Technical Briefing – Project 1

The speech involved a powerpoint presentation. The text below is the notes from the ppt but I didn’t use them after the first slide. Ran a bit over time at 11min+ but given the amount of information I was trying to cover I’m not surprised. Just need to be tighter on the extras. Pleased overall. Evaluation was good.

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Slide 1

Madam Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and welcome guests.

More and more information is becoming available online about the history of our people and our communities. Accessing it is easy and following the footprints left by previous generations can be both interesting and enjoyable. Tonight, I want to show you just one source of online information: the National Archives of Ireland website. This website has made available, as recently as last August, census records from 1911.

Slide 2

Here is the welcome page from the online archive. As you can see there is a whole load of links here that you can brows at your leisure. What we are interested in tonight are two links: 1.The SEARCH CENSUS link , The BROWSE CENSUS link

Household Occupants

Slide 3

Which ever way you go you will end up on a page like this. This page is for an individual household on the night of the census. It shows the SURNAME, the FORENAME or Christian name, the AGE and the SEX of the individual. The National Archives have promised that this page will include the rest of the information entered on the form before the end of the year. But in the mean time we need to look at the image of the actual form itself if we want to know more.

This is the record of a single household

Slide 4

This is the most important form, FORM A.

CHRISTIAN NAME

SURNAME

RELATIONSHIP TO HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD

RELIGION

AGE

This is interesting for what else it can tell us. We can get the year of birth. If the person was born after 1864 then the registry office will have a birth certificate. That birth certificate can give you the mother’s maiden name and where she was living at the time of marriage. It also gives the fathers name and occupation and where they were living.

OCCUPATION

Here we have Vintner and that’s a big clue as to which famous Carrigaline Pub we are talking about. We see William was a Carpenter, Denis the son, an Assurance agent and Edward was a clerk.

MARRIED/SINGLE

YEARS MARRIED

This column again helps us find a new direction for our search. Margaret and Denis were 30 years married in 1911 making their year of marriage 1881. Again its after 1864 so there is a marriage cert for them. This will also given the women’s maiden name. It also has both father’s names and occupations.

CHILDREN BORN

This column gives the number of children born but also how many were still alive. It was quite common for families to loose several children at a young age.

CHILDREN SURVIVING

WHERE BORN

Another source of surprise can be this next column which tells were the individual was born. The parents may have been more in another county or have moved at some stage with different children born in different places. This can be very important information when searching for births certs.

SIGITURE

One other interesting item is the signature. Whereas the enumerator may well have filled out the form, here you will often have the actual signature of your ancestor. Sometime when they couldn’t write the name is written by the enumerator and an X is added with the comment “his mark”.

Slide 5

This is Form B1. This tells us about the families neighbors and who they were but it can also tell us about what the buildings around them were used for. Here we see Household 11 is a Public House. This matches nicely with the description of Denis Cogan as Vintner and lets us know the family were living in the pub. These columns tell us about the size and quality of the building, whether it was thatched and how many windows it had in front. All this gives an indication of how well off they were. Look at household number 8. It has 6 rooms and 5  windows in front. But there are also 14 out houses. This dwelling was occupied by the Cantellions. This last column tells us they owned the house because if they didn’t this column would tell us who the leased it from.

Form B2

Slide 6

This is Form B2. This can be a very interesting form because of what it tells us about the other buildings used by the family. The Cantellions had 3 stables, 2 coach house, 2 harness rooms, a cow house, a piggery, a boiling house, 2 sheds and 2 stores. I’m assuming this was Beaver Lodge which once stood over here behind the hotel.

Form N

Slide 7

This final Form is Form N. The form doesn’t add much information on the individual housholds because it only lists religious affiliation. But it’s the stuff up the top that can be useful in your research. We have the County as Cork East Riding. The Parliamentary Division as Cork South East. The District Electoral Division is Carrigaline. We can also see the official name of the town land or street, the barony and the Civil Parish. Note that the Civil Parish, the Roman Catholic Parish and the Church of Ireland Parish can be 3 very different things. All this information is very useful if your extend your search further to local maps and maybe even to the Griffiths Valuations maps of some 60 years earlier. But that will have to wait for another occasion.

