In January 1996 Professor Oliver MacDonagh sent me the following cutting from The Sydney Morning Herald. The article refers to Oliver's review of "Finding Connections" by P.J.Kavanagh ( ISBN 0-09-173750-5 ) which deals with Carlow / Australian research journey in 1987. Oliver was born in Dublin Street, where the Red Setter B+B is now established, he was related to the family that operated "Oliver's Wool Stores" . I invited him to write about his early days spent in Carlow, he sent us a 7 page article entitled "Carlow Days". SERENDIPITY By Jill Kitson, Journalist. On the grounds that I never win anything and, besides, could not bear to be disappointed every week, I never buy lottery tickets. But when it comes to making a weekly radio program, I blithely put my trust in an utterly inexplicable higher power – one that, as E.M. Forster might have put it, only connects. In the matter of First Edition, serendipity rules, OK? Take the serendipitously named book Finding Connections, by the English writer P.J. Kavanagh. A review copy was waiting for me when I returned last July from a biography conference in Canberra, where I had met Professor Oliver MacDonagh, the biographer of Daniel O’Connell. A year earlier he had reviewed – splendidly – Roy Foster’s History of Ireland for First Edition. Our meeting had made me anxious to find a new title for him to review. As if on cue, here was Kavanagh: an account of his search for his Irish roots, which had taken him to Ireland and to Tasmania and on to New Zealand. I was dubious, though. This book was not a scholarly book, closer to travel than family history: perhaps too slight to interest Professor MacDonagh. He agreed to look at it. Two weeks passed. A three-page fax arrived unannounced on my desk. I began reading: “…in Finding Connections, (P.J. Kavanagh) explores his ancestry in an attempt to discover and account for the very centre of himself. The dominant – though shadowy – character in the book is his Irish great-grandfather, Patrick Kavanagh, who at the age of 23 left Carlow for Launceston in 1842.” Nothing in the opening paragraph prepared me for the next: “Let me declare my interest straight away,” MacDonagh went on. “I, too, come from Carlow; my forebears lived in the same place as P.J. Kavanagh’s Brown Street; I was born in the very street which is used as a principal symbol by the author, Tullow Street, supposed to be the narrow gut in which more than 600 rebels were massacred in 1798. “I have even had my hair cut by the barber (now retired, Alec Burns) who was P.J’s first guide in Carlow history. So I feel a sort of cousinhood or kinship with the author, which, however spurious, allows me to be easily charmed…” That’s serendipity for you. P.J. Kavanagh can rarely have been so fortunate in his reviewer, whose mellifluous Irish accent lent his words added charm. Jill Kitson presents First Edition, a weekly program on books and writers on ABC Radio National, Australia. On 29 July 2012 21:58, Michael Brennan <[email protected]> wrote: > Oliver MacDonagh another famous Son of a Carlow family > http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irlcar2/Oliver_MacDonagh.htm > > Regards > Michael Brennan > http://www.facebook.com/michael.brennan.3152 > County Carlow Website: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irlcar2/ > My Laois Page: > http://freepages.family.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mjbrennan/index.htm > > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message >