The flute and Irish history

[GreenWood]

PB+J

On your "colored" relatives.

This isn't a topic I will return to in this conversation but I will answer it once because I think it is important.

Colour, nationalism, the famine, politics, identity and similar would be better in poststructural, beyond passing mention where it is clearly relevant to changes in society that affect the music. People have strong feelings on those, I expect many don't answer you because they are too far removed from music, which is what this whole forum is about .

I use "nativist" in the following in the more negative sense it has acquired, not that of the simple idea of keeping a nation more to those descending from those already there. Remember please that in EU we don't have freedom of speech enshrined, that various nationalist identity movements are arbitrarily persecuted and banned, are automatically portrayed as merged with more extreme movements in spite of holding moderate rhetoric. Nativist otherwise might be as straightforward as say native american , or as fabricated as a hierarchy of descent using some ancient historical pseudo-fact. I'm not part of any political organisation whatsoever.

A disclosure, so that I am not misread:

I have friends from various countries and religions and backgrounds. With a black friend it might go. "How would you like the coffee?"... "BLACK" would be an answer "sure not WHITE?" ... "BLACK as night my friend".

I am "white". Superficial colour and race discrimination is mocked for what it is, no one amongst us makes serious of it. No one believes in "race equality" either, but all recognise use of superficial themes to generate inequality are unjust. Most if not all identify to race (meaning physically distinct peoples) , recognise the capabilities and shortcomings each is endowed with, recognise that different races work at different wavelengths in spite of similar upbringings. So there is discrimination, who to talk to, who to ask for a helping hand from and so on. No one takes any of that to signify they are overall superior, it is no more relevant than how anyone might fairly discriminate for similar themes amongs own race. So we're all "racists", but a conversation was held online that I read on just such a theme, and a new word was sought for negative connotation of racism, and they came up with "sectism" . Just to underline the difference.

To continue, you will surely know of nativist activity in America in 19th century, that what we call native Americans were not part of the picture. You should know the catholic church originally designated original native Americans as non human (animal) and without soul. It is even possible caricature of Irish derived from that reality somehow. You will know that classification of certain peoples in 19th century was "less than white". That your own family were labelled "colored" should be of no surprise. Possibly that certificate was an exception going beyond the limits of the day, possibly you wonder if a relative was black even. Possibly you are looking to gauge sentiment on the theme, or are even trying to reconcile your own identity with regard somehow.



Anyway your search for Irish ancestry contradicts the notion you offer of "race" or similar being superficial. I might suggest you (and not others nescessarily because it is quite complex) watch if you haven't

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EUcKDncURc0

for conclusions such as that the search for a 'normal' Irish is/was more a method of control or that it is/was to highlight those that were outside of "normal" rather than to offer a familiar identity . Just the fact that nativists were heavily into biometry should make you very wary of similar modern technology. The socialist with the little moustache springs to mind also, and that goes right through to the enforced silencing of any study or discussion of that period that is legally in force in various countries today, and basically the background that "Europe" is conducted to.

The presentation of ancestry by the study you chose presents many difficulties:

The actual validity of any information is often highly disputed. That ranges from depth of previous study through to correct historical allocation of previous results.

The interpretation is wide open to manipulation. 96% Irish, so you're not Irish 100% ? Are you actually the same as if you mix the features of 96 of 100 Irish together... the notion is absurd. If you have a country with 50 % recent foreign nationals, 96 % means you are half foreign in real terms, or similarly someone Irish since whenever will appear half not Irish. These are just some examples but they lead on to...

Political manipulation. Statistics might be used to show a people were a certain type, "older type" presentation adhered to by "secludists" ( I tried to think of a neutral term) , "newer type" by "progressives", to shape policy. People might start to concern themselves with their status, might start to look on their identity as provided by data. This quite frankly would be like eugenics made public. At present my impression is that an impetus is being created to disassociate identity from nation and culture, to atomise people in terms of their thinking with regard to those, and so as that they see themselves as part of a "bigger picture" as presented by this form of study. If for example the earliest common ancestor of the Irish is then presented as from wherever, what would that do to how people perceive themselves or their country?

