Hunting Frank O’Connor

The Digital Humanities team at UCC are hosting a tools and methods workshop for the phd class this weekend, and we are using data about Frank O’Connor, the Cork writer, as the thematic glue to link the various sections on TEI/XML, Databases, visualisation and social networking. Preparing for it I’ve sent some time hunting for data on his early years in the 1901 Census, and the BMH witness statements.

O’Connor was born Michael O’Donovan in 1903, in “Douglas Street, Cork, over a small sweet-and-tobacco shop kept by a middle-aged lady called Wall.” This part of the trail is easy to locate – there is one middle aged shopkeeper, Eliza Wall, at 30 Douglas St in the 1901 Census; the other Wall family on the street are a medical family. From Douglas St he moved to Blarney St, to “No. 251, where we lived, is one of the cottages on the right near the top” but his precise memory of his address is not helpful – the numbers along Blarney St, both now and in the 1901 and 1911 Census’, jump from 71 to the 300’s. He may have meant 351, a number which does exist, but we cannot be sure because before the 1911 Census his family had moved on. What we do know is that about 100 yards, by his memory, from his house was the top end of Strawberry Lane, where he first went to school. I didn’t look for a school there in the census yet, and there doesn’t seem to a school on Strawberry Lane now, although St Vincents is nearby but Google maps shows a ideal candidate near the top of the lane – a building which looks like a school, but is now a Community Centre. Was this where he first put pencil to paper?

He doesn’t appear in the 1911 census in Blarney St, because when he was 5 or 6, his family moved across town to Harringtons Sq, beside his grandmother, near the barracks. He lived there for a long time, so we should see him in the 1911 Census for the Square, but sadly the O’Donovan family aren’t there. We can find the square easily on the map, and there is a photo on Panarmio of the grotto there which sohws houses that match his description of his home. The grotto is probably a later addition, built during the Marian year, but we can confirm that if we drive by during a break in the workshop.

Today, I cannot find Michael O’Donovan, father or son, in the 1911 Census for the square. Neither Harrington Sq, nor Harrington’s Sq, nor any variant of the place name or any variant of Donovan or O’Donovan, or Michael, or Ml or M. throws up the family. We will solve this puzzle, but for our workshop, this is actually excellent – I can set the students off on a merry chase and demonstrate very clearly how many variations of the name appear in the Census, and how hard it is to standardise them, and the problems of record linkage, while also getting them to consider the problems of designing both a database and a user interface to deal with this sort of problem which some of them will certainly face in creating their own research databases over the next 4 years.

We’ll use samples of the census data from all three places – Douglas St, Blarney St and Harrington’s Square – to do some micro history, building a database, transcribing some records from the pdf images online and looking at how the information matches up with his autobiography, An Only Child. Of course I could just ask the National Archives for a copy of their database, but that isn’t as useful for teaching purposes as creating one.

The next task tonight is looking at the Witness Statements from the Bureau of Military history to prepare for some research on O’Connor’s involvement in the War of Independence and the Civil War.  I can’t find a witness statement for O’Connor himself, but he was involved in the Volunteers, and got around quite a bit, so he should appear in some of the other statements. Certainly, some of the incidents he was involved in will appear, and this will allow us to link those  to his own account. Unfortunately, there are several Michael O’Donovans in the Cork statements, but he isn’t any of the ones thrown up by a basic search so I will have to head back to my copy of “An Only Child” and pull out a list of names of people and places touching on his account.