May your sleep be sound
And your heart be light
With memories warm
this Christmas night.
God bless.
Category: Posts and podcasts
Posts and Podcasts
A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year – 1870
Gerard van Honthorst (1590-1656)
Wallraf-Richartz Museum
Wikipedia.org
Australian Town and Country Journal 24th December 1870 p16/17
“A Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.”
Could there be a heartier sentiment? Is not all that is genial, and kind, and friendly embodied in the sentence?
So should it be; for Christmas time is surely a period when the most generous promptings of the year should be indulged; a time when charity consists not in the cold deliberation of other times, but in the giving without doubt, without inquiry.
A time when none but a churl will cherish malice or hatred, but all good fellows will pocket ill-will for the nonce at any rate, and thrust forth their hands in friendship.
A time when the spirit frees itself from the thraldom of everyday petty cares and strifes, and comes forth in its earnestness and truth.
A time, in short, brief but healthy, when men and women may give way to the kindliness and charity of their nature, without being sneered at by their fellows, without feeling the shame of having done an absurd thing.
Breeching the law? 1826
Wikimedia Commons
https://widgetworld3.wordpress.com/podcasts/
(abridged)
Mary Hartigan, a daughter of Erin, was introduced to the magistrates notice last week. The preceding night constables met with Miss Hartigan (who seemed to ‘tower above her sex’) parading the streets dressed not in silks and satins, but in good substantial brogues and corduroy inexpressibles, and what not.
The guardians of ‘peace and harmony’ first gave their account of the matter. Then Miss Hartigan was requested to state her inducement for assuming what, by the ‘common law’ between the male and female parts, did not exactly belong to her. Mary responded she saw no reason, when all the boys and girls were enjoying themselves, that she should remain at home that night. Feeling inclined for a ‘bit of a spree’ she took a fancy to ‘wear the breeches’. She was also ‘proud to keep the ould game alive.’ Her mother and her grandmother and her aunt’s daughter and all the family of the Hartigans did the same before her – and where was the harm of that?
The magistrate did not understand that this was a universal amusement in parts of Ireland during the Christmas holidays. He and lookers on were not convinced of the prevalence of this fashion. Mary was dismissed with a strong recommendation to the care of the ‘female factory’.
Typhoid Mary – 1909
Wikimedia.org
Willmar Tribune, 20th October, 1909 p3
The Autocracy of Boards of Health (edited)
The health board of the city of New York has got an innocent, strong capable Irish woman, who used to be a cook in a private family. By evidence that appeals only to a bacteriologist, they convicted this poor woman of being a typhoid germ carrier. The irish woman is perfectly healthy herself, has never had typhoid fever, and yet they declare her to be a veritable walking typhoid germ culture. She is doomed to perpetual sentence in a dingy old building called the pest house. They are proposing to keep her as long as she lives, or at least as long as they choose to keep her.
A Strange Tale – 1913
Hal Jespersen at en.wikipedia
Woman Vet, of Civil War has strange tale. (edited)
Quincy, III
The sex of Albert D. J. Cashier, civil war veteran and an inmate of the Soldiers’ and Sailors home here, has been revealed by Colonel J. O. Anderson, superintendent, as feminine.
The woman, whose real name probably never will be known, served three years in the Union army during the Civil war, as is shown by records. She was mustered out of the service in 1865 and a few years later was placed on the government pension roll.
She was born in Ireland, December 25, 1844, but the place of her birth is not known. It is thought by Colonel Anderson and officials of the home board that she ran away from home and came to the United States dressed in boy’s clothes, a stowaway on a British vessel.
She enlisted in Company G, Ninety-fifth Illinois Infantry, May 4, 1862. The regiment to which she belonged was stationed in the south during the last three years of the war, and she was actively engaged in several important battles, among them the siege against Hood’s forces in Tennessee, in which more than half of Company G was killed.
The revelation of the identity of her sex was made two years ago in Livingstown county, Ill., where she was employed as a chauffeur. One day she crawled under the car, which started suddenly and its wheels passed over her, breaking her right leg. When she was taken to a hospital her sex was revealed.
A Terrific Storm – 1841
WikimediaCommons
THE CORNWALL CHRONICLE (LAUNCESTON, TAS) 30TH OCTOBER, 1841, P2
It seems that Ireland has lately been visited by a terrific storm of thunder and lightning, accompanied at the same time by a severe shock of an earthquake. Cattle and horses were killed by the lightening, and in the county of Galway the lives of three individuals fell a sacrifice to the electric fluid. So frightful and devastating a storm has not been witnessed in Ireland in the memory of its oldest inhabitant, and it is to be hoped that it will be long before the occurrence of such weather.