It is all a very bad idea in my opinion.

Most of what we would call a congruent nation or society is by familiarisation, that is not five years residence but acceptance that generations of adaptation to local culture and manner is needed if the fabric of society is to remain relatively stable, so tailoring immigrant numbers to that reality. This isn't obligatory, there are nations that live very fast demographic and cultural change, whether "invited" or through drama such as conflict. Cosmopolitan realities (often cities) are different from more traditional ones (often rural) as most will know. I think it is acceptable for a people to choose the degree of change or openess allowed of their nation in terms of nationalisation, visitor numbers or property ownership (as examples). Only in the west are we set on the high levels of acceptance of migration, most other regions of the world are much stricter. In other words, we are the experiment, and not the usual stance regarding nationhood.

Switzerland and Ireland are of the few western countries that deny easy access to nationality to foreigners, but both are otherwise relatively open countries.

Ireland having much emigration ? Population has steadily increased, it is an island so the sense of leaving is not like working just over a border, plus I will guess higher birth rate than various other countries. I suppose it would be for the Irish to decide if they thought building various big cities to house millions more is really a great idea or not ?

Historical population graph from 500 AD

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/th ... s.1182719/

Finally, it sounds far fetched but isn't beyond reason, fabrication of tailored biological weapons is made much easier if data is widely available on the different peoples. We are in an era where conflicts are not even understood to be taking place at and across national boundaries, and with various modern actors having no particular loyalty to nation as previously understood as concept.

In short, possibly with an unnecessary apart of contributing to understanding the evolution of societies to answer a few academic historical questions, I just don't see anything positive from that form of study.

I did read another study on black people in Ireland for 19th century using records, and the estimate was one in two thousand.

[PB+J]

Concerns noted

[bigsciota]

No one believes in "race equality" either, but all recognise use of superficial themes to generate inequality are unjust. Most if not all identify to race (meaning physically distinct peoples) , recognise the capabilities and shortcomings each is endowed with, recognise that different races work at different wavelengths in spite of similar upbringings.

I'm sure that this is a matter of miscommunication, because I cannot be reading you right in saying "no one believes in race equality." The only way that that sentence really makes much sense is if you say "no one believes in race, and therefore the idea of "race equality" is irrelevant."

However you draw the lines up, people in various populations are vastly more different from each other individually than their "group" is from others. The concept of "physically distinct peoples" when it comes to race is, to use a deeply scientific term, horsedroppings. Instead, we have developed various ways of discussing differences to create those categories as a societal construct, none of which have much basis in biology. For example, if you want to talk genetics, despite the fact that they would all be characterized as "Black" in the usual racial categories we use, studies have shown that various Sub-Saharan African populations are more genetically different from each other than they are from Eurasians, or indeed than many European populations are from Asian ones. In other words, genetics tells a much different story than skin color or facial features. And there are plenty more ways in which cultures have historically distinguished "race," from language to geography and beyond.

It should be noted that PB&J is referring to exactly that kind of societal creation of race when he is talking about his "colored" ancestor. Under Virginia's laws at the time, anyone who had "one drop" of non-white ancestry, meaning any nonwhite ancestry whatsoever,* were classed as "colored." This has absolutely nothing to do with any biological realities, just accidents of birth and deep, firmly entrenched racism. It's also not something that can be discussed, generalized, theorized about, etc. without putting it in its specific historical context. Talking about their concept of "race" and relating it to yours or mine or anyone's just doesn't work, because they are completely different. This is true, by the way, about any concept of race that you can come up with. They are all very squarely dependent on their cultural and historical context. And they all have very little to do with anything more than superficial similarities.

So, in short, no "race" is "endowed with" specific "capabilities and shortcomings," and if you don't believe in the equality of the "races," there's a much bigger conversation we should be having than who played what flutes when.

