Wanderung 34

Linda's Success!

Our absolute first priority for our visit to Ireland was to try to get official records of the birth somewhere in Mayo of Linda's grandmother. We knew we were in the right area, but where to start? Our first attempt was to walk a block up the Main Street to the Catholic church in Swinford, a very pretty church located on a small hill on the far edge of the town. We found people gathering and realized a morning Mass would be held soon, and Jerry had the bright idea to ask the priest about any pertinent parish records right after Mass.

So Linda and Jerry stayed for mass whilst we heathens looked at the nun's cemetery behind the church. But then we headed one block further down the road to the Tesco superstore. We were searching for an adapter for the English-style 3 prong plugs in our room so that we could return the one we had borrowed from the hotel and the other one that we had borrowed from Linda. The Tesco superstore was just about the size and variety of a Walmart Super centers in the US, so we had high hopes to find them in some department or the other. But despite searching high and low, we did not find any adapters; however, we did find a 2-socket USB charger with adapters to fit the English style socket, the European style socket, and the US style of socket, all for 5 Euro. We picked that up to at least keep our iPhone and iPads charged, but it would not work for plugging in my CPAP machine.

One curiosity I found outside the entrance to the Tesco store was an open-air laundromat, something that I had simply never seen before. The installation had two washers, an 8 kg one and a 16 kg one, and one large dryer. The machines all cost various amounts, but you could pay by either cash or credit card and I thought that was a plus, especially for travelers such as ourselves.

Returning to the church, the mass had already let out (apparently Catholic Priests are more concise than Lutheran ministers as we never had a service last less than an hour!). Jerry and Linda had tried to ask both the officiating priest and the resident priest in the rectory next door about baptismal records, but the former did not know anything and the latter had already departed for the day. That was a bit frustrating.

Undaunted, we backtracked a bit to make our next inquiry at the Swinford county office, which is next to the library that is installed in the old train station on a different side of town. They were very nice but that country office did not have such official records. Instead they directed us to Castlebar where there was the official birth-death-marriage records office for that section of county Mayo.

Jerry and Linda told us it was right next to the hospital there, but my GPS suggested the country office was in a slightly different location in town, so I followed the GPS (wrong move!) and wound my way through Castlebar, a city with such narrow streets, chaotic parking, and congested, 2-way traffic on one-lane streets, which I would recommend avoiding unless you really have to go there. I came close enough to one parked car that the already-cracked cover of our left-hand mirror popped off, so we had to pause and pick that up before continuing our search.

Fortunately, the crack int he mirror cover did not seem to have become any worse, so I popped the plastic cover back on while Linda and Jerry checked in at the county office for the birth records. But the county officials only reconfirmed that the official birth records for that section of County Mayo were indeed in the hospital complex. I carefully backed out of the side alley (no room to turn the car around!) and worked my way through town to the hospital complex. Unfortunately, we found out that they did not allow any parking inside the hospital complex at all, so I finally gave up and parked the car over on a side street.

Linda and Jerry walked up the driveway entrance and found that a new, modern hospital was located on the left side while the old hospital building on the right hand side had been coverted to offices, including the "Birth, Death, Marriages, and Miscarriages" records office(!). Linda had to first answer questions to justify her request about her grandmother's birth certificate, which surprised me a bit. But it turned out to be worth all the folderol because that office actually had the official record of her grandmother's birth and would cheerfully print official copies of it (for the bargain price of 20 Euros each!). Yay!

With the official copy finally in Linda's hot little hands, we were free to continue on to La Hardaun, which was the reputed home town for that branch of her family. We blundered around the small town and finally found the local church after asking the local folks where it was. When we walked over there we found the exterior doors were unlocked although no priest was present (Roman Catholics often leave churches open, but Lutherans never do). The interior of the small church was for the most part plain, but the church had absolutely fantastic, one-of-a-kind stained glass windows. Aside from the normal windows containing religious themes, two stained glass windows were installed on either side of a memorial plaque for victims from the local area of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. A surprising number of local folks died in that disaster, which would have represented a large percentage of the people in the town, I would think, and hence the memorial.

