FORMER BRITISH prime minister Tony Blair, who has joined the Catholic Church, is following in a family tradition of switching religions, the Irish National Archives’ records show.Mr Blair’s grandmother, Sara Lipsett, is listed as a member of the Methodist Church in Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, but listed in other records when she stayed with extended family as being a member of the Church of Ireland.
“When she was at home she was Protestant but elsewhere, Methodist. So it was a la carte religion,” National Archives expert Caitriona Crowe told the launch of the search engine for the 1901 census in London yesterday.
It also emerged that Paul McCartney’s great great grandfather, Owen Mohan, lived in Co Monaghan. The former Beatles member got married to Heather Mills in Castle Leslie in the same county in 2002.
“I don’t know whether Mr McCartney is yet aware of his Monaghan connection,” said Ms Crowe, who has led the £3.4 million (€4.1 million) work on making the 1901 Census information available online for free.
The information is to be used later this year in a tourist campaign to encourage Irish-Americans and those in Britain with Irish connections “to come home”, said Minister for Culture, Sport and Tourism, Mary Hanafin.
The campaign, which launches in the UK in September, will feature well-known British people with Irish connections to encourage others to delve into their family trees.
Unlike other countries, Ireland is making the information freely available. The UK has sold the information to ancestry.com, which charges the public to view the records.
The new website, nationalarchives.ie, has proven popular, with 8.3 million people viewing 348 million pages of census details, including names and information about the homes people lived in.
“Being able to see the actual return as signed by your ancestors on that night, containing very personal information about the family, can be a very emotional experience,” she told a function at the Irish Embassy.
Most of the website’s users live in the Republic, three in 10 are from the UK, and one in eight is from the US. However, Tourism Ireland hopes to boost foreign user numbers significantly in coming months.
The website will be developed to allow people to add information so other members of the extended family can learn more about their background.
“People want to know more than just the names. They want to know about the kind of lives that their ancestors lived,” Ms Crowe added.
SIC: IT