*Side note: there was a small carveout for trace Native American ancestry, because a lot of upper-society Virginians liked to be able to (supposedly) trace their ancestry back to Pocahontas. It was a way to stake their nativist claim to America, but they also didn't want to be labeled as anything other than white. "Rules for thee but not for me," as the saying goes.

[PB+J]

No one believes in "race equality" either, but all recognise use of superficial themes to generate inequality are unjust. Most if not all identify to race (meaning physically distinct peoples) , recognise the capabilities and shortcomings each is endowed with, recognise that different races work at different wavelengths in spite of similar upbringings.

I'm sure that this is a matter of miscommunication, because I cannot be reading you right in saying "no one believes in race equality." The only way that that sentence really makes much sense is if you say "no one believes in race, and therefore the idea of "race equality" is irrelevant."

However you draw the lines up, people in various populations are vastly more different from each other individually than their "group" is from others. The concept of "physically distinct peoples" when it comes to race is, to use a deeply scientific term, horsedroppings. Instead, we have developed various ways of discussing differences to create those categories as a societal construct, none of which have much basis in biology. For example, if you want to talk genetics, despite the fact that they would all be characterized as "Black" in the usual racial categories we use, studies have shown that various Sub-Saharan African populations are more genetically different from each other than they are from Eurasians, or indeed than many European populations are from Asian ones. In other words, genetics tells a much different story than skin color or facial features. And there are plenty more ways in which cultures have historically distinguished "race," from language to geography and beyond.

It should be noted that PB&J is referring to exactly that kind of societal creation of race when he is talking about his "colored" ancestor. Under Virginia's laws at the time, anyone who had "one drop" of non-white ancestry, meaning any nonwhite ancestry whatsoever,* were classed as "colored." This has absolutely nothing to do with any biological realities, just accidents of birth and deep, firmly entrenched racism. It's also not something that can be discussed, generalized, theorized about, etc. without putting it in its specific historical context. Talking about their concept of "race" and relating it to yours or mine or anyone's just doesn't work, because they are completely different. This is true, by the way, about any concept of race that you can come up with. They are all very squarely dependent on their cultural and historical context. And they all have very little to do with anything more than superficial similarities.

So, in short, no "race" is "endowed with" specific "capabilities and shortcomings," and if you don't believe in the equality of the "races," there's a much bigger conversation we should be having than who played what flutes when.

*Side note: there was a small carveout for trace Native American ancestry, because a lot of upper-society Virginians liked to be able to (supposedly) trace their ancestry back to Pocahontas. It was a way to stake their nativist claim to America, but they also didn't want to be labeled as anything other than white. "Rules for thee but not for me," as the saying goes.

This.

Yes the "Pocahantas exception!" Walter Plecker privately complained that he wasn't allowed to classify people claiming descent from "indian princesses" as black. He was indignant about it.


By 1930, Virginia was insisting in law that any person "with an ascertainable evidence" of African ancestry was a black person. "Ascertainable evidence" could mean the existence of a record somewhere: a historical document 120 years old, for example, in which an ancestor was termed "colored" would be enough. That law was never repealed, it's just no longer enforced. It's bizarre, but the fact that these ancestors were termed "colored" make me legally a black man in Virginia. The people in question left Virginia and moved to philadelphia, where I grew up--no one in my family had any idea of this alleged racial heritage.

DNA tests, an equally absurd business in my opinion, reveal no african ancestry, but call me "95% Irish, 4% Scottish, and 1% Swedish," which makes me laugh, what exactly is the meaningful genetic difference between "scottish and Irish?" What time period does this test indicate? There's all sorts of pandering nonsense and fantasy involved in commercial DNA testing and this is part of what i want to write about.

