History re-written (or re-pictured).

In June this year, my wife and I took another trip to Co Clare, this time the intention was to make some video recordings of Whitegate and the Cliffs of Moher. I already knew that the photographs I took in Whitegate the previous year were NOT of the house my grandmother was born and grew up in - that was down the road towards Mountshannon in a hamlet called Gweeneeny. So the first task this year was to correct the previous year's error and photograph the pub which my great grandfather ran in the late 1800's.

While we were in Gweeneeny, I visited another local researcher who had collected details of my grandmother's local school records (Lakyle National School). I was able to photograph the school records for my grandmother and each of her siblings at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th.

Unfortunately, further research at Ennis Library did not produce any further information about either the Allisons, or the Hutchinsons. But I was able to have a look at my great grandfather's last home on the outskirts of Limerick. He moved here sometime between 1901 and 1911 and died here in 1923.

Samuel Fox - Photographer

Early on in my investigations into my family I started off with my father's family because my cousin's wife Linda had already done my mother's maternal line pretty comprehensively. I remember my mother saying that my grandfather had been entitled to a double-barrelled name but chose not to use it. So, I started, knowing that my grandfather had been a commercial artist, I went back to the 1901 census and discovered him at home with his parents and sisters. I then managed to go back to the 1851 census with his father Robert Jones, discovering my great great grandfather John Jones to have been a partner in the firm what became known as Dickens & Jones of Regent Street. No, he was not the Jones of that partnership name. That honour belonged to one John Pritchard Jones, originally from Anglesey. My gg grandfather apparently was born in a tiny hamlet near to Dolgellau in North Wales. When my gg grandfather was involved, the firm was originally called Dickens, Smith & Stevens, only

His son, though married one Catherine Fox, whose father, Samuel came from Workington in Cumbria. Samuel had become a travelling daguerrotype artist (otherwise known as a photographer). He started in Ireland sometime during the 1840's and got married there to Catherine Molloy from Athy in Kildare. He moved back to England during the late 1840's to Worthing in Sussex, where he set up his own photographic studio. Samuel himself died in 1867 when he was only 62, but his business was carried on by Catherine and his daughters until the daughters all married.