Archive (1372 life histories found)

By the end of July 1963 I was beginning to get restless. Maynooth was now history and there was no future for me in Clondaliever. It was a great time to be young and free. Sean Lemass was leading Ireland away from a dull and conservative past into a…

Religion was taken seriously in our house. This was not exceptional. At that time the vast majority of people in Ireland attended mass every Sunday and said the rosary every night. While my father was happy on a diet of Sunday mass, the rosary every…

Following the hurling success that I had experienced with Johnstown school, it was a natural progression for me to join Clonkill hurling club. The club had no playing field of its own. It reached agreement with my father that the players could use…

I was one of the lucky few to progress from Johnstown primary school to secondary school. It was only after free secondary education was introduced in the mid - 1960s that secondary schooling became an option for a majority of primary school leavers…

I fell and cut my knees on my first morning going to Johnstown national school. Johnstown school was in Delvin parish - it has since been closed. We were living in Taughmon parish. It was to Johnstown that daddy had gone for the full three years and…

My father, Matt Gaynor, was born in Clondaliever in 1886. He started life as a landless herdsman, watching over herds of cattle on Murray's (pronounced Mur_�_ray's) farm in Clondaliever. In the early 1900s he joined some of his peers in driving…

Our source of drinking water was a hand pump over a well in the middle of the field behind the house, which we called the pump field. The pump was about 400 yards from the house. The task of providing the house with a good supply of drinking water…

On a day when we were going to Balreagh bog my father got up early. My mother helped him pack the requirements for lunch into a basket. He was usually on the road with the horse and cart by 8 am. Myself and Paddy would follow by foot sometime later.…

Clondaliever, the townsland where I was born in 1941, is in north Westmeath. It is the place where the three parishes of Collinstown, Taughmon and Delvin meet. As most facilities in rural Ireland were to be found at the centre of a parish, the…

It was a very sad day for me when my husband passed away on 3rd of May 1997 at Altanagelvin Hospital, Londonderry, N. Ireland.27th of July, 1999 is a heart broken sad day for me when my daughter left us in Royal free Hospital at Newcastle Upon Tyne…