Author Julie Parsons is on a quest to re-discover the history of the Mariners' Church in Dun Laoghaire. Julie has started the Mariners Project to discover what happened to the parishioners who lived in the streets and squares of Dun Laoghaire or Kingstown as it was called.

My grandfather, Canon George Chamberlain, was the rector of the Mariners’ Church in Dun Laoghaire from 1925 until he retired in 1959. The Mariners’, built in 1836, was originally a sailors’ church, designed to service the spiritual needs of the sailors of the Royal Navy and the ferries which crisscrossed the Irish sea from Dun Laoghaire, or Kingstown as it was then called, and Holyhead in North Wales. As the years passed the congregation grew. Church of Ireland shopkeepers, gardeners, teachers, domestic servants, labourers, soldiers, clerks all worshipped at the Mariners’. It was a vibrant place. Sunday services were crowded, choir and parishioners raising the roof with their singing. My mother, Elizabeth, who grew up in the rectory in Adelaide Street, loved to tell me stories about the parishioners who all lived in Kingstown’s Victorian and Edwardian streets and squares.

However, it is a historical fact that the population of Protestants in the Irish Republic has declined significantly since independence. In 1920 it was 10%. In 2000 it was 3%. South County Dublin illustrates vividly this decline. Between Blackrock and Dalkey there are seven Church of Ireland churches, one Presbyterian church and one Evangelical church. Of the seven C. of I. churches, one, St John’s Mountown, is now a Catholic church and the Mariners is now the home of the Maritime museum. The other churches continue, but with congregations which are drastically reduced. At Christmas the numbers, bolstered by Catholics and non believers, swell for the traditional carol service, but for the rest of the year the attendance is sparse.

The reasons for the exodus of Protestants are at once obvious and hidden. It would be an obvious assumption that most Protestants were more loyal and committed to the Crown and that as the Crown gave way to the harp so the Protestants decided to make their lives in other parts of the world where the Crown was still dominant. Anecdotal evidence would support this view. But it is mostly anecdotal. As the granddaughter of the rector of the Mariners, whose congregation declined so significantly that in 1971 the church closed and the parish was amalgamated with Christ Church, two streets away, I often wandered what had happened to all the people of whom my mother spoke.

So I decided to find out. First of all I needed to determine who were the Mariners’ parishioners. I went to the Church of Ireland library in Churchtown and I painstakingly copied out the marriage and baptismal registers from 1900 to 1939. I cross referenced them and found forty-eight couples who were married in the Mariner’ and subsequently had their children baptised there. These people, I decided, are my “Mariners’ Families” and it is them I am looking for.

But how to start? I am not a historian. I am a writer with an interest in mysteries and solving them. I looked through the list and noticed that many of the surnames, names like Monsell, Pemberton, Blackmore, Symes, Glansford, Archibald, were unusual. So using my common sense I consulted the Dublin phone book. And sure enough I found many of the unusual names as well as the more usual – Farrell, Higgins, Moore. I wrote to the people in the phone book, asking them if they were related to the particular family with the same name and waited, not certain what Pandora’s box I might have opened. Within a couple of days I received a flood of replies. Unfortunately, most did not progress my search but everyone was intrigued by it and many people had interesting family stories to tell. However, I did find five of the families this way which gave me hope that I would be able to fulfil my ambition.

After that initial success I tried another common sense approach. I asked around. Dun Laoghaire is a small town, Although part of greater Dublin it has its own unique identity. I was amazed that I was able to find eleven more of the families this way. I had tapped into the remnants of the Mariner’s congregation who had not emigrated, just moved. Many came from a nexus of inter-related families and are still in touch. Indeed I found a group of ladies, former members of the Girls’ Brigade, who still meet every week for bingo and chat.

But where to go next? According to the occupations given in the marriage and baptismal registers, some had been in the Royal Navy, the British Army, or were civil servants working for the British government in Ireland. Regimental websites gave me information about George Carswell, from Mulgrave Street, who had charged at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, but no further clues as to what might have happened to his children Richard and Hamilton. Kevin Lohan, an archivist suggested a number of sources. The Irish Times archive revealed a treasure trove of snippets of information about a number of the families. Births, marriages and in particular deaths provided the possibility of researching wills held by the National Archives which will give names of executors, usually a relative with an address to be followed up on.

But mostly the Irish Times archive gave me an insight into the lives of some of the families. The Monsells of Mulgrave Terrace, whose children, Clarendon and Fortescue, won prizes in a riddle competition in 1925. The Pemberton family from Clarinda Park, whose daughter Dora was in a production of “Northanger Abbey” at Alexandra school in 1923, James Kitchen from Charlemont Terrace, whose occupation was listed as a “journalist” and whose obituary revealed that he had been a sub editor for the Irish Press for 20 years, and most interestingly the life of George T. Hamlet also from Clarinda Park, an international rugby played, capped 30 times for Ireland, who joined the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in 1915 and his son George A. Hamlet, who during the 2nd world war was at the infamous Battle of Souda Bay in Crete where the Allies suffered an infamous defeat, resulting in George’s imprisonment in German POW camps for four years.

So far I’ve made contact with 18 of my 48 families. My website www.julieparsons.com explains the background to my quest and names the families. The lives of these people matter to me. I am sure their grandchildren and great grandchildren are out there somewhere. I am determined to find them.

About the author: Julie Parsons was born in New Zealand and has lived most of her adult life in Ireland. She has had a varied career – artist’s model, typesetter, freelance journalist, radio and television producer – before returning to write fiction. Julie lives outside Dublin, by the sea, with her family.