During Lockdown in the strange days of Covid-19, I researched my family history on all sides, learning of long-dead ancestors and living cousins that I never knew I had.

I researched stories of Breens, Sharkeys, Currans, Stewarts, McDonaghs, Gallaghers, Creighans, Campbells, Gardiners and more, including Maguires.

My wife is a Maguire too, but an English one. The fact of being English is only relevant here because it’s a background factor in how her family had lost touch with their Irish origins over time.

Her father, Terry Maguire, knew that his ancestors came from the Emerald Isle, and had some connection with religion and pubs. However, Terry had no idea of his family’s exact historical origins.

I therefore decided to go on a quest to unearth the missing history of these English Maguires – and what I found was fascinating.

The stories of Irish immigrants and their descendants in 19th Century Britain was like something out of a Charles Dickens novel, with tales of wealth, poverty and rags to riches, or vice-versa.

I used various internet sources, including the Ancestry website, grave records and Facebook to track down those mysterious Maguires, wherever they were to be found.

For all that I knew, they could have been from Fermanagh! When I managed to trace them through cyberspace, they turned out to have their origins in County Wexford.

From there, they’d crossed the water to Anglesey, and then made their way down towards London.

The earliest recorded man of this lineage had the very common but unusually spelled name of Patt Maguire.

He was born in 1728 and married a woman called Mary McDermott. They had a son, Phillip Maguire, born around 1749, who married a Dublin woman and had three sons, who would grow up to cross the water to England.

At this point in history, there were daily 12-hour sailings across the water to Liverpool, although some emigrants also caught faster boats to Holyhead in Wales.

Out of such journeys, the story leaves Wexford and moves across the sea to England, where most of the subsequent events take place.

In the fashion of the times, Phillip Maguire had a son that he also named Phillip – born in 1791.

That would have made ‘old’ Phillip in his 40s. Young Phillip grew up to become a ‘whitesmith’, which is basically a variant of blacksmith who works with white metals.

But it seems he wasn’t just a fast mover with the poker and the tongs. When he got to Wales, he found himself a wife, and brought her down the country to London, where they settled in the Bermondsey area.

They had three children – Jane, Thomas and John Maguire, who I’ll come back to a moment.

But first, there’s an interesting detour in the life of a younger brother, Barnard Maguire, born in 1793.

Barnard also crossed the Irish Sea and settled in north London, where he became a shoemaker. This seems to have been quite a wise choice of specialism, because he’d have been out a small fortune otherwise.

Barnard Maguire is reported to have been married twice, and had seven children with each wife, giving him a grand total of 14 offspring, some of whom went on to have very big families themselves.

So if you ever bump into a Maguire in North London, they’re probably cobbled out of the shoemaker’s family line. But back to the stories of Phillip’s two sons, Thomas and John Maguire.

Like their father, the whitesmith, and Uncle Barnard, the shoemaker, these two boys took up a very specialised trade.

They both became vellum (animal skin) book binders, possibly under the guidance of an older cousin, Eleanor Maguire, and had great lives – to begin with.

Then fate was to play its part in the rollercoaster world of these Dickensian times. Although vellum had long been used in the printing industry, it began to get more expensive in the late 19th Century.

Henceforth, printers moved towards cheaper materials – such as cloth – so that books could be published in greater quantities, and at less cost. The Maguire cousins were experts in a dying art.

Sadly, fortune was then to hand Thomas and John a very different set of cards.

Thomas got out of printing and into the pub business, where he was working when his first wife died.

It might seem a strange thing to describe a young widower as the ‘luckier’ of two brothers, but John was truly dealt a more horrid set of circumstances.

It seems that as he entered his early forties in the 1880s, John Maguire suffered the same terrible fate as a cousin of mine a few years back.

Married with seven children, he developed an early onset of dementia, at the age of 43.

In a time without a welfare state or a state pension, that left him in a mental hospital, and his family in dire poverty.

Meanwhile – as they struggled to the point of his daughters searching the streets of Bermondsey for scraps of food in bins – Thomas Maguire married a French hotelier’s daughter, becoming incredibly rich.

Probably with the backing of his wife’s family, he went on to run a series of pubs in some of the most prestigious parts of North London, Crouch End and Camden Town.

Filthy rich, he even seems to have had a holiday retreat on the Essex Coast.

But like many rich men, he didn’t seem to believe that charity begins at home.

Though his brother John died of dementia in his late 40s, Thomas Maguire offered no help to his nephews, nieces and sister-in-law, who were struggling to survive against pure poverty.

Interestingly too – which might surprise people reading this – Thomas Maguire’s side of the family were English Catholics who were very heavily involved in the Church.

Perhaps that’s why his three daughters in his second marriage all became nuns.

Those three Maguire sisters entered the Servite Order as teenagers, becoming teachers in convent schools.

A bad feeling though seems to have soured relations with John Maguire’s side of the family, in wounds that never really healed.

But through John Maguire’s side, I got a wife and in-laws. Despite the sad ending to his own story, a lot of his descendants have turned out very well too.

The English Maguires have spread out from Wexford through Bermondsey and Kent into places as far afield as Australia and Canada.

I suppose even with a dozen pubs, you can’t buy happiness, and a rich man’s three daughters becoming penniless nuns must say something about the limits of money, no matter how much you have.

Paul Breen is @paulbreenauthor on X.