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| The baptism of James Augustine Joyce, St. Joseph's Church, Terenure (NLI Registers) |
This past Friday was a literary holiday of sorts, particularly in Dublin, marking Bloomsday, the day that Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses, made his sojourn through Dublin on 16 June 1904. A group of Dublin's literati began to mark the occasion by recreating Bloom's adventures in a pilgrimage of their own, and so the Bloomsday tradition was born. Now, a discussion of Irish literature might seem an odd topic for a genealogy blog, but Joyce's Dublin is actually also "my" Dublin. The same city as he knew it was the city as my ancestors knew it, in the places they lived and went to church and in the streets they traversed, and so I'm sharing a few of those places and what their significance was in my research on the O'Reilly family in Dublin.
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| St. Joseph's, Terenure (Dublin City Libraries) |
The first stop on this historical journey through Joyce's Dublin is the church where he was baptized, St. Joseph's in Terenure. I've
written about St. Joseph's before, and how the registers of that church provided information on the location of relatives who had gone to America. Part of Joyce's baptismal entry in the registers, from February 1882, can be seen in the image at the top, the full page
may be seen here. My cousin Isaac O'Reilly was also baptized at St. Joseph's just a few years before Joyce, and Isaac's wife Julia Mannering was also from that parish. As I've previously written on these O'Reillys, Isaac and Julia were married at St. Joseph's in 1897, and since all of Isaac's immediate family were living in America, his uncle Laurence O'Reilly was his witness. Laurence's address was given as 5 North Richmond Street.
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A first edition of Ulysses
Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities, Austin, Texas
Photo: A. R. Dotson |
At the time my great-great granduncle Laurence O'Reilly listed his address in his nephew's marriage record, number 17 North Richmond Street was occupied by a large family represented in the Thom's Dublin directory under the name of "Joyce, John, esq." This head of house was John Stanislaus Joyce, the father of James, who in February of 1897 would have just turned 15. North Richmond Street was a short street consisting of only 20 households, and uncle Laurence had children of his own around the same age as the Joyces. It's quite possible the two families were acquainted. What we do know is that North Richmond Street left enough of an impression on the young James Joyce to appear in two of his works: a short story in
Dubliners entitled "Araby" and in
Ulysses.
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The Bleeding Horse, Camden Street
Photo: A. R. Dotson |
Laurence, who had been promoted to superintendent in the Dublin Metropolitan Police by the time he resided on North Richmond Street, had moved his family to that address from number 29 Lombard Street West, a Victorian terraced house in Portobello, where they had lived just around the corner from his widowed mother Bridget. Lombard Street itself is part of the Dublin of
Ulysses, being a former address of Joyce's protagonist Leopold Bloom. A short walk from what was the O'Reilly home, just around the corner past their church, St. Kevin's, is Camden Street and yet another landmark of the Dublin of
Ulysses. "I saw him a few times in the Bleeding Horse in Camden street with Boylan the billsticker" says a character named Corley in reference to Bloom (
Ulysses, Episode 16: "Eumaeus"). Even today, you can stop in at the Bleeding Horse for a pint. It's still there, just as it was when the fictional Leopold Bloom was seen there, and just as it was when my very real ancestors lived in the neighborhood. Who knows, they may have been seen in there a few times themselves!
