Message from the retiring President 2010
It is a great honour – and it has been a great pleasure, too – to have been President of the Irish Genealogical Research Society for the last eighteen years. I am very sorry not to be with you all in person to welcome my successor. But before I knew the date of this AGM, I had committed myself to attending the ninetieth birthday celebrations today in Yorkshire of an old friend who was robust – and optimistic – enough to send out his invitations more than a year in advance. I think you will agree that that is an engagement it would have been wrong to break.
My involvement with the IGRS goes back to 1965, when our then Hon. Secretary, Mrs Lorna Rosbotham, provided me with the clues which launched me on the hunt for my Irish forbears. George Chartres helped me find my way round the Library, as he has helped so many other aspiring genealogists before and since; and Lorna Rosbotham put me in touch with the redoubtable Rosemary ffolliott, who then laid the foundations of what became the Wexford Goodall pedigree. To them, and to all those volunteer members of the Society and its Council who have helped me over the years and who keep the Society afloat, I owe a personal debt and would like to say a very warm thank you.
As well as enabling me to learn about my own forbears (and giving me enormous pleasure along the way), the hunt for Wexford Goodalls introduced me to the last four hundred years of Irish history and, in doing so, gave me an invaluable insight into the complexities of the Anglo-Irish relationship – a relationship at once adversarial and at the same time uniquely close. No one can come seriously to grips with Irish family history without recognising that between Britain and Ireland, in the words of Dr Garret Fitzgerald, there is “an extent of direct human and family ties … probably unprecedented between two independent states ”.
It is a reflection of the strength and importance of these ties that the links between the Society and its Irish branch have steadily strengthened over the last few years, and that the time has come for the Society to have a President from the Irish side of the Irish Sea. Heraldry and genealogy are cognate fields of study: so it is doubly appropriate that the distinguished scholar who is to be our next President is the former Chief Herald of Ireland, Mr Fergus Gillespie. I am sure that under his auspices both the Irish and the London branches of the IGRS will flourish, and I am delighted to welcome him on behalf of all the members of the Society.