a warm welcome. This paper was started by a conversation I had with Elizabeth who spoke yesterday about the Munster Irish project and she was saying that the clans of Ireland had expressed an interest in having a project about the words used to describe clans and the different terms that are used and so that's where this paper began as an attempt to look at the historiography of how we have described clans and in the paper before last, Shoseph was saying that Irish language material is not always as prominent as maybe it should be in our discussions of Ireland's past and hopefully he'll improve this paper because I'm going to be concentrating mainly on Irish language material. But I'm starting with the Victorian period because that was the time when Irish people first started discussing who were their ancestors, what structures existed as professional historians. It started, it was a group led by the Ordnance Survey people in the 1830s and 40s and it then grew as part of the sort of background to the Gaelic League and the growth of nationalism. So I start with G. H. Orpin who did a very lengthy six volume discussion of Ireland under the Normans and he says before the Normans, this is page one, Ireland was in a tribal state. The allegiance of the free born Irishman was given in the first place to his head of family, his kindred, or sept and then he translates the word sept with the Irish word finna. Then through the family head, the cown innah, to the chief of the tribe of which his family formed an element related by real or supposed remote or kinship and connected by common ownership of land. So there's all sorts of interesting things in that description. The word sept, the fact that the word sept is made equivalent to the Irish word finna. They come in ownership of land and the notion that kinship might be supposed rather than real. Also the word tribal which I'll be coming back to. Orpin was really discussing as I say Ireland under the Normans somebody whose concentration was on pre-Norman Ireland of roughly the same period was a guy called P.W. Joyce who was a school teacher from County Limerick and in his account written in 1903, published in 1903, he talks about the people of Ireland were formed into groups of various sizes from the family upwards. So the family was the group consisting of living parents and all their descendants. What we might call the nuclear family today. The sept for Joyce was a larger group descended from common parents long since dead. But this is an important word brought into use in comparatively late times. I'll come back to that. And then he goes on and he says all members of a sept were nearly related. That is to say closely related. And in later times they all bore the same surname. Above that he sees the clan or which he trans he equivalents to something he calls a house. Clan means children and the word therefore implied descent from one ancestor. And above that again as the greater umbrella term the tribe which he makes equivalent to Tewis was made up of several septs clans or houses. And generally speaking he says also was taught to come from a common ancestor. So he's very much focused on common ancestry as the key underlying all the structures. But it underlies the biggest umbrella structure the Tewis and then all the sub structures again underneath that. And then he goes on and he says the theory of common descent became a fiction. Except for the leading families who preserved their descent pure and kept a careful record of their genealogy. And thus the tribe over time became a mere local association of people occupying a specific district and bound together by common customs common interests living under one ruler and in some degree by the fiction of descent from one common ancestor. So that's quite a specific model. It's interestingly specific giving that Joyce is writing very much at the beginning of the discussion of all this and unfortunately like a lot of our Victorian writers he doesn't give you any footnotes. So it's a lovely model but you need to know what's underlying it. So he became Owen McNeill. Owen McNeill was the first professor of early Irish history in UCD. He was also the guy who famously did not call out the volunteers in 1916. He was also the guy who was in charge of the boundary commission when Northern Ireland was set up. So he had an important political career but for early Irish historians he is the first and the father of early Irish history. And again he doesn't use footnotes but he did set up an awful lot of the models that we still work with and try and interpret. And in 1935 towards the end of his career he wrote a book called Early Irish Laws and Institutions in which he excoriated in particular the word tribe. He really didn't like the word tribe because he felt it was used by people to belittle early Irish society. And he felt that the English word tribe had negative connotations. And it's quite interesting even today when you listen to newspaper reportage for example when they use the word tribe it's nearly always of a people with whom we're at war. So it does tend to be quite a negative word. I would agree with MacNeil on that. On the specifics he says Joyce does not tell us what Irish words corresponded to sept and clan although he does print these as technical terms in heavy type with capital initials. And then he then goes on to talk about other scholars mainly British scholars who use the word clan and according to MacNeil anyway are