It is east to forget that one has four great grand fathers, seeing as the possibility, in my child hood, of meeting any of them was unlikely.

I have a memory of a photograph of this man, in stout old age but still wearing his impressive moustache, which is in the family album somewhere.
My father was always proud of the fact that we were of the side of the Magnier family which retained the original “i” in the spelling, the others were contemptiously referred to as the “blind” Magners.
He may even have been right, the ones with the “i” in have done pretty well for themselves. My father even managed to establish a family connection to the man with the stud in Coolmore.

There were always great stories going about the farm Duntaheen (pronounced, for some reason, Duntane) and about the various high jinks there.
The two sons, Cyril and Fred were contempories of my father, even though they were technically his uncles, and there was another daughter, Irene, born in 1912 who was to become my god-mother, and also there are another four children in the family tree who don’t make it here, presumably because they died in infancy.(Although there is one, Frank, who has a cryptic; K. In Sudan after his name. Whether this was in a war or by a tiger we will never know now)

I was puzzled by the Kathleen until I realised it was, of course, Auntie Kat.
She was the unmarried aunt who spent her life being ferried from one relative to another. When she stayed with my Granny (who was Mamie, the eldest) she was treated as a sort of unpaid servant but she got her revenge by smoking like a chimney (a habit my grandmother loathed) so much so that she had a wonderful streak of incongruous red, nicotene stained, hair right over her brow.

William’s children I would also have known a little; Veronika having married Ken Kiersey the architecht I feel a connection to as I inherited a lovely painting this man made of their house in Glenageary and a cousin of his, John Kiersey of Kilmacthomas is a great friend of ours and sings in Sile’s choir.
There is also the interesting Mary, the wild one, who ended up marrying a rather bohemian artist and moving (long before it was fashionable) to Spain.

So a thanks are due to my brother Ted who unearthed the reference to the Great Grand Father, and the picture from a sort of Cork Who’s Who of the 1910s.
There is no doubt in my mind that the older one gets (and the closer to them!) the more fascinated one becomes with ones forefathers.