WW1 and a lovely recent photo of Patrick Sheahan

Below is a recent post by a person who uses the name John Granville on the Listowel forum.

There might be people reading this who have an interest in these things. We, in NKRO, 

would love to find someone interested in doing this research and we would post it 

on our soon- to -be- revealed website .

I watched some of the ‘Nationwide’ programme on Mon. night about the

 number of Irish people who died in World War I. As the camera panned

down the list of names I spotted that of John Barry of Listowel who was

killed in action in France on March 17th. 1917.

Curious to know a little

more, I did a little research.

Anthony Gaughan hasn’t much to say about the period in his book except that hundreds from the area joined the British Army and died in the Boer War and in World War I, especially at Gallipoli. He doesn’t mention any names. (p.152, Listowel and its Vicinity)

I didn’t find any more information about John Barry but I discovered that Kerry County Library archives has a list of Kerry related fatalities from WWI, 674 in all, listed alphabetically.

Some of the entries have linked photographs of the deceased, a piece of official documentation or, sadly, a letter from a mother or relative to the authorities requesting information about a missing loved one.

The following is a typical entry:

STACK, EDWARD PAUL.

Rank: Lance Corporal. Regiment or Service: Royal Irish Rifles. Unit: 2^nd Battalion.

Age at death: 20. Date of Death: 26-October-1914. Service No: 9950.

Supplementary information: Son of John and Ellen Stack, of Church St., Listowel, Co. Kerry. Born in Listowel, County Kerry. Enlisted in Cork.

Killed in Action. Grave or Memorial Reference: Panel 42 and 43.

He has no known grave but is listed on the Le Touret Memorial in France.

There are many more from Listowel. Like the above, many died very young and have no known grave. It would be interesting to know how

many from Listowel, urban and rural, lost their lives in that awful conflict

 and also, of course, those who fought and survived

 Next I have a few housekeeping words for you. I'm fairly new to blogging but how it works is this:

I post something. I look at it online and then I edit. I am now discoveing that people who have signed up with feedburner get the first draft sent to them. This very often has missing links, missing photos, missing letters, punctuation etc.  If this is happening to you, you will have to go in to the blog a second time to see the actual post. If you don't know what I am talking about, ignore this next bit.

On Sunday I posted a letter I found on Twitter about the refurbrished Irish embassy in Ottowa. I cut and pasted, I posted as an image, as a link and in every way I knew but I couldn't put it online, so my feedburner people got a mention of it and no story. I'll try today for the last time and if I fail I'll give you the gist of it in my next post.

I will post later on today if I get a photo of Manny.

Meanwhile Tom Fitzgerald shared this lovely photo of Patrick Sheahan of Finuge relaxing on "his" bench in the summer sunshine.