There is a great surge of interest in genealogy in Ireland at the moment as the first census taken in 1926 after Ireland became a free state or independent republic has just been released. In the first 24 hours there was something like one million hits on the website such is the excitement it has generated! Millie, a cousin of mine on my mother’s side has been working on our own family tree for several years so the additional information from this census will add to her large body of existing knowledge no doubt.

Some time back she communicated with my older sister asking for some more details of our maternal grandmother in Fanad, Co. Donegal as she was finding it impossible to locate her anywhere; she was finding everyone else for at least five generations or more but granny Friel was missing. How could she be – a prominent lady in the locality as a headmistress in Doaghbeg Primary School for many years, the wife of Francis Friel  a big farmer and general shopkeeper and herself a member of a well-remembered family the McAteers of Shannagh? Where on earth was she? How was she lost?

Millie casually mentioned having some more missing links in earlier generations and one or two other more minor challenges. Just as an aside she also spoke of having five women  each of whom appeared only once in any census or document –or  maybe twice at most. She could find no adequate details about any of them. For this she had looked up birth & baptismal records, marriage certificates and had gone into so much more detail trying to find my grandmother while  also trying to sort out these other five local women.

Millie regularly visited Fanad and trusted the memory and oral history of the local people as she continued her task. One day she met an old man whom we called Taig and she spoke to him of not having made the connection with Mrs. Friel in any document she found. He took his pipe out of his mouth, spat on the ground, thought for a few minutes, and said:

“ By what name would you be looking for Mrs Friel, girl?”

“Well I don’t know her right name but I know she existed as a woman & is listed in one place as the wife of Francis Friel by the name  Cecelia McAteer” replied Millie.

Taig was quiet, he then went on to say that that was a posh English name they must have given her but her real Christian name was Jiley called after her own grandmother Jiley Coll of happy memory. The Colls were a fine Shannagh family he said knowingly. Her siblings might have called her Julia, or later on  even Celia. So Millie seemed to have four of the women found – all in one person! But what of Sheila Friel mother of seven children and a teacher in Doaghbeg….was she the same woman? Yes she was and this name was the Irish version of Jiley, Julia, Cecelia and Celia and the name given to her during her teachers’ training course and fortunately the one I was given at birth, as I was named traditionally for my maternal grandmother.

With her newfound  knowledge Millie had pieced together her biggest puzzle and all relating to one woman, and one known to everyone in the whole area of Fanad simply as “Mrs. Friel” and this in a locality where people were more generally called by nicknames to avoid confusion as surnames where nearly all the same. So granny as a married woman would have been Sheila, Jiley, Julia, Celia, or Cecelia Francie John but she was never called this. She was always “Mrs. Friel.” I am delighted to have been called after her as she was a truly remarkable woman who lived to be ninety-seven – and oh am I glad I got my favourite version of her name – SHEILA?!