The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #159615   Message #3782117
Posted By: keberoxu
29-Mar-16 - 06:09 PM
Thread Name: De Barra family ancestry (harps)
Subject: Roisin Ni She and the de Barras
The redoubtable O'Shea/Ó Séaghdha family has turned up on the "dear spinning Eileens" thread about the Irish harp. When I learned that Róisín Ní Shé, who died in 2005, had two generations of descendants and that some of them were prominent in Irish music today, I thought this line of descent deserved a thread of its own.

Much of the following info on Róisín comes from the Gaelic-language entry at ainm.ie, where there are biographical entries for Róisín under her married name, for her father Seán Pádraig Ó Séaghdha, and for her sister Nessa Ní Shéaghdha (but none, strangely, for oldest sister Máirín, the harp teacher at Sion Hill's Dominican convent school).

Her parents came from county Cork. They had moved to Dublin (Drumcondra) when Róisín Ní Séaghdha was born on September 14, 1919. Her arrival was preceded by the births of Máiriín, Nessa, and only brother Finbarr. The ainm.ie entry, concise as it has to be, leaves out almost as much as it discloses; there is no mention, for instance, of Caroline Townshend/Townsend (depending on who the writer is who mentions her), herself from a Cork family, who made up her mind to investigate the Irish harp. The little I can find on Ms. Townshend says that when she finally located a playable Irish harp, it was in Wales (?!). In her enthusiasm for all things Irish, she learned how to play the harp (no mention of a tutor), she arranged traditional Irish songs, and she even cooperated with people who wanted instruments like hers, and she gave permission to have harps made that were exact copies of her own. Doesn't say, but I am guessing this was a gut-stringed harp, not a wire-strung Gaelic harp.

When Caroline Townshend relocated from county Cork to Dublin, she had already been teaching harp lessons for years. In Dublin she was sought out for harp tuition, and it is stated that the daughters of Seán Pádraig Ó Séaghdha were among Ms. Townshend's more advanced students, with whom she was especially pleased.

Róisín Ní Séaghdha's formal education was extensive. She studied at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (piano I believe), in addition to her studies with Caroline Townshend. Then there was her bachelor's degree from University College, Dublin; her major was Celtic Studies. Here, I attempt, with the help of Google Translate, an English translation of statements quoted from the biographical entry in Irish.

[quote] The result [of the UCD Celtic Studies major] is that she spoke Welsh fluently, and that she learned to speak Breton and Irish Gaelic at a later date; in fact she was a good speaker of FrePOST http://mudcat.org/NewMess-Sub.cfm HTTP/1.1 Host: mudcat.org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Referer: http://mudcat.org/newmess.cfm Cookie: CFID=206265; CFTOKEN=24834222; _cb_ls=1; _chartbeat2=CWKQmv07YUKBMg3c2.1459290053475.1459291485106.1; __atuvc=4|13; __atuvs=56fb