Dreadful sufferings in the Polar sea – 15th December 1860
DREADFUL SUFFERINGS IN THE POLAR SEA.(abridged)
The only survivor of the crew and passengers of the barque Kitty, a sailor named William Armstrong, arrived at Galway by the Prince Albert last August. Armstrong, on the 29th of June, 1859, shipped as mate of the barque Kitty, from Newcastle-on Tyne, which sailed with a cargo consigned to the Hudson’s Bay Company. She was commanded by Alexander Ellis, and besides her crew of able-bodied seamen she took a few passengers, who intended to settle in the locality.
The voyage from the outset was rather boisterous and protracted, for the vessel did not get off the American shore till the beginning of August. On the 11th of that month she was enveloped in a fog off Cape Resolution, and she was suddenly surrounded by huge mountains of ice, so as to render escape almost hopeless. The bergs could be seen through the fog, gradually drawing nearer and nearer, until at last the vessel was touched by them. 
Greenland
Wikipedia.org
The crew and passengers wore naturally panic-stricken, but they soon recovered, and commenced efforts to save their lives. Two boats were got out, and as much provisions as could be put into them in a hurry were stowed away. One was under the command of the captain. The other under Armstrong, the mate, left, the ship’s side, just as the bergs closed upon the ill-fated vessel, and crushed her into pieces. She then went down. The remaining boats managed to get through an opening, but only to find themselves in a field of ice, its pieces threatening destruction at every moment.
For days the two boats beat about making attempts to reach the open sea, with no success. The cold began to take effect, and the fearful symptoms of frost-bite became painfully apparent. Remedies such as were within their power were applied, but they were useless. The poor creatures gradually became worse, and dropped off one after another.
Finally the botls separated in a fog. The captain’s boat was never heard of again. Armstrong, with the few persons in his boat still surviving, pursued his course, the little crew in his boat getting fewer in number, while the survivors were becoming weak and sickly. Those who were sinking under the privations, as their hour approached, became maniacs. Two or three besides Armstrong only remained when the welcome cry of ” Land” was raised, and the men strained their eyes and asked one another could it be real. It was at length reached, but too late for some of them. The ecstacy of such a discovery, after being 62 days in an open boat and suffering such privations in a polar region, was too much for them, and all, with the exception of Armstrong, sank to the ground and died. It it is no wonder Armstrong dropped upon his knees, and returned thanks to his God that he had been spared.
Having obtained a little rest, he wandered along the shore, and was fortunate to fall in with some Esquimaux on a hunting expedition. They conducted him to their huts, and there kept him for a considerable time, until he had recruited his strength. They then brought him to a place where some Moravian missionaries were residing, who forwarded him to St John’s in the early part of August. Up to the present no tidings could be got of the vessel, and it was long since supposed that every soul had gone to the bottom.
Haslem Counties Herald.
Close
Women of Miltown Malbay – fair play to them – 1887
Two hundred and fifty women at Miltown Malbay, County Clare, lately baffled a force of police, bailiffs, and sheriffs. The posse came to seize cattle for rent. The women made prisoners of the peelers and bailiffs, while their husbands drove the cattle away.
Raftery – the Roving Poet – 1904
EO’D
Freeman’s Journal Saturday 21st may, 1904
AN IRISH MINSTREL
THE BLIND BARD OF CONNAUGHT – RAFTERY THE ROVING POET (edited)
Anthony Raftery was born in Killedan, County Mayo in 1779. He was smitten with smallpox when he was a little lad and the disease left him blind.
Someone taught him to play the fiddle and when he was still a young man he left his native place to go tramping the Galway roads, fiddling and singing songs for his meat and lodging. He was a poet of a type then fairly common – there were over two hundred wandering Irish poets when Raftery was on the roads, and each one of them, wherever they went, was welcome at the fireside and the fair. Raftery was the most famous, a man one was proud to entertain. He would play dance music at Kiltartan Cross “of a Sunday evening'” and it is said he could “turn a marriage into a wedding” with his music. 