relying on fictional descriptions of Highland clans in Scotland by Sir Walter Scott. If you look up the word sept which has already appeared a couple of times this is used extensively even now by modern early Irish genealogists they continue to use this word. When you look it up in the Oxford English dictionary they say it first appears in an Irish context to describe a clan structure and it originates in the 16th century so in the Elizabethan period. Now the Elizabethan period is long beyond my normal arena of operations. So I have one text but as somebody said yesterday one source is never enough and I have written to my tutor colleagues to ask them do they have further information on this. But at the moment I'm dealing I have one text on the O'Sullivan's of Barra and this is a document about an argument over land. But it says the countries of Barra and Bantry contain 60 quarters of land and every quarter contains three plowlands and the Bishopric of Cork owns eight quarters and certain freeholders that is to say subordinate groups own 33 quarters so about half the land belongs to freeholders and half the land belongs to others and they say the only land belonging to O'Sullivan and all of his sept in Barra and Bantry are 19 quarters and O'Sullivan has in continued and settled estate only five quarters and the remaining 19 is divided between him and the people of his sept or his close relatives. And this varies over time depending on the size of how many relatives he's got at any given moment. And in the same document which as you can see is written in 1593 it goes on to say that the domain lands belonging to O'Sullivan in the country of Barra together with the rents and services and lawful duties and so forth it names the freeholders and you can see from the list these are people of alternative surnames. So in this structure we have an O'Sullivan chief we have O'Sullivan close relatives who are called the sept who have land which comes and goes between them and the chief and then we have the freeholders who are named by other surnames and this goes back to what Elizabeth was saying yesterday about the fact that some people worry about perhaps a surname was used for all the tenant farmers on land controlled by a chief while this text suggests no the tenant farmers kept their own surnames and it was just the chief and the chief's close relatives who bore the single surname but it's only one text I'll be back next year with more hopefully I have picked up that between what Orphean says and what Joyce says and what MacNeil says there are contradictions so my first point is that the Victorian writers the people who started our field of modern studies of Irish genealogies have left us an inheritance of various English terms to describe the structures of Irish families and they're not all mutually consistent they're not closely defined these were pioneers and we can't rely we do tend by the nature of things there aren't very many scholars of early Ireland as one of my big bug bears we tend to pay for engineers in this country rather than for early Irish scholarship but we can't rely on what the Victorians did as giving us the final answer it was only the beginning so that's the descriptive, the narrative accounts that we've inherited about Irish families and Irish tribes and Irish clans what about the actual vocabulary well we do have dictionaries we have two major dictionaries the first of these is the glossary to the ancient laws of Ireland and this was produced by the role series of Great Britain in 1901 there were six volumes and it was an account of Bretton Law as known at that stage now this project had a certain number of hiccups like all big projects the two people who were majorly involved in the beginning were the two great Victorian scholars John O'Donovan and Eugene O'Curry they both died tragically young in 1863 and the project was then taken up by a committee and like camels this committee produced something which satisfied very few people because there was too many people and they weren't majorly involved in Irish language scholarship and there's inconsistencies between the different volumes and so forth so nowadays scholars of Bretton Law tend to be quite dismissive and there are a lot of negative comments made about the ancient laws of Ireland as a project and as a publication but they left us a glossary and that glossary has fed into an awful lot of the secondary literature and one of the things you get from the glossary is that there are a number of different terms which are used in Irish to describe families and clans structures so I start with the word finna which in the glossary is described as a tribe you remember Orphan used it to describe the sect and then he goes on to say well I'm calling it a tribe but actually if you read the other five volumes you'll see we mostly translated it by the word family these kind of things don't help he then has a discussion about a particular problem and then he says in the Bretton Law text mention is made of four finna that is to say the gel finna, the dere finna the ear finna and the inn finna and these are groupings that work together but this subdivision is not explained in detail in what we have in front of us so that's one word that's used to describe a structure another, the word clan interestingly is hardly described at all it just says progeny or descendants left at that it doesn't turn out very often in the Bretton Law that was published in the ancient laws