Accounts of Irish poverty in the 19th century were part of the larger 19th century interest in racializing difference. The historian Barbara Fields uses the term "racecraft," making a deliberate comparison to witchcraft, a set of practices designed to produce its own object, "witches" Racecraft is the set of techniques that produces "race" and then blames, say, the poverty of the Irish on alleged defects in "the irish race." Poverty is the sign of the existence of race, rather than the sign of greedy basmati landlords backed by guns

Arguments about tradition in music arise from this same 19th century impulse to racialize difference, and imagine a kind of racial continuity that allegedly transcends phenomena like mass poverty, or famine, or economic and geographical displacement. There is of course continuity as well as discontinuity in history. It seems to me that Irish music has changed over time; it has lost and gained different influences over time: it's always been engaged with music from other places, particularly the close neighbors, and in Ireland itself, different social classes have played it at different times. I can hear an "irish" quality in music, but I don't imagine I'm hearing the music of Brian Boru, I think I'm mostly hearing the legacy of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Here's an example of the kind of thing Walter Plecker did for more that twenty years, as supervisor if the bureau of vital statistics in Virginia

[PB+J]

Mistaken double post

[Terry McGee]

PB&J

Just trying to catch up after our extended Internet outage! Mutter, grumble....

I wonder what your delightful Mr Plecker would make of DNA testing? On the face of it, he should be delighted, as it would give him the tools to find that "one drop" of coloured blood needed to disadvantage his victims. But equally he might be very disappointed. Finding some "shading" in his own family perhaps, or finding someone he looks down upon (perhaps for good reason) totally bleached. And, given your DNA results, he would have had to reclassify your predecessor! Pretty hard to pin the term coloured on your 1% Swedish content!

(There's a reason why we Irish suffer so much in the sun down here. No skin pigmentation! All my friends at school could work up to a tan. All I could manage was beetroot (you might call them "beets"). I could go from zero to beetroot in less than an hour. Swimming carnivals at school were hell.)

Being of a certain age, I'm finding the reference to "vital statistics" quite amusing. Do I correctly remember Marilyn Monroe's "vital statistics" quoted as "36-24-36"? We can probably have more faith in that finding than any of Mr Plecker's. The tape measure is a far more reliable tool than anything he had.

I am intrigued by your DNA reading's "95% Irish, 4% Scottish". It might be interesting to query that or even lash out and have another company repeat the analysis. Mentioning that you are quoting the results in a book might grab their attention!

Have any of our other "Celtic" readers had their DNA tested? What did you get? Feel free to let us know - we promise we won't mention the results to Mr Plecker!

Interestingly, I just looked up DNA testing Australia and landed on the AncestryDNA site, where they make a big thing of the possible Irish connection here:

"You could be Irish. More specifically, Munster Irish."



I'd expect to be more Leinster than Munster (Mum was an O'Carolan from Nobber in Co Meath, Dad from Co Louth). But we didn't come over here from Ireland in the Famine, but because of post-WW2 austerity in England. Dad struggled to find reliable work in postwar England, even with the dreaded McAlpine! But even so much later than the period you talk about, Mum in particular reported some relevant experiences. When a child, having the family cottage in Nobber searched by the Black & Tans. Grinding poverty which caused her to venture to England for work. Imagine the fear involved for a country Irish girl to head for London! When she arrived in England, seeing signs on boarding houses: "No blacks, no dogs, no Irish".

And it didn't die out there. Growing up in Ballarat in Victoria, and going to St Patrick's College, I remember kids from the local Protestant school taunting me with 'Catholic dogs, sitting on logs, eating maggots out of frogs.' I was totally mystified at the time!

Woah, I just looked up that doggerel and got a hit! https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article ... ctarianism

And note the site name. Eureka Street. I used to catch the bus to school on Eureka Street. Woah, spooky....

[PB+J]

I have dozens of letter like that from Plecker. People would write to him because they have a family of kids in the local school, and two were light but one was kind of brown--what race are they? Multiple times people asked Plecker if there was some kind of blood test to tell race, and he replied that sadly, there is not, and so we must rely on genealogcal records. Now of course, there IS a test

I've been fascinated by what Ancestry.com is up to. They were able to locate me in specific townlands in Ireland that I knew my ancestors had come from, which I found astonishing. For example it identified the townlands around Lettermacaward and Malin head in Donegal as probable points of origin--indeed I have great grandparents from both places.

