Roland_Waters

Hell everyone;

First time for everything. I have been trying to get to Ireland now for over 44 years since I was 12 years old. Things like family deaths, finances, and ministry got in the way. I am second born American Irish from Worcester, Massachusetts. My Grandfather 'James Patrick O'Connor' was born in Killorglin, Kerry in December '1880'. I have been finding it very hard for me to find a baptismal record or a record of birth for him.

If anyone could help or provide places for me to go that would be a great help for me once we are there! We are arriving for the entire month of 'October 2012' in Dublin in which we plan to stay for 5 days. Then we plan on going down and up around the Ireland boarders and some inland sites. A month can go by quickly, and we are on such a limited budget it is ridiculous! This is my way of finding where we want to live for next year! I would like to move to Ireland to be where my heart, my Mothers heart (now deceased) has always wanted to live. My grandfather had to leave Ireland and he was so depressed his whole life until the day he passed. I never knew him, but I know I have great cousins who live there somewhere on both my grandfathers side and on my Scottish grandmothers side as well. My grandfather may have been in the army in Ireland, info on that is sketchy! He sailed out of 'Queensland, Ireland' on the 4th of july year 1907. He landed in Boston Mass on July 13th 1907, the ships name was the 'Cymeric' of the 'White Star Fleet'!

Making new local friends who would truly love to be around some great guys would be so incredibly awesome! We presently live in Boulder, Colorado USA. We are both past our mid life crisis, I 'Roland" am 56 and my partner 'Caswell' is 64, I think our last names will fit perfectly for living in Ireland! Mine is Waters and his is Forrest!

We look forward to meeting the people of Ireland.......I look forward to finally coming home!

Thank you all so very very much!

annhig

Hi Roland,

first of all, welcome to Fodors!

secondly, sadly i can't help you with either of your quests in Ireland [to find your "roots" and to spend time with some great guys"] but generally, can i urge you to be a little more careful about the personal info you post on a board like this? so far, i know your full name and that of your partner, where you live, when you are going to be away from home, and were i so minded I could probably find your exact address!

good luck with planning your trip!

thursdaysd

If you're thinking of moving to Ireland there is also the matter of citizenship and/or visas. With an Irish grandparent I believe you are eligible to apply for citizenship, although you'd need to find that missing birth certificate, but what about your partner?

Alec

Gaining Irish citizenship through getting your name on Foreign Births Register usually takes up to a year or more, as all cases are referred to Dublin for verification etc and they have a backlog of applications.

Cowboy1968

Queensland is probably Queenstown - and nowadays Cobh, County Cork (next to Cork city).

An open word from someone who knows a bit about the Denver area, and maybe even a bit more about Ireland:
Even though it's 2012, the rural parts of the Republic are not the first location that come to mind when thinking about parts of Europe where same-sex couples can expect to be greeted with open arms.
We are talking about a country where condoms had been prescription drugs just a bit before the millennium.

Compared to Boulder you are up for a significant change in lifestyle if you decide to take residence anywhere else but in Dublin.
Things have changed during the last decades, agreed.
But if I got 5 euros for each male couple walking hand in hand thru Cork or Limerick (or even in Dublin proper on anything but a Saturday night in Temple Bar), I would not be able to buy a whopper at the end of the day.

Cowboy1968

P.S.
Not wanting to sound too negative.
The folks are really nice, but if you want to meet a few lads you better get a subscription for recon asap and try to chat up a few before you travel.
In Dublin, the George (pub) on S. Great George St. and the Front Lounge on Parliament St. are the usual watering holes.
A few more bars and pubs exist in the same (walkable) area of Temple Bar.
The first real gay neighborhood will be in Manchester (and that's already not on the same island), London is so-and-so. But it's not uncommon to keep an eye on Ryanair's fares and hop on a plane for a weekend in Berlin or Barcelona once you can score a €20 flight.

StCirq

I have Irish citizenship and an Irish passport through the Registry of Foreign Births, but I got it before the regulations got all difficult. First thing you need to do is dig up those family records (when I did it, I needed at least two parents' or grandparents' records - not sure what the requirement is now, but the Irish Embassy is very good at explaining it, in person and on the website). My parents made a trip to Ireland in the late 1970s to get those records and ended up getting most of them through parish records, as the official ones in the town halls (or whatever the equivalent is) were mostly gone, burned down, missing, or whatever. Today, I guess you can use one of those genealogy sites to help you out - don't know, haven't done that. But it is absolutely essential that you get the original paperwork.

Then your adventure with the Irish Embassy begins, and it's a trial. Loads of paperwork, back and forth, odd-shaped photos, bank statments, tax returns, pay stubs, etc., etc., etc., but it can be done. Don't give up.

Unfortunately, and this I found out from a recent visit to the actual Irish Embassy here in Washington, DC, your partner is totally out of luck. My question to them was, if partner and I marry (which we intend to next year), will be be eligible for Irish citizenship because of that? Absolutely not. So if you actually obtain Irish citizenship and plan to move there as a couple, you would have to arrange for some sort of long-term visa for him to be able to spend any amount of time longer than the standard tourist visa allows. There are probably ways to deal with that, but I don't know, as I'm looking at using my Irish passport to live in France, not Ireland, so haven't looked into that.

All that said, best of luck to you. Usually, where there's a bureaucracy there's a way to crack it, though it's often time-consuming, expensive, and frustrating.

Roland_Waters

Wow, so far thank you for all of you're responses. My Partner and I have looked into his personal visa situation. we both plan on actually purchasing an existing company in Dublin area, and re-building a small farm somewhere along the coastal towns.