EO’D
His chief poems are “Eanach Dhiun”, “Mairin Stanton,” and a long solemn poem of great beauty, called “The Vision of Death,” which he made from a vision that came to him some seven years before he died. Of his life, there were many anecdotes, telling how he was once worsted in a dispute with a farmer poet, called Callinan, how he liked whisky, and was ever too fond of money, and how, at his death, the poor house where he lay “was all lighted up as bright as the day, and a flame in the heavens above it.” Blind though he was, it was said he could walk the roads with neither dog or stick, taking the turns rightly and leaping the bog-holes without a guide.
Raftery died in Killeeneen in 1835 and was buried in the graveyard there, with all the villagers to play him home. Lovers of his poetry placed a simple white stone above his grave.
Local Spirit(s) – Kinvara, Duras, Ballinderreen – 1920
Photo; Norma Scheibe
Second series, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press 1920
https://widgetworld3.wordpress.com/podcasts/
A FAIRY FORT
A woman I know had business one time in Ballyvaughan, and when she was on the road beyond Kinvara a man came to her out of a fort and he asked her to go in and to please a child that was crying. So she went in and she pleased the child, and she saw in a corner an old man that never stopped from crying. And when she went out again she asked the man that brought her in, why was the old man roaring and crying. The man pointed to a milch cow in the meadow and he said, “Before the day is over he will be in the place of that cow, and it will be brought into the forth to give milk to the child.” And she can tell herself that was true, for in the evening when she was coming back from Ballyvaughan, she saw in that field a cow dead, and being cut in pieces, and all the poor people bringing away bits of it, that was the old man that had been put in its place. There is poison in that meat, but no poison ever comes off the fire, but you must mind to throw away the top of the pot.
A GATHERING OF SPIRITS
The Burren
Photo: Norma Scheibe
There’s a bad bit of road near Kinvara Chapel, just when you get within sight of the sea. I know a man has to pass there, and he wouldn’t go on the driver’s side of the car, for it’s to the right side those things are to be seen. Sure there was a boy lost his life falling off a car there last Friday week. And I knew him, a quiet boy, and married to a widow woman; she wanted the help of a man, and he was young. What would ail him to fall off the side of an ass-car and to be killed?
It’s by the big tree outside Raheen (where you take the turn to Kinvara) that the most things are seen. There was a boy living in Gort that was out before daylight with a load of hay in a cart, and he sitting on top of it. He was found lying dead just beside the tree, where he fell from the top of the cart, and the horse was standing there stock-still. There was a shower of rain fell while he was lying there, and I passed the road two hours later, and saw where the dust was dry where his body had been lying.
And it was only yesterday I heard a story of that very same place. There was a man coming from Galway with a ton weight of a load on his cart, and when he came to that tree the linching of his wheel came out, and the cart fell down. And presently a little man, about two and a half feet in height, came out from the wall. He lifted up the cart, and held it up till he had the linching put up again. And he never said a word but went away as he came, and the man came in to Gort.
Photo: Norma Scheibe
I heard a churning one time in the hill up by the road beyond. I was coming back from Kinvara, and I heard it plain, no mistake about it. I was sorry after I didn’t call down and ask for a drink. Johnny M— did so, and got it. If you wish for a drink and they put it out for you, it’s no harm to take it, but if you refuse it, some harm might happen to you. Johnny H——— often told that he heard churning in that spot, but I wouldn’t believe the sun rising from him, he had so many lies. But after that, I said, “Well, Johnny H——– has told the truth for once.”
THE MONSTER
There is a monster of some sort down by Duras, it’s called the ghost of Fiddeen. Some say it’s only heard every seven years. Some say it was a flannel seller used to live there that had a short fardel. We heard it here one night, like a calf roaring.
THE BANSHEE
There is a boy I knew near Ballinderreen, told me that he was going along the road one night and he saw a dog. It had claws like a cur, and a body like a person, and he couldn’t see what its head was like. But it was moaning like a soul in pain, and presently it vanished, and there came most beautiful music, and a woman came out and he thought at first it was the Banshee, and she wearing a red petticoat. And a striped jacket she had on, and a white band about her waist. And to hear more beautiful singing and music he never did, but to know or to understand what she was expressing, he couldn’t do it. And at last they came to a place by the roadside where there were some bushes. And she went in there and disappeared under them, and the most beautiful lights came shining where she went in. And when he got home, he himself fainted, and his mother put her beads over him, and blessed him and said prayers. So he got quiet at last.
The Burren and Beyond 