I suspect, but have no evidence to prove, that Ancestry tracks its user's search queries, so that when it gets a DNA test kit it can correlate what the DNA shows to what it knows the user is interested in. So if you have, say, ancestors from Krakow and you spend a few months searching on names in the krakow area, when you finally send them the test they are going to emphasize results that point to krakow. Because they increasingly want to sell you ancillary services like "heritage tours."

On the other hand many thousands of Irish people from west Donegal went to the PA coal fields, where my man started out in the US, so their results are historically plausible. I don't think they are lying, I think they are spinning the results in a way designed to serve an interest they have already identified.

Also for what it's worth my results have been "revised" three times since I sent the test in. First I was 90% irish, then a year ago I was 99%, now I'm at 95%. They of course are probably revising results as more and more people take the test and they get more data.

[bigsciota]

Funny you should use that particular example, PB&J! My grandfather was, as Plecker puts it, "a native of the Philippine Islands," and his marriage to my (white, German-ancestry) grandmother would have run afoul of various laws across the US when they got married. They ended up living in Virginia much, much later in life (after raising their kids in the Philippines), but luckily for everyone it was well past Loving so it didn't matter any more.

As for DNA tests, my wife and I did one for fun recently. Mine lit up most of Eurasia, while her ancestors seem to have pretty much stayed put in Cork and Clare (sometimes she wishes she had done so as well!). Worth noting that if any of you met me (which you have, albeit over Zoom), all you'd see is a white dude despite significant Asian ancestry. Goes to show how "scientific" these categories really are.

I do think your point is very important PB&J, that a lot of the writing done on this topic in the 19th and early 20th centuries is tinged with the kind of racialism that was common in its day. The fact that we don't view it as a problem, and indeed have positive associations with the idea of "essential Irishness," "Gaeldom," etc. doesn't completely divorce it from the more uncomfortable precedents and conclusions of that kind of thought.

[PB+J]

Bigscotia, when i teach a course partly on the history of American music I often teach a song called "My filipino baby" which originated in the Spanish American war, and was about a "colored" sailor falling in love with a woman from the Philippines. Then in 1936 it get rewritten and after WWII it gets covered by multiple country singers who turn it into a white sailor singing about how he is going to marry his "filipino baby." In 1946 this same song was number2, number4 and number 5 on the country charts, covered by Ernest Tubb, Cowboy Copas, and T. texas Tyler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_Baby

The lyrics are pretty appalling and students are rightly critical of it, but I point out that in 1946 the marriage being described was illegal in most states where the song was a hit. The racial history of the US is deeply weird

[Terry McGee]

Now, some time back, PB&J, you mentioned that the O'Neill's in Ireland had a good-sized house set on a good amount of land. But you also mentioned that the Land Acts made it impossible for the Irish to buy land. I'm assuming the O'Neill's were Catholic Irish (correct me if I'm wrong) so wouldn't have been allowed to buy land. But was it the case that they could hang on to land they already owned?

We have a touch of the O'Neill's in our family - my father's mother was an Anne O'Neill. No idea where she came from though, and I imagine the name is well distributed.

Remembering other snippets from my mother. In her day, they were not allowed to use the O' in names. So she was Josephine Carolan, even though the family had previously been O'Carolans. And she commented on the cross-road dances (she was a keen dancer back in the day). And how the parish priest would go along the hedges, lashing and poking them with his walking stick to flush out young fornicators...

[PB+J]

Now, some time back, PB&J, you mentioned that the O'Neill's in Ireland had a good-sized house set on a good amount of land. But you also mentioned that the Land Acts made it impossible for the Irish to buy land. I'm assuming the O'Neill's were Catholic Irish (correct me if I'm wrong) so wouldn't have been allowed to buy land. But was it the case that they could hang on to land they already owned?

We have a touch of the O'Neill's in our family - my father's mother was an Anne O'Neill. No idea where she came from though, and I imagine the name is well distributed.

