Every now and then I lose the impetus to continue
researching my family history, and then something special happens to give me a
huge gee-up. Recently I wrote a little piece about an interesting discovery that I had made in the course of researching my grandfather, Frank Carney. I had found a tiny
entry in the Derry Journal of November 4th 1940 and it revealed that
my grandfather had a childhood friend, E.V. O’Carroll, and that they were
inseparable.1
At first I had difficulty finding out much about Major
General E.V. O’Carroll, it even took me some time to discover his full name. Eventually I put the information I had up on my blog, and thanks to the wonderful times that we live in, the son of Eamon Vincent O’Carroll saw the post and he has been in touch.
His father, Major General O'Carroll, passed away in 1941, only a couple of months after his retirement from the Irish Army. His son was a very young child at this time, and
he too has very little information on this hero of the Irish War of
Independence. Now we share this one precious personal snippet from their early
lives, that Frank Carney and Eamon O’Carroll were the best of friends in their
secondary school in Enniskillen until they both left there in 1913.
Eamon O’Carroll’s son and I live continents apart, but both
of us find ourselves sharing the same emotions at this meeting of the
descendants of those two school chums from so long ago. Somehow we have touched their lives, they have become more real, and, for just this moment, we are as close as they once were.
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| E.V. O'Carroll |
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| E.V. O'Carroll |
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Notes:
1 The original blog post is - The Connection to the Bureau of Military History
Thanks to Tara O'Carroll, granddaughter of E.V. O'Carroll for passing on these two beautiful pictures.
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