the word tuith is the people of a country who are ruled by a king and for that reason because there is always a king most Irish historians now don't translate it at all they just simply say tuith or tuith and they leave a go at that but if you have to translate it people either go for very neutral comments like community or else they go for kingdom we tend not in the modern era to use the word tribe although there is this Victorian inheritance of using that is translated in the glossary as race, generation, kind or again tribe cignate is generation, birth, issue and sometimes tribe clius is a word meaning a rafter when you have a roof you have rafters and ara is the word our modern word for minister so it's somebody who is a rafter somebody who supports the chief and this is a supporting guy and this seems to be a term which is used specifically according to the glossary of a sept close relations who share the same surname as the chief perhaps implying special obligations on those parts then you have the word doll which is a division, a sept or a tribe pheasant of a sept or a tribe and then our old friend finna that we heard of before used again the four divisions the gel finna, three generations the dere finna, the ear finna and the infina consisting four, five and six generations respectively but this too can be used according to Atkinson as progeny, descendants, clan, tribe or race so what we're getting out of this is a consequence of the way the ancient laws was published and came into being there are different people translated different terms by a much smaller pool of English terms and nobody went back and sort of investigated the specific Irish words in their specific context to try and get specific meanings out of them these are more words here I'm not going to go through them all but you'll notice the second one, officiel that's a lone word from romance language either from anglonoman French as it was spoken in the colony probably and then you have slundered which is the active naming and this gives a rise to the term slincia and slincia is the term that we use nowadays for surnames so if you know Paul Richter-Wolf's book on the surnames of Ireland the Irish title is slincia gael agus carol the old word okay originally ua where you get the plural form e followed by the genitive of the ancestral name so it's Nile but it's the e-nail the descendants of Nile okay and according to professor McNeil um these belong to these e-names belong to a later fashion of nomenclature than collective names the names like conakta or the lion, the lendsterman okay and then he gives a quite detailed description of an article professor McNeil wrote in 1911 which I'll leave to one side he revisited these problems in 1935 he said these e-names they are descendants of some ruler of the 10th century or of later days and it is evident says McNeil that a clan originating in the 10th century 1000 could not have constituted the whole social community and there must have been a lot of subordinates who met in assemblies who did not belong to these surnames these e-surnames okay and these e-surnames he reckons were only an aristocratic crust on the general population of Ireland and then he talks specifically about what he calls the superior clans with the ones who are very powerful in medieval Ireland people like the surnames McCarthy and O'Sullivan and he talks about how the fact that they had migrated from Casual into the southwest of Ireland and that this must have happened in the 12th century under the O'Connor High Kings of Ireland and again his talk he says these then represent an aristocratic upper stratum which is not connected by kinship with the community in general or with the free population of the local free element in the local population so he's very clear that he sees O'surnames as simply being rulers and not being the population at large now when we come to the clans of Ireland website they translate themselves not with the word clan interestingly but the Irish term they use is fintu and this is the plural of a word fintu meaning land which is the hereditary possession of a member of a finna I'm sorry for all these technical terms but the point is that unless we start dealing with the technical terms we don't really know what we're trying to deal with and there's a fabulous scholar called Professor Fergus Kelly of Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies who has done more than anybody in the last 40 years to popularise history and early Irish Brechen law and he describes fintu as the land which comes under the control of a large group or family and he talks about the distinction between a person's inherited share of kin land which is fintu and land which he could acquire by dint of his own efforts as an individual and clearly there was the prospect of both but what you would inherit it from your kin at your death was supposed to go back to your kin and what you had acquired personally a percentage was to go to your kin but some of it could be handed down whenever you liked so my second point is that there are a large number of terms in Irish far more than exist in English and really we haven't gone through it in any systematic way and the scholars of unfortunately the way early Irish scholarship has worked is that early Irish language scholars tend to be very interested in the kind of questions that have come up today about Celts and Indo-European and connections outside Ireland but they haven't been as