Remembering other snippets from my mother. In her day, they were not allowed to use the O' in names. So she was Josephine Carolan, even though the family had previously been O'Carolans. And she commented on the cross-road dances (she was a keen dancer back in the day). And how the parish priest would go along the hedges, lashing and poking them with his walking stick to flush out young fornicators...

I didn't follow the family very much after francis left.

They leased the land, it appears from the son of Daniel O'Connell himself, one of the rare Catholic landlords in Ireland. Oddly the oldest son, Philip, did not inherit the land--it passed to John O'Neill. who seems to have spearheaded the move to cattle rearing, the eldest son went to the US and for a while ran a stevedore gang in Erie PA. He also lived in NYC for a while and had an account at he Emigrant savings bank.

John O'Neill had a son, Phillip, who lived in Tralibane for part of his life, and he had a son named John, Francis' nephew who he wrote to. John, the nephew, became a priest and held found the Irish Folklore Commission. Phillip lived in Tralibane till about 1910 and then shows up living in Gortnascreeny not far away, on part of the families lease-holdings in 1855. Photos show him to look very prosperous. He was interviewed as part of the schools project in the 1930s, a national oral history project which is now all online and an incredible resource. (https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes). If you search for names in specific townlands the odds are good you will find some relative mentioned

I assume they managed to buy that land after the Land War of the 1880s, but I haven't tried to track it. It'd have to be done in Ireland I think. I had limited time and funds in ireland

[Terry McGee]

Woah, this is complicated stuff, isn't it. I had made an assumption above about the O'Neills: "I imagine the name is well distributed." By which I imagined, much better distributed than say my own name, McGee. And it's perhaps true, but only just. There are 121,191 O'Neills in the world, but only 106,570 McGees. But it's the distribution that is intriguing.

95,861 McGees infest the US, but only 18,436 O'Neills. Sorry about that!

28,230 O'Neills stayed in Ireland, while only 3,322 McGee's remained there.

18,726 O'Neills made it to Australia, compared to a mere 2,745 McGees. Whew. We don't need that many flute makers!

Heh heh, I'm reminded that when I worked at the Research School of Earth Sciences at ANU, and taught tin whistle once per week in the Student's Union, I received a phone call from another Terry McGee who was a Human Geographer at the same university. He was puzzled because he'd received a number of phone calls in the previous week asking him how the Rakes of Kildare went. You'd think a Human Geographer would know that, wouldn't you....

[Jayhawk]

Terry...where did you find the data on surnames? Just curious, because Google popped up a lot more Ryan's out and about than I would expect and I don't trust the site I found. I highly doubt there are 417.984 of us floating around this old globe.

Eric

[Terry McGee]

I have bad news for you, Eric, you are two-a-penny! (Hey, that might not be bad news, you have Critical Mass!)

https://forebears.io/surnames/ryan

And yes, 417,984 Ryans worldwide....

190,608 in the US
53,483 in Australia. Bloody hell, you're our problem too!
48,429 in Ireland.

But here's the weird one:
39,231 in Cambodia. What's going on there?
37,449 in England
then a big drop to Canada at 20,630, and it's downhill the rest of the way.

Now that's just one site. I wonder if there are others, and do they correlate well?

[PB+J]

Of course we all know that Australia is composed mostly of convicts and their former jailers!

It's really is true that entire townlands in west Donegal left for a very specific region of Pennsylvania, so for example there were a lot of Boyles in Pottsville, PA or Tamaqua. My colored ancestor's name was actually Patrick Melley: he changed it for unclear reasons. In one decade, from 1868-1878, six different men named Patrick Melley got married in the same church in Summit Hill, PA. Lots of fun for the historian. Couldn't these people have shown a bit more imagination in their naming practices?

There's the Island of Arranmore, which sent most of its younger population to to Deer Island in Michigan, where Irish was spoken into the 2th century. It's people following family and neighbors. Wash DC has a very large population of Ethiopians, for example, and for some reason they got into the parking garage business. It's almost always the case that if there's an attendant in the parking garage, the person is Ethiopian. I'm sure there's a high concentration of certain Ethiopian surnames in the Wash DC area.