Paul Breen writes about links between technology and ancestry

But at the heart of such a mindset, there’s a misunderstanding of what technology actually is.

The word itself refers to any study or knowledge of ‘mechanical and industrial arts’.

As such, even though today’s software and social media programs might seem high-tech, they’re just an extension of what’s gone before.

And why people’s stories survived, even without Facebook or Instagram.

When I first moved to London’s Greenwich area around 2007, I found myself surrounded by monuments to Britain’s scientific past.

Amongst these, you can see the grand central structure of The Royal Observatory – a historical centrepiece of astronomy, navigation and time itself.

My uncle, Pete Breen, a musician, lives just a few miles from there too, in a place called Lewisham.

It was there that he first showed me a computerised image of his grandfather and my great-grandfather, John Breen – a farmer from the rocky townland of Carrickaheenan, in the weathered heights beyond Brookeborough village.

Delighted to see this picture, I copied and captured it on a memory stick, heading back home with my great-grandfather in my back pocket.

This was a man who had a hard life, and died in 1927, at just 56 years of age, probably without ever being on a bus, or a boat across the water.

And yet, there he was on a double-decker 80 years later, travelling across Greenwich, the home of time and the Meridian Line.

I marvelled at the thought of what he might have made of it, up in the heights of Carrickaheenan on the day that photograph was taken.

I imagine he’d have paid little heed to thoughts of a high-tech future – never picturing a day when his name appeared in the paper.

The technologies at the heart of his life were simpler: the plough, the spade and maybe the pony ‘n’ trap that brought him to Brookeborough.

Despite that, he wouldn’t have been cut off from the world.

Like the figure of Seamus Heaney’s father in poems, John Breen was a man quietly digging his own ground whilst around him the Earth shook.

He lived through the Ulster Covenant, a World War, the 1916 Rebellion, the War of Independence, and the formation of Northern Ireland.

He married a woman with American connections, too – Rose Sharkey, whose cousin, Charles, featured in this paper recently, as a poster boy pilot of the Second World War.

Added to that, John Breen’s brother-in-law was a man named Owen Hanna, a Fermanagh Sinn Féin Councillor in the 1920s.

And he’d a brother, Mickey Breen, who got rich and moved to Dublin, mixing in the social circles of the city’s D3 and D4 areas in days again long before Facebook.

Without a need for Tinder, Mickey Breen’s son of the same name met and married into the Gébler family of literary fame.

That world, which included Edna O’Brien, a superstar writer of any age, was far from Carrickaheenan.

But somehow, all of these people still kept in touch, with relatives posting photo albums and proclaiming closeness in letters from America.

And the language with which many of those letters were written is a far cry from the abbreviated text messages and emoticons of the present age.

That’s not to say one time was better than the other. And certainly, the picture of John Breen’s five decades was a very weathered one at the end.

By his fifties, when that sole surviving photograph was taken, he could have passed for his seventies, whilst another brother – who headed South to live in Kildare – could have been 60 in his seventies.

It was a tough life in times of more basic technologies.

But that was as much to do with geography, economics and social class as anything else.

There were middle-class Catholics in early 20th Century Brookeborough going to prestigious universities both in Ireland and Great Britain.

The Bakers of Lismalore House in Brookeborough were one such example; merchants, traders and graduates who knew lifestyles that most of John Breen’s descendants wouldn’t know until half a century later.

Even in Greenwich, there were educated Irish Breens in professional positions before Breens had even moved to Carrickaheenan.

And ironically, having discovered John Breen in Lewisham, I came across those Breens of Greenwich when I was back home in Fermanagh.

Someone in Brookeborough asked me if I knew a Hugh Breen of the present generation.

Though this is a first name that has run through our family for centuries, it’s not a common one in today’s generation.

But when you look up Hugh Breen on Google, the very first person that pops up across a 200-year timeframe is a former employee of Greenwich’s Royal Observatory. And guess what his job was?

Hugh Breen’s job title was a single word: “COMPUTER”.

Now, this doesn’t mean that he was some kind of tech-enhanced being or a robot.

Long before the word ‘computer’ was attached to today’s meaning of anything from a PlayStation to a MacBook, Hugh Breen computed information.

He was a Mathematician and Astronomer, born in Armagh city before moving across the water to work at the famous observatory.

Later, all three of Hugh Breen’s sons would find employment in the same place – Hugh (Junior), James and John William.

So, neither me, my uncle Pete with his guitar, nor my great-grandfather on a memory stick, were the first Breens to grace Greenwich with technology.

Probably, we won’t be the last, either.

Tech is constantly changing and adapting. In many senses, we’ve come a long way from William Claxton’s creation of the Printing Press in 1476 to where we are now, with digital subscriptions to newspapers such as this one.

And yet, as you’re reading today’s Impartial Reporter – whether in traditional print, or on a screen – it’s not that far from people like John Breen reading theirs, somewhere in space and time.

Maybe less than the 486 miles between Greenwich and Carrickaheenan!