interested in the specifics of native institutions on this island and the historians I hate to say for the most part don't have Irish so we haven't really got a proper dialogue going as yet on these issues and really it's people like you and the genetic genealogy movement which is throwing this into very high relief and we're suddenly realizing you know there's an elephant in the room which we haven't discussed as used today most people think of it in terms of its Scottish parallels and again when you look at Scottish history and I don't know if John Cleary is still here but the yes well I I'm saying this I may be wrong here okay but most of the general works that I've seen on Scottish history don't discuss the nature of the clan in great detail for the same problem that it's written in Scotts Gallic and most historians in universities are English speaking only but there is a very interesting account by an Alan McPherson of a Highland genealogy that was published in 1966 and this was a genealogy that was put together in the later 17th century after the battle of Culloden and at a time when land holding and structures in Scotland were particularly in the Highlands were under a great deal of pressure similar to the fact that a lot of our genealogies happen again around 1650 because again it's a time when people are under pressure and people are losing land and so forth and this genealogy it was published it was written by a guy who was a lawyer okay and it's based on three sons so there's a one ancestor who has three sons and this guy died around 1350 and then the 17th century text goes down through the list of the descendants of each of the three sons and it ends around 1704 it lists approximately a thousand individual McPherson's male and female as well as some 200 non McPherson marriages okay and the figures are roughly 750 males and 200 females and over 300 marriages are recorded so the author suggests that approximately one quarter of the actual McPherson clan is being recorded now this is where I think it gets really interesting he says rather more than one third of the recorded marriages took place within the clan okay so they intermarried so you had McPherson's marrying McPherson's they were in three separate geographical areas but they intermarried with each other of 119 marriages within the clan 40 are within the descendants of one brother okay so very close intermarriage both geography and coast kindred if you were a chief you tended to marry outside the clan and indeed if you were a man you had a higher percent higher likelihood of marrying outside the clan generally with your neighbors okay but McPherson females were the ones who mostly married inside the clan structure and he suggests that might be to make sure that McPherson land didn't go off with a non McPherson male so it was kept within the clan now this is a very interesting description there are things in that which seem to parallel what we know of from early Ireland in particular the notion that if you don't have male inheritors you marry the females to members of your family group to make sure the land doesn't go away that Irish history could be written entirely from the subject of land and that seems to be something that we have also in the early early sources and it's also interesting that some of the terms which he uses such as slecht up there and dukes down here again these are words which also Scott's Gallic and Irish are connected they share an awful lot of common vocabulary there are question marks as to how many common institutions we share Scottish nationalism in the current era is, I mean I've had arguments with people from Aberdeen who said I was an Irish imperialist for suggesting there could be for Irish parallels for Scotland but that's up for debate but certainly the vocabulary is the same and here is another example of the word slecht used in a particularly in an Irish context and you can see it's also used of a genealogy in this case Lachlan O'Donovan I don't know I'm not really an expert on the 17th century and later genealogies particularly the ones in English I don't know of many examples from Ireland where we have the women recorded and the marriages recorded in such detail so it's difficult to draw a parallel for that element in the Scottish in the Scottish text although for me that's one of the most interesting things about the Scottish text I have got occasional references to women and it's interesting they all seem to turn up in the 17th late 16th and 17th century so it seems to be a habit which is coming into Ireland at the end of the 16th, 17th century period about the same it coincides in date with the Scottish material but I don't know whether that's the full explanation but the notion that you have multiple brothers who are the beginnings of the family tree again that's something which is very common endemic in fact in Irish genealogy and this is perhaps our very earliest example this is from a text written in the 680s AD not 1680s but 680s it's written by a guy from just south of Calala in Mail and it's a count of St. Patrick as he travels around the northern half of Ireland and he talks about how somebody from his area is introduced to Patrick at Tara and the question is posed tell me your name the name of your father the name of your territory and the name of your lands and where your house is and he replies I am Enda son of Avlongad son of Fiacro son of Ekhu from the western district Magdovnon which is Eris essentially