Or, Subtitled: “In putting away the dead we also put ourselves away”
This posting is not precisely a genealogical posting. It’s a genealogy-adjacent posting, however. It is, in some ways, a gloss on my previous posting reporting on my research several weeks ago in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, and the information I found there about my Ryan ancestral family of southern County Kilkenny in the first half of the 1800s. After my return home from Ireland, I read Patrick Joyce’s marvelous book Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (NY and London: Scribner, 2024), which I had spotted in Dublin’s wonderful Hodges Figgis bookstore. In what follows, I want to share some reflections on a passage in Joyce’s Remembering Peasants, the passage highlighted in the graphic at the head of this posting (to read the second part of this posting, click the numeral 2 below):
BEGATS AND BEQUEATHALS 