On the buses

The new Public Record Office in the Titanic Quarter (where else?) has cost around £30m to build and fit out but I'm sure it will be worth every penny (providing of course that it doesn't flood — aren't there rules about putting public archives so close to the water?) and I look forward especially to viewing the public art there by Rita Duffy.

Visitors, particularly Americans, will undoubtedly put the PRONI office on their itinerary when coming to Belfast so that they can check up on their ancestors.

However, a very potent web archive is already available to anyone interested in their forebears. The 1911 census, filled in by every family in Ireland is now online.

It can trace every family by townland and county and makes for magnificent reading. I pulled the census form of my grandfather's family, the McKeowns of Ballymulderg, near the Loop in South Co Derry.

They were a big family — one brother as mentioned here previously was shot dead a decade later and two others shot and wounded by loyalists in the family home as their stricken mother looked on.

What sticks out on this form: the question on Irish. With Partition and the attempt to erase Irish from the map, the question was dropped for eight decades.

But also I note my great-grandfather was illiterate. His mark, an 'x', is placed where his signature should be.

How many generations does it take to move from the civilization of the Gael to the subjugation of illiteracy under British rule?

And what a credit to him that his family became selfless patriots — one son ended up in the prison ship the Argenta (I have read his 'S' security file and its searing exposé of life on the floating jail), one murdered, two others injured. In their careers, I believe some of the family went onto careers in business and teaching. My grandda made it as far as the buses on the Falls Road, asking to be moved out of the Ardoyne depot when he recognised one of the men who had shot him prowling the area.

The same Falls depot, that is, where they played the Sash on the benches.