and the wood of Focloth and then he talks about how there are seven sons of Avlongad and six of them six of them did not accept Christianity but Enda and his small son and Patrick were lined up on the side of the Christians and they stood in front of the High King and the High King made his decision along with Patrick they should divide their inheritance into seven parts Patrick and the sons of Avlongad so the sons of Avlongad in Mail represent the seven districts under which the territory was controlled and that's a text as I say from the end of the 7th century AD so my third point is that the analysis of a 17th century Highland clan in Scotland does show features which are traditional also in Irish literature and of course they do share a common Gaelic language culture but there are also some features in the Scottish material which can't be easily replicated in earlier Irish pedigrees namely the position of women unfortunately because of the nature of this talk so enjoy this because it's one of the very few remember we talked about the finna and this was the word which was most commonly associated with the English word sept that is to say the people who were closely related to this achieve by sharing the same surname now in Bretton law there are four groups of finna and essentially they go back as earlier stated to an ultimate ancestor but the Bretton lawyers knew that in terms of the reality of human existence particularly in early medieval Ireland you were unlikely to have three generations as adults living at any one time so if I'm I'm the hero of this story so that's me my father and my grandfather assume I'm male for the purposes of this exercise I'm male so my father and my grandfather my grandfather's other sons that is to say my uncles and my cousins his sons so the descendants of my grandfather they are the members of the gel finna or the bright kindred five groups my grandfather directs the ascendancy there are also the great uncles and then there are the descendants his sons the sons of his sons and the cousins so that's the wider grouping that's the Derevinna and there's up to nine different groups of them I don't know the English vocabulary I get into great cousins of great cousins so the next generation you can see the principal an ancestor up there glued them that brings me up to 13 different groups and that's the Derevinna and then another set of groups here and that's the Invinna was anybody really interested did this have a practical application in everyday life or was it simply for discussing over the fire on extremely wet and gloomy days yes it did the gel finna the smallest group becomes very popular particularly in relation to inheriting office so becoming a chief or becoming a inheriting the role of olive or breton of a group that tended to be done within the gel finna the close family network the slightly larger family network the Derevinna this was the unit that seems to have been essentially the group that took part in metal the group that functioned as a farming community okay and each of the nine groups would have their own piece of land but the lawyers suggest these pieces of land were all closely you know they were neighbors to each other and when it came to plowing or when it came to anything involving multiple requiring multiple people involved in labour then it was the Derevinna that group of kindred that were called together and what happened was that in every generation as one group in the Derevinna died out there would be a second there would be a gathering of the Derevinna and they would decide okay we'll give some of that land to so and so because he's got a young family and we'll take some of that land from so and so because basically he's lazy and he doesn't pull his weight and we'll hand it over here and so in every generation they would re-divide the Derevinna land among the kindred so it's how the farming worked but farming didn't just take place on the land you actually owned there was also commonage which included lands on the mountain lands by the seashore rough grazing land and so for land you use for boolean all that kind of thing and the kindred as a whole would have would share that land and we can see that process not just in Brechenlau but also in townland names all over Ireland where you have Ballya E. Kelly the settlement of the O'Kelly and that formula is referring to the Derevinna as a group the Derevinna was the group that was used to calculate taxes it was taxed on the Derevinna as a whole the Derevinna was the group that provided men for the army, provided guards against wolves and pirates cleaned the roads and were the responsibility in cases of feud or murder if a member of the Derevinna killed somebody else it was the Derevinna as a whole who had to pay the fine okay if you run out of Derevinna you then extended because life was precarious and the Derevinna might die out in which case you extended the liabilities first to the ear finna and eventually to the infina but very very seldom the infina was absolutely you were really at the dregs when you were talking about the infina and my final point was wagging his finger at me my final point is that apart from these very definite legal definitions Gelfina, Derevinna, Earfinna there are also other people who are not related by blood but who can become kinsmen and this is described in the Bretton Laws so we have the red kinsmen is somebody who sheds blood who is thrown out of the kindred we have the dark