Madam Toastmaster

Special Occassion Speeches – Project 5

This project is about accepting an award and doing it in a time of 5 to 7 minutes. I am learning that there is a real need to manage your speaking environment (for want of a better phrase). By this I mean briefing the Toastmaster in detail as to what way you want things to work. In this case there was a need to set the scene,  to do an actual award and to provide a physical token of the award.

I didn’t give my Toastmaster enough of a briefing in hindsight. I didn’t say where I wanted him to stand, tell him where I wanted to sit and so on. The result was a bit too toastmaterish when in actual fact an element of role playing was required. So my advice would be to clearly separate the Toastmasters introduction from the role play of the award. Another thing to watch is time. My time was 7 min 24 sec (I recorded the speech with a dictaphone) but the Timekeeper started when the role play started resulting in a time of 8 mins 40 secs. So clarify that the time is to start at your first words of the actual speech.

WARNING! This is a made up speech made on some of my own personal history but with elements tweaked to suit my own purpose in the project.

Introduction by Toastmaster:

Acting the role of the Chief Scout, I will be presenting an award to Shay for which he will make an acceptance speech. He has asked me to point out that while such an award does exist in scouting it would never be accepted with a speech in this way. Each February 22^nd is celebrated as Founders Day and a list of those receiving awards for their contribution to Scouting is published.

Intro by Chief Scout

For various reasons this is the first opportunity I’ve had to present a Silver Elk to someone who has had a long career in Scouting starting with 1st Dublin, then with 12^th Cork and now with 1^st Cork. Unknown to many people he has also had a long association with The Irish Girl Guides but I’ll leave him tell that story himself. So, for services to Scouting over many years, I would now like to present this Silver Elk award to Group Leader Shay McInerney.

Acceptance speech

My thanks to the Chief Scout for the very special effort that I know he has made to be here tonight. I know how busy he is these days. When I saw the list of names on the awards list last February I was suitably impressed. Many of them were people I’d known for many years.These were all people I knew deserved to be recognised for their contribution.I was surprised to find my name on the list.Over the years I had come to associate the awards list with a certain generation within Scouting.A generation before mine.It was a bit of a shock to find myself to be part of that older generation.

There are more than 28 million Scouts, youth and adults, boys and girls, in 160 countries.Add to that another million Girl Guides and Girl Scouts in 145 countries. So you have what can only be described as a global movement. Baden-Powell never set out to form a world wide movement.I never set out to receive an award. I joined because it seemed a good idea at the time. In fact I joined twice.

My first time was at about seven when I joined my local Unit in Finglas. Back in the 60’s I was given a booklet of prayers and told to learn them off. I lasted three weeks.

My second attempt was ten years later. A friend of mine persuaded me to join 1^st Dublin Venture Scout Unit. That was 1977 and thanks mainly to people like John Fox and Paddy Halton, 1^st Dublin was the place to be. It was a time of great change and 1^st Dublin was in the centre of that change.

They had one of the first Beaver Units in the country. They ran the first, then experimental, mixed Scout Troop in the country. The Venture Unit had its own minibus. They were a specialist caving group and part of the Irish Cave Rescue Organisation.

Lads in their late teens on the north side of Dublin city were more likely to have a trade then be going to college. I was able to work with electricians like Dick Wilson, the unit leader. Plumbers like his brother Willie and carpenters like Sean Lyons. Helping these guys was useful and what you did counted. When I joined they were central to the preparations for the SAI 70^th anniversary camp taking place the following year. Almost every weekend we headed for Inistioge to work on preparations for that camp.

The experience of being on staff on an international camp is the ultimate in Scouting for me. It ticks all the boxes in terms of contribution and fellowship. It can make a lasting difference in a young adults life. It certainly did to mine. I staffed the Electronics base and as a result made it my career. I met my wife on that camp. That brought me to Cork and to 12^th Cork Sea Scouts. I could not have done Sea Scouts without the support of people like Tom McMullan, Dinny Mulcahy, Jerry Aherne and Mick Murtagh.

Several of these Scouters were involved with the Fire Service. Meetings were often held in the Fire Station in Anglesey Street. Many of these meetings ended suddenly. The Call bell sounded and half the meeting left to answer a fire call. “Be prepared” was at a new level.

