Archive (1372 life histories found)
'...but even today, more than years later, I feel a little twinge when I think of my first experience of betrayal'
It was the day before the end of the school holidays in 1948. I was to return to Kilkeel the next day to begin my second year there. I was actually looking forward to getting back and meeting my friends after the long holiday. My mother's London…
Tags: Adolescence, friendship, Loneliness, Puberty
'The lovely fountain pen I got from Uncle Ben in Egypt'
School in St. Louis is mostly good memories. In Ballymena. Singing in the front hall with Sr. Marie Gertrude, playing around the huge rhododendron bushes which could become any place you wanted to imagine. My tenth birthday and the retreat. The…
'My father and his brothers all lived in close proximity to their mother, who was a sort of Matriarch'
My father and his brothers all lived in close proximity to their mother, who was a sort of Matriarch. It was in effect a 'compound' - they shared a lot in common. When I was younger the phone - Cloughmills 246 - was in granny's - the papers were…
Tags: Cousin, family, grandmother, matriarch, village
'For me it is in the fabric of my being'
Antrim is a beautiful part of the world, which is now, unfortunately, a well kept secret because people are deterred by the 'Troubles' from visiting there. For me it is in the fabric of my being. Its memory 'haunts me (in the nicest possible way)…
'I am back as a little girl peeping out through the curtains, looking at the men staggering under the enormous drums, battering them until their wrists bled'
I suppose Cloughmills was a special place in that in the Northern Irish context, for most of the time, there were harmonious relations between the people. Our parish of Dunloy and Cloughmills had three centres of population. At one end was Dunloy,…
Tags: Catholic, community, drum, Marches, Orange march, Protestant
'There was not anything particularly Gaelic about the curriculum in the school when I was there, though we did sing some Irish songs'
I started school in Cloughmills Public Elementary School on my fourth birthday. I always felt my mother had taken her first legal opportunity to get me out of the way but she assures me that she felt like the mother in this poem, which was one that…
Tags: Education, Gaelic, Gaeltacht, Irish Language, school
'When my father eventually married a policeman's daughter there was some surprise, though people would not have known all of the story'
My family name is McGuckian. That is not one of the names which figure in the early history of North Antrim but they have been there a long time. John McGuckin, a Harvard scholar, who has done a lot of work on this says that the family originated in…
Tags: family, family history, Gaelic League, geneology, IRA
'I remember going there as a child because my family had use of the farm buildings and expecting to see Rumplestilskin or Rapunzel at any minute'
I was born in Ballymena, the county town of Antrim, and spent the first 12 years of my life in a village about 10 miles out of the town, half way to Ballymoney, called Cloughmills. We were situated right in the middle of what was the ancient region…
'I like to think that it was there that Patrick learned the Irish language - so he spoke it with a Northern accent'
As a child growing up there I was very conscious of the fact that in our little patch of North Antrim there were many places associated with St Patrick. At Dunseverick, the castle on the north coast which is reputed in the Annals of the Four Masters…
Tags: Antrim, history, landscape, St. Patrick
'I love the song that I learned as a child about County Antrim'
People of Antrim love their county and have written songs in its praise. The story goes that a man from Glendun was thinking of emigrating and he wrote a song in which he imagined what it would be like to be away. He made himself so sad that he…