I have every record known except what I spoke of. I also have looked into the gay scene within Dublin, honestly not into it like here, not into it. I am more a regular guy looking for regular people. I have not held hands with my partner with my partner unless on pride days. I am not shocked about the fact how it is in Ireland, after all it's a Catholic society. I came from catholicism and then went into 'Christianity or Assembly of God', I am a Minister still.

I stand up for all beliefs, not into certain ones! I would like to feel I can help others find themselves and go further with their own!

Mainly we want to just have friends and create some type of contacts within Dublin. The search will continue on the forefront for family/friends/ and bushiness opportunities for both of us.

I appreciate all help and hopefully new friends!

Rew

flanneruk

Virtually no Irish birth records have been destroyed, and there's hardly any known examples of a post-1870 baptismal record being completely destroyed. Only Irish census returns have suffered widespread destruction.

It was a legal requirement in 1880 to register a baby's birth. The registration was made at a district office, and then compiled into a register ultimately kept in Dublin. The index to this register has been preserved intact: microfilm copies are at all Mormon family history centres in the English-speaking world, and electronic versions are available widely online.

The index is arranged by district office (Killorglin births were supposed to be registered at Killarney) and by date of registration (so an 1880 birth could be registered legally in 1881). Non-registration, or delayed registration, if discovered, carried a fine - so it's not unusual for registrations to declare a later birth date than family memory records. It's not 100% guaranteed that the registration would be at the "official" office: people in Killorglin might well have found it easier to register in Tralee. The standard Mormon search engine for Ireland requires you to enter the registration district, not the place of birth (though it doesn't explain this well). A significant (5% or so) proportion of births aren't listed in the alphabetic section of the microfilmed indexes: they're in the "late registration" pages at the end of each quarterly volume

Registering a birth required declaring parents' details and home address. Your family might remember the ancestral address as Killorglin: the birth register might well carry the townland or barony instead. In a rural society, the formal address might have been some distance from the town (or parish church) your family memory recalls.

Numeracy isn't notoriously an Irish expertise. None of my ancestors of that generation accurately retold their year of birth 70 or so years later. Even with the most innocent explanations for this (and lying, for example to qualify for entry into the army, wasn't rare) this means you always need to search at least three years or so either side of the date your family has passed down.

Though it's often claimed 10% or so of Irish births weren't registered, this is unsubstantiated as late as 1880. There's virtually zero likelihood of a Catholic not being baptised, though it's often tricky to trace the baptismal records, which almost all had copies made and stored at diocesan offices. The baptismal certificate, for people living a distance from a church, might be surprisingly later than the birth: Catholic doctrine allows lay baptism of sick babies, and once the child's been baptised by the next door neighbour, there's no urgency for a formal ceremony that might require an unwell mother to make a lengthy journey.

There's an almost 100% set of microfilmed copies of church baptismal registers post 1850 or so in Dublin's National Archives of Ireland or National Library of Ireland, a large proportion of which are on the Mormon websites, though there appear to be some cases where the local diocese still clings on to its sole copy.

If you still can't find a birth registration or baptismal certificate, the overwhelming likelihood is that your family memory is wrong, rather than that records have disappeared. It might still be possible to interrogate surviving relatives more intensely to try to get accurate information out of them.

You appear to have been brought up a Catholic. That doesn't guarantee your grandfather was. Around 10% of rural inhabitants of the current 26 counties in the 1880s were Protestant (almost entirely Church of Ireland) and surnames are no guide to religion. The Catholic church's insistence that children of Catholic/Protestant marriages be brought up Catholic means that Irish Protestantism has been bred out in much of the diaspora.

StCirq

<<Earlier Irish census records were largely destroyed by fire.>>

http://www.censusfinder.com/ireland.htm

Depends on what records you're looking for.

Cowboy1968

You said you plan to buy into an existing company.
If your partner was leading in this, he may be eligible as an investor to obtain long-term residence (if you had already cleared your status thru ancestry). This may also be interesting to follow as a back-up plan and check which thresholds for foreign investors Irish immigration laws have.
Would you already know in which field of business that company would be active in?

For buying property, there are hardly better times than now, unfortunately.

Not sure what you mean by "re-builiding" a farm, though. You can buy an existing one as you probably don't wish to acquire a property that has been abandoned for a while.
What are your plans with the farm? Do you plan to produce anything? Or just want a house in the country?

With some massive degree of generalization, fertile farmlands are more found in the inland counties of Ireland than right on the coast. Peat lands are not fertile at all, and against common believe, it is not even that easy to grow potatoes.
Much of the inland farms focus on dairy or cattle or poultry as it only requires grass lands. And grass sure does grow.

As you can imagine, irrigation is not exactly an issue on the green island.
OTOH, many crops that are commonplace on the Continent have a hard time growing on the island due to lack of sunshine hours.
If you just want to grow your own vegetables than most of the above is not an issue, obviously. But if farming is in any way planned as part of your income you should give that extra time of thinking.

If you think about "re-building" an old cottage or a property with old farmhouse on it into a 21st century place to live in you need a lot of these two items: Money and nerves.
I've been watching my friends now for five years doing that for someone else (with that person's money), and you can't imagine how many tens of thousands of euros can be pumped into a fairly small cottage for repairs and renovations.
The idea that it is sufficient due to the always mild climate to throw some logs in the fireplace and have a cosy home is further away from reality than you can imagine.
Due dilligence when acquiring a rural property is key, and many items demand serious attention from availibity and quality of well water to property to status of roof, floors, walls, heating, and so on.

Anyway, Ireland is still the best place in the world if you allow yourself to adjust to a different lifestyle and I wish you best of luck with all your plans.

GreenDragon

Also, rebuilding a listed property has its own pitfalls - if the building is older, it may be protected, so you have to get permission for every piece of refurbishing you do, from the door latches to the colors of the wall, so be warned, and good luck!