Being married to an Irish Girl Guide leader also worked very well for me. We shared activities, camps, transport and equipment. We had a calendar on the wall in the kitchen with an A4 page per month. The rule was that who ever booked the slot first, the other one had to find the baby sitter. It encouraged forward planning, let me tell you.

Sometimes things happen that are not planned. Like when my family moved to France in 1989. We used to take our kids to the only local fast food outlet on a Saturday. We noted scouts going into a building across the street. After a few weeks we decided to say hello. Within a month I was their Scouter. No police vetting in those days. They had no leader for scouts and my being there kept that troop open until they found a leader. They spoke little English and I spoke little French. But it worked none the less.

And the work goes on. Now I find myself as an elder lemon and Group Leader. We have new age ranges, a new programme and the challenge of integrating two different traditions. We have one hundred years of Scouting behind us. We face into some hard economic times. Scouting is about using your initiative and making whatever you have work. I am confident we will succeed. Thank you, fellow Scouters.

Truely inspirational stuff

Do yourself a favour and watch these two lectures on http://fora.tv/

The first talk is given by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newson and he is certainly one of the most inspirational speakers I have heard in a long time. His talk is entitled  Cities and Time and focuses on the issue of sustainability in urban environments. If you had any doubt about what is possible in terms of dealing with the major issues facing countries like Ireland listen to this man talk about what his city IS doing and HAS already done. Try not to be depressed by any comparisons with our own government or that we probably get the politicians we deserve but try and accept that if we change our thinking, our expectations as individuals, things can and will change. Really uplifting stuff.

Toastmasters should just marvel at the delivery.

Unfortunately, as the poster of a goat on the back of my kitchen door says we are so far behind we think we’re in front. This is what being in front looks like on sustainability, on energy conservation, on green tech, on transport, on housing, almost everything.

The second is a lecture titled A Theory of History with an Application and is given by economist Paul Romer. These are the issues we need to be thinking about as we face into another Lisbon referendum.

Anyway do something with your mind that stretches it a bit and watch these lecture. Then move on to the rest of the stuff that Fora.tv has to offer.

Special Occasion Speeches – Project 4

Presenting An Award

This project has a time of three to four minutes and this final version came in at 3min 55sec but that was only after pretty severe last minute cutting. As I practiced it and got the the pace and pausing right I kept going over time. Hence the cutting.

The evaluator raised a number of issues:

• Failure to liaise properly with the Toastmaster on the night. This arose because my follow-on speaker was doing project 5 and accepting the award. We hadn’t organised how we intended to handle that with the Toastmaster: where people would stand and so on.
• The two speeches were not properly adapted, one to the other. This was due to emails going astray more then anything else but I should really have made sure my opposite number had my speech well in advance.
• Signs of nervousness that may be due to lack of confidence which I should address. Not sure what I could do about this.
• Take more control of the room. Again I’ll have to speak to my evaluator to see what exactly he means.
• He also raised one other useful point about the difference between writing for speaking and writing for reading. He considered many of my sentences to be too long and complicated making them difficult to recall when speaking. This results in over use of notes. This is very good advice. I love language and especially well constructed phrasing but that does make remembering the exact phrasing hard and that causes me to panic a little. So this is one I’ll be taking to heart for my next speech.

While these may seem rather petty/severe by normal meeting standards, the speech was delivered at a club formed specially for speakers doing advanced manuals and wishing to progress to a high standard. The assumption is that we know the basics and want to address the small things. So if we can’t handle the heat, we need to vacate the kitchen.

—————————————-The Speech————————-

When people retire from community work wonderful things are often said about them which they wish they had heard before they had retired and which would have being of massive encouragement when things got that little bit tough.

So each year we recognise the contribution made to community over an extended period of years by a single individual who is still active in their community by presenting a lifetimes contribution award in order to recognise the excellent work they do.

This man’s involvement with the GAA started as it does for most people, as a participant.He himself was at the receiving end of a previous generations contribution to their communities. As a football player he won both Club and Junior titles.

