Just reading @TimWilsonCSTPV's "Frontiers of Violence", in particular his comments about the AOH/Hibs. Reminded me of an overlooked resource relating to that organisation. But first, I need to describe how I came across it. A thread...

I was doing the family-history bit relating to my granda, specifically, when did HIS father, Joseph Glennon, die?

He was Joseph Glennon in the 1901 Census. But by 1911, he was Seosamh Mac Giolla Fhinnen, one of only about 30 householders in Belfast to fill in the Census form completely as Gaeilge, which was allowed, even back then.

Family legend has it that he gave a speech at the Wolfe Tone commemoration in Bodenstown one year. Which'd make him IRB, so he'd be reasonably hardcore. Three sons in the pogrom-era Belfast IRA would reinforce that perception.

(Typo)

Anyway, up to 1935, Joseph - as Béarla - is listed in the Street Directory as householder for the house where my da grew up, what he knew as "my grannie's house." For a few years after that, the house is just listed as "occupied", no name given. So Joseph probably died 1935ish.

So I went into GRONI in Belfast, the births and deaths registry, which was then in Chichester St or May St, somewhere down that direction. Asked the chap to look up Joseph Glennon. Nada. Asked him to look up Seosamh Mac Ghiolla Fhinnen. Nada.

Asked him to look up Seosamh Mac Leannáin, another Irish surname that also translates as Glennon. Still nada.
OK, great-granda is proving elusive...

Had a brainwave: started working through potential MIS-spellings of great-granda's names, one in English, two in Irish. That's a lot of potential mis-spellings, so the chap's patience eventually ran out.

Had another brainwave: great-granda left a widow and six children, surely one of them put a death notice in the Irish News? So I decided to search a year and a half either side of Joseph's last sighting in the Steet Directory in 1935.

Believe me, you have no idea what it's like to read three years' worth of death notices in the National Library on successive weekends, looking for one particular needle in an extremely morbid haystack. At the time, the Irish News death notices were on the front page...

Then, as I was wading through early 1934, Wee Joe Devlin died. Believe me, the AOH absolutely invaded the death notices column of the Irish News thereafter. Except now, it wasn't a column, singular, it was columns and columns. And this went on for days and days and days.

Tributes and obsequies and laments and praise-giving from AOH "Divisions" (branches) from all across the north and border counties. "Outpouring of grief" is an understatement. Meanwhile, I'm muttering "That's not the Joseph I'm looking for, stop cluttering up the death notices!"

Conclusion #1: if you want to assess the spread and post-partition longevity of the AOH, the death notices of the Irish News in January 1934 are a good place to start.

I never did find a death notice for my great-granda, Joseph Glennon. Conclusion #2, as I told my da: "Maybe his final instruction was to deprive the Brits of the satisfaction of knowing he was dead." /ENDS