Julia (Byrne) Redmond
Jackeen to the core Gran was born in the Liberties, the area south of the Liffey, outside the Medieval City Walls, where William Byrne, a printer, my paternal great grandfather, was born in 1857. He married Mary Quinn, age twenty, whose family came from around Herberton Bridge in Dolphins Barn. They married in 1881 in St James’s Chapel, and moved out of the Liberties, finding lodgings on the north side of the Liffey. No.19 Upper Dominick Street had been the Regency house of William O’Kelly MD. Of course, Dr O’Kelly, his family and servants had long moved on, and No.19 was now a multi occupied grandiose tenement, albeit with a closed hall door. Six of Mary’s seven children survived and moved on from there over to the Gardiner Estate area. Julia, aka Jools, my grandmother, the oldest, worked as a box maker when she left school and was then apprenticed to a dressmaker and became a skilled seamstress. She may well have been apprenticed to Granda’s first wife Mary Ellen, a dressmaker, who lived next door. Marion also worked in a box factory and suffered from progressive deafness, Joe became a printer like his father, Alice appears to have been ’beyond parental control’ and spent most of her life in Institutional settings, dying in the South Dublin Poor House, Billy was a butcher’s boy having failed to join the Dublin Fusiliers and was a mine of infor-mation on esoteric subjects. Kitty married late in life so was childless. She moved Marion and Billy into her home in Ringsend when her husband, Tom, died. Before their move, Marion and Billy, and their widowed mother, Mary, had done the rounds of the Gardiner Estate, ending up in 1 Rutland Cottages around the corner from Gran in the Dwellings in Upper Buckingham Street. They were a scrawny little family but they all saw in their three score and ten. Despite their rickety appearance there is no genealogical evidence to suggest that any of them succumbed to tuberculosis and some of their previous generation had been deemed fit enough to take the ‘King’s Shilling’ and lie in unmarked graves across the African veldt and at Suvla and Sud el Bhar. Apart from far off Commonwealth graves the only places to commemorate their memory is the Fusiliers Arch at St. Stephens Green and a memorial in Glasnevin.
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Julia is 31 degrees from Emeril Lagasse, 31 degrees from Nigella Lawson, 29 degrees from Maggie Beer, 54 degrees from Mary Hunnings, 35 degrees from Joop Braakhekke, 38 degrees from Michael Chow, 24 degrees from Ree Drummond, 29 degrees from Paul Hollywood, 31 degrees from Matty Matheson, 29 degrees from Martha Stewart, 38 degrees from Danny Trejo and 36 degrees from Molly Yeh on our single family tree. Login to find your connection.
Gran never crossed their doorstep and I thought she would drop dead on the spot when she saw me coming out of the local premises one day having redeemed Jim Fitzpatrick’s Sunday suit for Irene. Pawnbrokers were not as avaricious as the money lenders, who were despised. The former was limited by law to an interest rate of 5d per £1 per month, while the latter’ usually a woman, could charge any amount of interest on her loans, 50% was not uncommon. The other alternative was the Tallyman’s never-never schemes which often ended in midnight flits. Julia Byrne was a frugal thrifty woman who always seemed to be able to provide food and fuel, and pay the rent and her penny policies. Because of her parsimoniousness, I used to be mortified going shopping along Summerhill with her. I always think of her attitude to measured meted out charity whenever I read the words of John Boyle O’Reilly The organized charity, scrimped and iced, in the name of a cautious statistical Christ. The smile restrained the respectable cant when a friend in need is a friend in want. When the only aim is to keep afloat and a brother may die with a cry in his throat.