Cork

It's about 9:45 in the morning here in Cork, it's raining slightly and all I have in hand is my notebook in search for family ties. Thanks to dad's cousin Anne, I had a good amount of places to check out possible lineage with the Crowley. I checked on the Irish genealogy site for the name Timothy Crowley (names of both my great-great grandfather, and my great-great-great grandfather) and got about twelve hits all pointing to the county that I'm in now.

Rewind to yesterday, I arrive by train into cork and stop by the nearest hostel which was about a five minute walk from the station. I bought my room, tossed my stuff on my bed, and went walking toward the city center to just browse around. And what did I happen to find? Not a block and a half away from the hostel I found a sign saying, "Stokes Clock work and Antiques shop." Seriously? Then another block from there, across the street, there was Crowley's music store. Seriously? I'm starting to think I might have more Irish heritage than the original 1/8th I thought I had.

Finding myself somewhat shocked by the name coincidence, I decided to keep walking towards the city center. It's a pretty typical city center, a bunch of shops, a tourist center, nothing particularly exciting. I walked by the Beamish brewery and gave a tip of the hat to them for making a solid stout, looked to my right and stopped in my tracks to see St. Finbarres cathedral. The construction was absolutely beautiful and detailed. The cathedral had statues of many different Biblical personalities, along with the respected occupations carved into the arches of the doorways. I went inside to breathe taking stained glass, tiles that had been made by Italian artisans hundreds of years ago, and a plaque commemorating the only Irish female Freemason. Simply fantastic.

Later that night, since I had looked up the Crowley name and the Mee name in the Irish genealogy site and gotten limited hits, I decided because of the Stokes store coincidence that I would look that name up in the registry to see what I would get. Crowley gave me twelve hits, Mee gave me eight, Stokes gave me over 350 birth records dating back to 1658. I think I have more Irish blood in me than the 1/8th I originally thought.

I believe the Clock store is going to open up at any minute now, so I'm off to see if the name is still present in worker of the shop.

John