kinsmen the guy who nobody is quite sure somebody a female in the Derevinna has climbed out of the house one night and has had what's called a son of the bushes and she brings him up and he does not share kin lands unless he goes through a a ceremony of proof and he can either put his hand into boiling water or they can cast lots or whatever in which case he will get some of the entitlements of the widest possible we have the kinship of invitation when people say we have really very little labour on the farm we need extra guys let's invite in that strong nice man from down the road to join our kinsmen because we need bodies around here so that's the kinsmen of invitation and then we have the grey kinsmen the son of a woman of your kindred when she goes off with a foreigner so kinsmen is not a purely genetic descriptor they have to make allowance for the practicalities of life so there are even in early Ireland there are people who are brought into the kin who are not genetically related I've got too much in this paper but going through some of the other details this is a word kinyad which is used in Scotland of a Klansman in Ireland it's used specifically of the Dalgosh ok and it's used in terms of defending the freedoms of the Dalgosh and protecting cashel from those nasties who live in the north like the inale and again my final final point sorry bars there is this high medieval thing called the Kriacht which is when when chiefs and their followers move across the countryside ok and as an act of war they occupy other people's lands and they pasture their cattle on other people's lands it's like the fire equivalent of setting the whole place on fire and we have an example of this in the O'Donovan's these are the two branches of the people who controlled Limerick the O'Donovan's lived in Calgary the O'Donovan's lived in the west in O'Connell they moved at the end of the 12th early 13th century they moved into Cork and you can see them moving down and the area under their control grows much much bigger by the year 1500 ok so we see surnames actively moving in the high middle ages from one district to another so my conclusions are we read an awful lot more research in this area but at this stage unlike a lot of the models that are used for Scottish clans at this early stage there is no evidence that large tracts, very large tracts of Irish land were occupied by individuals sharing a single surname small areas of land farms were occupied by people sharing a single surname but not large tracts secondly the relationship of all the multitude of Irish terms clearly was something very important to Irish people the Finnaid, the Kennel, the Schlicht the Kenned, the Tuath those words need to be defined the relationship with those words to particular surnames needs to be defined and the relationship of both to the Irish terms also needs to be defined so please everybody do Old Irish we need to change in order for historians to help you in your genetic research we need to do this research because at the moment we're a broken reed as far as you're concerned thank you very much do we have questions for Kathy? yep we have a question here from Paul Burnett back and then there's the front there's the hole I wonder if you went across the term midger midger, yeah, midger is used in the 16th and 17th centuries it's used in many cases in the household and in the 16th and 17th centuries it seems specifically to refer to surveys and it's sort of our best race at the moment for going from Irish language genealogies into modern-day surveys how do we get back to conversation? we don't know because most of the genealogies don't give us geographical locations that's one of the problems ok we have a question here from Elizabeth that's a comment in our Munster Irish project for instance there are a lot of surveyors that are obviously related to Munster but any of the records any of the old albums and the original genealogical tracks that we study has not necessarily identified a greater tribe to which they belong and your early slide about your siblings and over 300 left of there that's a perfect answer I'm delighted to see it well there is we've been talking about this there is Elizabeth and Theo which gives an awful lot of surveyors at the end of the year before 1601 and they may be our best insight into the variety of surveyors existing in Ireland at that period and they may be the way to because the genealogies were normally kept only for the change so looking at Elizabeth and Theo it might be a way in to find the agreement so that we have other sources like that because they were raised in Ireland not on a regular basis most were very fond of aristocrats so it's the one that we all reference here and there but the only thing I know specifically of an early reference to a non-christocratic family is something from a text which is written around about 1300 and this guy says he's asked he appears over the horizon and he's asked who are you and where are your family and where do you come from and he says I am not a boar farmer and he doesn't give a survey at all and that's 1300 but it is a literary text by 1300 but I haven't got evidence at the moment for freemen and followers having surveyed at an early period but I'm still holding it there's a lot of project administrators in the audience who run certain projects what can we do as certain project administrators to help further research into this area well again we have the monster Irish project they