While we were chatting earlier he told me he played both full back and centre back but while his playing position may have been defensive, his subsequent career and contribution to the GAA in West Cork has been to lead from the front.

I’d say he’s held every administrative position his club had to offer, Secretary, Treasurer, PRO and now Chairperson.

He has even found time to be a selector for teams from under 10’s all the way up to Senior club level.

As always with people who give so much of their time and who put so much effort into what they do, they end up being asked to shoulder additional responsibility on a broader stage.

Tonight’s recipient has served on the County Board, chaired the Beara Division Committee and has been on the General Purposes Committee without which, as many of you will know, the games would not take place.

Now Beara has some of the mildest weather this country has to offer, but you just can’t do GAA without getting very familiar with mud, and wind and rain.

You also need to like driving along some very poor country roads, eating sandwiches of various degrees of quality, endless cups of tea.

Here we have the quintessential community volunteer without whom community cannot and could not exist.

Volunteers like tonight’s recipient give not because of any high ideals or lofty convictions but because it comes natural to them. They enjoy what they do.

They might not admit it to your face but for me this level of commitment, this level of selfless giving can only be maintained if you really enjoy it.

In recognition of the many dark winter nights he has spent in the mud, the wind and the rain.

In recognition of the endless meetings he has attended and which make the GAA the wonderful organisation it is.

In recognition of the millions of miles he’s driven often, I’m sure, into the early hours of the morning.

But most importantly in recognition of a lifetimes contribution to the people of both his own community, to the wider community at large and in particular to the youth members of the Gaelic Athletic Association.

It is my great pleasure to present this award to Mr ???????.

Special Occasion Speech – The World is Flat

This is not in fact a Special Occasion Speech given by a Toastmaster but it does serve as a very useful learning tool to see all the right bits in action. The talk is by  Thomas Friedman and is about his book The World is Flat. Quite apart from the actual content of this talk there is a lot to be gained from simply observing the speakers themselves and that’s why I have put this post in my Toastmasters category.

Firstly there is the introduction to the speaker which is an excellent example of a Special Occasion Speech – project 2 which involves speaking in praise of some individual, living or dead.

Special Occasion Speeches – Project 3

This project is The Roast. The object is to poke fun at someone in a funny but not insulting way. The person being roasted is normally present and has the right of reply. It’s 3 to 5 minutes. I did use notes and my evaluator considered that this detracted from the speech as it kept me hovering around the podium. Talking without notes is still an issue for me. Maybe next time. And even worse: my son’s reply completely upstaged me.

Special Occasion Speeches – Project 2

This project requires a speech in praise of some individual living or dead. I pretended that Dr Noam Chomsky was a guest speaker at a Carrigaline Toastmasters meeting (wouldn’t that be cool) and is being introduced and welcomed by the Club President.

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Mr. Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and most especially our guest speaker tonight, Dr Noam Chomsky.

Speaking with passion

Whatever your politics and whatever you may think of politicians as a class of beings you cannot but watch and listen with awe to George Galloway speaking in the House of Commons in a clip on YouTube that I have come across recently.

The passion, the emotion, the grasp of the subject speak for themselves. The music overlay stirs the emotions no doubt but the speakers passion comes through. The absolute silence in the chamber long known for it’s heckling tells a story of people realising they are listening to politics as it should be, passionate and forceful. The look of sadness on the man’s face as he sits down is powerful of itself.

Toastmasters – Master of Ceremonies

This experience is being listed under Toastmasters because it arose as a result of a call I received as the current (but soon to be relieved) President of Carrigaline Toastmasters Club. A few weeks ago I received a phone call from someone I thought was enquiring about Toastmasters and I was about to launch into my one minute pitch when I realised no, this is different.

Special Occasion Speeches – Project 1

Project one in this manual is The Toast. It’s time is 2-3 minutes. My big mistake was not to have developed a scenario for this toast. Talking with the evaluator before hand I did a quick few lines for the Toastmaster saying it was an extended family get together and that it would be a toast to one of their famous relations who had died in 1979. The problem was that was not matched by references to Toastmasters in the actual toast. This is something I’ll need to take on board for the rest of the projects in this manual. (The information in the speech may not be factually accurate.)