WHATEVER happened to John Arnold?

Well it’s a story - no... a mystery really - that I’ve tried to solve over the years without success, and still the wonder grows.

Back in the year 1910, he was hoping to start a new life ‘far away in Australia’ and was eagerly anticipating the adventure to come - ‘if God spares my health and strength and luck for my future days to come, I think I ought to get on well in Australia, for without health and luck in this world one cannot get on’.

Hopes and aspirations to better himself must have been foremost in the mind of the 24-year old when he penned those lines at Ballinaglanna, Glanmire.

That John Arnold was the son of another John Arnold, from Carrigtwohill in East Cork.

My father had no brother and just one sister. She was Johanna, born in 1911, we always simply called her Auntie Jo. She never married and lived here with us until her death in the 1970s.

It was Auntie Jo told me about the Arnold cousins in East Cork. I think she never actually knew or met them herself -not certain about that - but her knowledge came down from her father, my grandfather, Batt Arnold.

He was born in 1877 and used recall as a young man going to visit ‘the Arnold cousins in Longstown in Carrigtwohill’. Auntie Jo remembered him telling her that those cousins who were farmers would always have ‘the early spuds’ in June or July and he’d always bring ‘a codgel of new spuds’ home after a visit there.

John seemed to be a prominent name in the Carrigtwohill Arnolds and there were also John Arnolds in the Rathcormac and Conna families. Our own family featured Daniel and Bartholomew more frequently - my own name comes from my maternal grandfather on the Twomey side.

Luckily, I wrote down Auntie Jo’s memory of the Carrigtwohill connection. After she died I knew very little about the extended clan as I........

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