Mal 🇿🇦🏳️‍🌈🇮🇪🏳️‍⚧️🇸🇪

Goodness, what do I know about my #family history, that can be recapitulated in readable toots?

We're a mostly non-religious #Protestant Irish family - #ChurchOfIreland - with main roots in what's now the #RepublicofIreland.

Non-religious we may be, but my Grandad (mother's father), Brian Snow, was a #CoI archdeacon working mainly in the west of #Ireland. He came to his vocation in his forties. He was quite high-church, and extremely #ecumenical, and that was much appreciated by his #Catholic neighbours and friends. He specialised in pastoral work - helping families with problems, visiting the sick and elderly, and so on. I remember being blessed by him at a service when I was a child, kneeling at the altar after communion. I'm not a member of the church, and I was too young to take communion in any case. But mainly I remember buzzing around County #Limerick with him in his Ford Fiesta, visiting people and being given cups of tea and biscuits by his parishioners.

Jan 9, 2025 at 12:41pmWeb
Show threadMal 🇿🇦🏳️‍🌈🇮🇪🏳️‍⚧️🇸🇪Jan 9, 2025

His wife, my Granny Pat Snow, was a senior leader of the Irish #GirlGuides for most of her life. She was an inveterate organiser - people, events, organisations. For a detailed example, she had a 15-minute rendezvous rule, before the age of the cellphone: we should make a plan to meet at a place at a time, but if we missed the time, then we were allowed to go off for 15 minutes, and attempt the meeting again. So you could do other things than just wait. She would have been an exceptional spy.

I don't remember her rank in the Girl Guides, but she was certainly the boss of the Guides in western Ireland. She created a lot of quite comfortable cabins in remote places where Guides could go 'on camp', though of course it was indoors - a good expedient in a wet and fairly cold part of the country. Then one could bivouac in tents on the days of better weather. Being a boy, I didn't go on most of these camps myself. I went on one in Wales when I was about 10 or so. I got a crush on one girl of the same age but I never said anything to her, nor admitted it to my Granny. Everyone was oblivious except for me. I distracted myself by boating on a lake.