Today is the anniversary of Aideen’s birthday. I always think of her on 6 September, and of celebrating it in Hollywood, in Musso Franks restaurant. But I’ve recently discovered something else important in the O’Connor family that happened this week in 1910, on 7 September to be exact.
It is a special celebration this year, because I can finally feel I’ve done all I can for her – the book is out in the world and will be officially launched at the Dublin Festival of History on 1 October at 14 Henrietta Street. There are other exciting events planned too; I’ll keep those details for another time.
In preparing the book for publication, there was a question that repeatedly came up from peer reviewers and the publisher: Do we really not know more about Aideen’s mother? The questions were gentle, more musing and curious than interrogative. And I knew this wasn’t a blindspot of mine, but a dead end. Yet there is nothing worse than a loose end, or worse still, a red herring.
There have been lovely responses to the book so far, and many are struck by how different Ria and Aideen were, despite their common training and dedication to the Abbey. But one strong similarity I’ve noticed is that both grew up without a mother. Ria described how being without her mother from a young age, she felt there was no one to tell her when she was doing wrong, or right. Aideen never wrote about it, but I wondered.
I had mixed information about Aideen’s maternal line that was somewhere between family lore, historical realities and supposition. The Census Record from 1911 gave her name as Flora O’Connor. I had always been uneasy with this; after hours of tracing cursive letters from that period, I thought the F was more likely a C, and she was Clara. But the official record was Flora, and it is hard to argue with that.
The family of Flora/Clara cared for Aideen at various points, and most of them seemed to have been living in Cobh. I leaned towards the idea that Flora/Clara had come from there, and therefore might be buried there. I’d done some preliminary searching official records in Cork city, but with a name as common as Crowley and not much more, it felt pretty hopeless. I also knew nothing about a date of death, except we were dealing with the period of the Spanish influenza pandemic, rampant TB and poverty, and the trauma of World War 1, which I knew had affected Aideen’s uncle in Cork.
I decided to simply omit anything, rather than suppose and deduce in the book. But when the book was with the copy editor, and I had time on my hands again to either fret or investigate, I decided to give it one last shot. I contacted a historian and genealogist, Sheila Robinson. I told her everything I had, including my hunch about the cursive F, and off she went. I figured I might have an answer by the time the book hit the shelves.
To my embarrassment, she was back by the end of the day. And it was all unexpected – except for the fact that she died, which is the final plot twist in most biographies.
Clara Crowley was born in Dublin in 1887 and was baptised in Chapelizod on 5 December. She was a Dubliner, born and bred.
On 7 September 1910, Clara Mary Crowley married Vincent de Paul O’Connor in the Catholic church in Rathmines. They were both of ‘full’ age, but that doesn’t give us details of their age. Nora Ryan served as her witness; Francis Hugh O’Connor stood for Vincent, probably his brother. Clara was living in Rathmines at the time, and while Vincent’s father was a clerk, she came from the family of a ‘gentleman’. The only real definition of a ‘gentleman’ at this time was that he could maintain himself without a full-time occupation.
And when did she die, leaving her husband to raise three girls? Well, to find that out, you will of course have to buy the book… It is available in Hodges Figgis, Dubray Books, some Easons and online from UCD Press.
