School of History, UCC

Dr Shannon Devlin, School of Arts & Humanities, University of Ulster

Thursday 10 November 2022, 16.00, Teams

The paper will be delivered through MS Teams. To obtain a Teams link, please, contact Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel (School of History, UCC), j.aandewiel@ucc.ie, or use the link provided here

Paper Born over two decades, ten Andrews siblings grew up on a modest tenant farm in County Down. Here they negotiated nineteenth-century gender roles, created loving familial bonds, and formed friendships, loyalties, and estrangements in adulthood. Surviving family letters exchanged between the siblings provide rich insight into three generations of the family and their attempt to maintain their position in rural middle-class Ireland amidst family scandal, farming feuds, sibling migration, and downward social mobility. Most nineteenth-century Irish families were large with lots of siblings. Yet, brothers and sisters are often side-lined in favour of looking at the family from a vertical perspective. These horizontal relationships complicate our understanding of household and reveal overlapping intergenerational relationships, favouritisms in large families, and complicated emotional bonds between siblings.

This paper uses the sibling relationship to unravel complex family networks and explore nineteenth-century Irish middle-class society through the family lens. Dr Shannon Devlin is a lecturer in Irish Gender History at University of Ulster. Her research interests lie in the Irish middle classes, the role of family in society, and Irish family migration. Using personal correspondence and family papers, her research utilises horizontal relationships – such as between siblings or cousins – to explore family strategy and social mobility in nineteenth-century Ireland. In 2020, she completed her PhD thesis at Queen’s University, Belfast, and is currently developing this research into a monograph. Shannon has just completed a Short-Term Fellowship at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and is a current member of the Reconstituting the Irish Family Research Network under the direction of Dr Maeve O’Riordan (University College, Cork) and Dr Leanne Calvert (University of Hertfordshire).