The window to the right of the memorial plaque commemorated the saving of passengers from the sinking ship, and has to be one of the most moving stained glass pieces I have ever seen. The colors are vivid, the details of passengers' fear-stricken faces are perfectly glazed on with the Grisaille method, and the portrayed action of hauling them from the ship into a lifeboat is just breathtaking. So if you ever get to La Hardaun, look for a low-one-story building with no steeple coated in beige stucco right at the intersection of two roads, and that will be the church--the exterior is so atypical of a normal church that all 4 of us had completely overlooked the building when we drove into town looking for a church as it simply looked like a very large house, or a Taco Bell fast-food outlet, or something.

We chatted with a custodian, I think, who was picking up things in front of the church, and he went way out of his way to call around and try to find folks in the area who might know of Linda's family there. In the end, he connected with "Josephine", and she cheerfully agreed to meet us in Leonard's Pub, an atmospheric and award-winning pub near the center of La Hardaun. The place seemed to be half pub and half mini-market or tiny grocery store.

We had a light lunch there while waiting for her. Jerry and Monika had their first Guinness in Ireland while Linda and I shared a pot of tea. When Josephine came, Linda chatted with her for at least an hour or so trying to establish family connections. In the end, she decided we were not from her branch of the Madden family, but my gosh when we took a picture of her and Linda they really looked like they could be sisters. That resemblance was so marked that I just wasn't sure; maybe Linda is from a close branch of Josephine's family?

Josephine's husband joined us for the latter part of our time in the pub, and as neither he nor I were a critical part of Linda and Josephine's discussion, we had a grand time chatting about current events in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. The hot question in the Irish Republic right now is a repeal of one article of their constitution that gives equal priority to the life of an unborn fetus and the life of the mother. Essentially, a vote to repeal would allow the government to pass laws that would allow some abortions to be done in Ireland rather than the women having to go to England, which now seems to be the case. The Catholic Church, of course is strongly against this repeal, and other folks support it. Josephine estimated that the current split of opinion in Ireland is about 50-50, so I will try to keep track of how that goes.

Bidding adieu to those very nice folks at the end of the afternoon, we started a scenic drive back around the Lough Conn to Knockmore. (I suppose that there may also be a corresponding town of "Knockless" on that lake or Lough, where they have a monster who does not give any warning when he comes into your room at night, which people naturally now call the "Knockless Monster"!)

It was a pretty drive around the lough with nice views of the lake on our left and farms and pastureland on our right with gorse bushes on the slopes. Unfortunately, although Linda chatted with a lady who might have been a relative in Knockmore, there seemed to be no family connection, so we returned to Swinford via Foxford to close our driving loop.

Once we had the car parked in back of the hotel, we wandered around Swinford looking for a place to eat. But I also hadn't given up on finding an Irish-to-American adapter for the wall outlets, so when we ran across the "Mr Price" shop in the middle of town, apparently the Irish version of a European "5-Euro" store or American "Dollar Store", we stopped in to see what they had. And finally, back in a shelf of miscellaneous electronic doodads, we found "adapters for foreigners" for 1.49 Euro each that converted the 3-prong English outlet to a 2 round prong European style outlet or the 2 flat prong American style outlet. Success! We bought two, one to power my CPAP machine, which is critical for me, and one to power up to 3 American plugs using our triple outlet. Now I could give Linda back her converter.

In the end, though, we didn't find a pub that looked any nicer than the one right downstairs in our hotel, and it turned out that they offered nice dinners there for 11 Euro, so we just sat down there and had a wonderful meal. I was totally unused to the relaxed atmosphere about dining in Ireland, however, and I kept expecting us to be chased out as quickly as possible, as would happen in many restaurants in America, but they just let us eat our dinner very slowly in peace and quiet. That difference in customs reminded me of the meal at a French restaurant with Eberhard and Birgit, where the proprietor seem offended that we even thought about getting up after 2 hours and bribed us to stay for another hour with complimentary glasses of cognac!

But we were all tired after dinner, so we just quickly discussed what we might want to do the following day, and the consensus was to wend our way through the scenic roads of the Connemara area and possibly stop to overnight in Galway. Then I filled in the journal for a while and Monika played some games on her iPad before we turned in for the night.