have some very interesting statistics as to how many people in a certain share a lineage share a genetic lineage I'm interested in that from the other side how many people don't share a genetic lineage because that's what might tell me something about when serenades were acquired so the more let me into all your databases and I will let him I think that's it's a partnership here you're finding out really what I'm trying to say is that it was geneticists gave us the model that serenades mean everybody is related as a historian I'm saying now that you've allergic to the problem historians don't agree with that model and we'll see what will happen as the situation evolves so do you think that geographic projects of Irish project are going to be more important than individual serenade projects but we have a comment here from Barbara and then first of all congratulations on a very very interesting talk it's just a small commentary commented on how important it is for the research to be done on these terms and so on and I would kind of even go further and say that anybody who is serious about researching Irish genealogy serenades and so on the Irish language and the understanding of it is really central to delving into whether it's no hands relationship between serenades and so on and you don't need to get hung up on whether it's silicon or O-silicon and so on these are all just English translations so but I have to say the Irish language people have to make academic Irish accessible to people who want to learn and as somebody who grows up in Belgium and tries to learn Irish as an adult most of the courses are about how to order serenade in a book and there's very little on how to actually investigate the language used in genealogy for example so again we need to establish links with the people teaching Irish but they will teach the final course on the final Irish language we have a question from Patrick and I say it's fascinating I was honored to talk about that part I'd like to let you in the context of your lecture to the pair of people and the advice that was given to the newly married couple Schnot Schnot how relevant do you think that is in the context of your lecture it's going to become a topic of conversation as well what does that mean what does that mean you translate essentially they say don't marry out of the family and keep your land I think the subtext is keep the land safe genetically that's a great piece but it means it means make every effort to have a big family that makes more sense that makes more sense Debbie in the Irish the surname is all the inheritance being passed on to the female which is something you find in English that is in the aristocratic powers in particular because I noticed in the early side you had a lot of people who were coming to serve in the personage some of those surnames were registered because of females so we sent them down to that time after the period we had a couple of very heroic figures who were named half the females so if I can counter Magnessa leader Holster he is the son of a mother he is the son of a father but it's always the exception and generally speaking the role of women in our Irish society is always the role of women and they tend not to be recorded and the only format in which women are recorded in English is something called the Van Hannity and the Van Hannity is really about the partners of men who produced important songs so they are reported not by virtue of their other ancestry but because they get breast milk so that's how they get in they don't get in as females they don't get in thank you very much for very interesting talk I have a particular question particularly say in relation to the late medieval period and the fact that maybe people with Irish maybe Irish surnames beforehand in the life the thing is as the sort of the ebb and flow of rural English speaking areas in Ireland regalization because they are not a scope for people changing Irish names to English names or even adopting Irish names having spoken it I speak as somebody from a background on the white circle absolutely and I'm a Swiss and my grandfather really hibernated and he ordered the foodies and we don't want the family any old connection at all but again it's a question of of this relation and that happens in the early period we have potters and potters but we also have the personal to the translation of potters suddenly start the period in the Viking period and we have to use that but with this we have to think of all the disadvantages of the different things that happen in history and we have to talk to all the political people and all the people we interact with what final comment from Hattie Warden I'm going to ask you to step out of here away from the speaker in case we get a huge amount of feedback thanks very much thanks Kathy for what we wrote very interesting talk there's one other English word that I often wonder about in sociology and genealogy it's the word friend if you look at Aaron Bergen Kimbell's book on sociology in the early 20th century they talk about the distinction between relatives and friends and relatives were the closer relatives and you could marry the relative but you needed a dispensation from the church you didn't need a dispensation to marry the more distant relatives does all that have roots in Bretton law and other types of fear I didn't realise darling Hattie as far as I'm concerned history stops with prime rules and after that it's journalists