It is extraordinary the lengths people were made to go to in centuries past to conceal the paternal ancestry of a child born out of wedlock. The name of a favourite pastry shop, a popular entertainer, a character in a play, or a name plucked from the newspapers - all could serve as potential inspiration for the surname of a child with no official father.
Yet even with the most creative narratives, clues could be dropped accidentally and perhaps even intentionally. Few narratives are ever made up from scratch. But which parts are true and which are not ? To quote David Lloyd George in another related context, extracting the facts from this particular mystery is a bit ‘like trying to pick up mercury with a fork’.
Most of Éamon de Valera’s biographers, most recently David McCullagh, have dealt with the puzzle of the Irish statesman’s paternity with varying degrees of detail and scepticism. They have then understandably moved quickly on to concentrate on his long, far-reaching political career.
When it comes to solving this particular genealogical mystery, there are a number of problems, apart from the unreliability of its lead character, de Valera's mother Catherine Coll (for good reasons of her own no doubt). For a start, its most interested researchers are unlikely to be native New Yorkers, effortlessly familiar with the city’s geography and neighbourhoods. There is also the eternally stubborn presumption that the father of a great man must also have been great, or at least distinguished in some way.
But nobody alive in the 19th century, including the astute Kate Coll, could have predicted the need to outsmart the swathes of genealogical records and powerful search engines available at the click of a mouse in the 21st. Then after all the reams of research to date on the mystery of de Valera's father, Vivion (Juan) de Valera, can any more be squeezed from the relevant sources, such as they are? Or has too much time elapsed and have too many secrets gone to the grave ?
Historyeye looks at the possibilities in the following essay.......
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