It all started with this photograph.

You can read my earlier piece about it here

This was found in my Mothers documents after her death and was was a cause of some confusion to my siblings as it was new to them. It had not been a picture my mother had been particularly pleased with and thereby hangs a tale.

It is a picture taken sometime around 1914 of the wedding of Agnes Harding to Billy Dwyer. The reason for my mothers pique is that she was the five year old flower girl but was not allowed pose for the slow exposure of the picture in case she would fidget. Her first public appearance was thus not recorded.
I had come across the picture sometime as a boy and my mother had told me the story.

The reason for its extradorinary relevance in our family is that it was the marriage of two old significant Cork families, The Dwyers and the Hardings, which was to be duplicated 28 years later when my mother, niece of the bride and my father nephew of the groom themselves got married.

In the picture are my maternal great grandmother (daughter of John Francis Maguire) my maternal grandmother and grandfather, my paternal great grand father (a nephew of the notorious William Martin Murphy) and my paternal grandfather and grandmother. It is virtually a family tree all in a photograph. It turned out that I was the only one to whom my mother had explained the full signigicance of the picture and, as I had at that stage just started my blog, Words, I, of course, blogged it and tried to attach names to the people, who were all relatives on one side or the other.
My brother Ted read the blog, was fascinated, and called together a family meeting.
Ted had decided that it was time that the history of our family in Cork was written down.
Ted himself had already written a book on himself and the family Don’t be afraid to Dream which had been published in 1996. This had touched on the history of the Dwyers in Cork but Ted now felt that it was time the whole story was told.

The Dwyers had been one of Cork’s so called Merchant Prince families, in the fifties in Cork their various commercial interests would have employed 6,000 people in Cork city, making them the biggest employers in Munster at that time and indeed one of the biggest in Ireland.

The Hardings and Dalys were were likewise involved in trade, but to a lesser extent. My mother’s Grandfather was John Francis Maguire, MP and lord Mayor of Cork, Papal Count and founder of the Cork Examiner.

The family soon realised the enormity of the task ahead and that we needed expert help to achieve the book, to all of our great delight we managed to persuade Mary Leland, one of Irelands best writers, to write it for us .
The agreement from the begining with Mary was that she would be given a free hand and produce the history “warts and all” (and there are plenty of warts in the family tree)

So the book has been in the manufacture since then and now the moment is approaching , sometime in 2008, when it will be published.
A moment I look forward to with great anticipation.