My Irish whakapapa

Though I have no Maori ancestry I share something in common with many who do, which is to say, my ancestors include the Irish.

My mother’s father’s parents each had one parent who was an Irish migrant, coming first to Australia and then to New Zealand.

The ancestors on my mother’s side who were born in Ireland are Elizabeth Foster, née Markey, and James Butler, my great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather respectively, although they were not married to each other. The rest of the foreign-born ancestors of my mother’s family were English.

James Butler’s daughter Annie married Elizabeth Foster’s son Charles here in Christchurch. Annie was Charles’s third wife; his first two wives were also each of one Irish parent.

Annie and Charles are my great-grandparents. My grandfather and his brother were the children of their parents’ middle age: Charles died at 78 in 1929 and Annie at 68 in 1936. In the one surviving family photo of them with my grandfather and his brother as children (along with neighbourhood friends and relatives), my great-grandparents are a small, tanned pair, their faces lined by long exposure to the South Island sun.

My grandfather took the responsibility of having older parents very seriously and supported, with his brother, his mother from the time of his father’s death until her own. After she died he moved houses in the neighbourhood, during which process he met my grandmother, who was just sixteen.

The Irish in my grandfather’s family were never much thought about until recently: like those they married, they had gone through the reinventive transformation by which we are All New Zealanders Now. Records show relatives who arrived in Australia as Catholic becoming, by force of law and circumstance, Protestant. The more perilous one’s circumstances upon arrival the more likely one seems to have been to be transformed from the former denomination to the latter and, when some among my ancestors eventually ascended to the Christchurch and districts’ middle classes, no-one seems to have asked any questions about their mixed origins. Perhaps they were too busy guarding the discovery of their own.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.  (Today is also two years since I first met Señor Mojito, who is not to my knowledge of Irish descent, although with his heavily Scots lines the possibility of unspoken assimilation somewhere back there is not out of the question.)

Tagged as: ancestors, St. Patrick's Day, the Irish