Travellers' Rest

My grandfather was always busy but mostly busy sitting down, if you know what I mean. So the doctor told him he had to put aside an hour each day and spend it jogging, a little further and a little faster each session until he was running a full ten miles at a time. Gramps got to be pretty good at it, but he finally gave it up. He said that he didn't mind the running so much, but the long walks home were pretty boring.

I have added a short segment at the beginning of Chapter 1 (Fiction 3) which had inadvertently been left out when that truncated opus was uploaded to this web site. My apologies. With respect to that work out of progress, I do intend to continue it. It's just that prose fiction, like poetry, requires a complete submersion into the subject at hand and I am long out of practice. So, good Reader, don't hold your breath (while I attempt again to hold mine). You may be sure that any significant progress along those lines will be loudly trumpeted on this page.

A Traveller friend named Bubby came up with this: "Onlyvillers." He says it's an old reference to the Irish Travellers located in New England and/or the Mid-Atlantic states. Bubby thinks it may have referred to a town named Onlyville, NY and possibly originated with the Southern Irish Travellers. It does turn out that there once was a railroad station named "Onlyville," near Middletown, NY, as a matter of fact, probably an unincorporated village. I am indebted to Matt and Sheila Salo for that information, by the way, an excellent source of genealogical information for all sorts of Travelling People. There is an e-mail link to them on the Travellers/Links page.

Of course, that is only one possibility. If you have a clue or a theory about the origin of the expression, please e-mail me at: Travellers' Rest.

The exchange of e-mails between myself and a Texas fraud cop has been re-posted to Law Enforcement 08/19/99. The current edition of Controversy concerns an unholy and unconstitutional alliance between the states of South Carolina and Illinois to deprive Irish Travellers of their rights as free Americans. It's factual and detailed, not just a rant and a rave. Take a look; why don't you?

A future edition of Controversy is in the planning stage, that will be mostly devoted to the nomadic character of the Traveller as a source of conflict with the settled or "country" people of Ireland and the USA.

Word from Ireland:

Actually, first, I'd like to report on an e-mail that I sent to a mailing list, based in Europe, that is maintained as an interface between scholars and Travellers of all types. It is self-explanatory:

(Beginning of e-mail)
I have a web site offering information about and for American Irish Travellers at:
(This Home Page URL)

In connection with that site, I received the message following this paragraph. Needless to say, I have no intention of abetting any designs for developing a public relations legend to sell horses impounded from my Irish cousins. But I'd like to know if anyone on this list might have further information about this unethical (and apparently profitable) confiscation scheme.

From: (Name snipped)
To:
Subject: Irish Tinkers
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 10:12:18 -0400
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.2106.4

I found your web site while doing some research on Irish Tinkers. My interest is really in their horses. I have recently imported two of them and would like to establish them as a breed over here. Like the people the horses are not much thought of in their home country. There are apparently vagrant horse laws that are being abused so that horses tied on the side of roads are picked up and impounded. The fees to recover them are often high. I understand it is being done in an attempt to settle the travellers. Other European countries are recognizing these horse for the unique breed that they are. Germany has a registry for them under the name of Irish Tinkers and the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden are following suit. One man has imported over a dozen to this country in Florida but he is putting dishonesty to these hard working horses by playing up "Gypsy Magic" as he sells these "Gypsy Vanner Horses" for $35,000 a piece. Check out his web page at (site snipped). I am hoping to make these wonderful hard working little draft horses available at a far more realistic and honest price. Well I hope I am not boring you with this but I am also interested in the people behind the horses as well so I can put together the story of these horses.
(End of e-mail)

Does anybody else remember the plot of that wonderful Irish picture, "Into the West?" All I can say to the above situation is that Life regretfully imitates Art in this case, as happens so often.

I would also like to express my appreciation publicly for the efforts of an Irish anthropologist named Sinead ni Shuinear on behalf of Irish Travellers. The lady has somewhat of a fearsome reputation in some quarters, to judge from certain advance reports I had received. Personally, I have found her to be gracious and generous in our admittedly limited correspondence, so I suspect her dogged devotion to academic truth, an aversion to blind dogma and little or no ability to tolerate political correctness is at the root of that somewhat bellicose reputation. I often find myself nodding with drowsiness when I read even semi-technical papers, but with Ms. Shuinear's work the cause is strictly a need to frequently express agreement as she makes her points. Pertinent articles and papers of hers that I have read seem to strike a responsive chord with both my intellect and my instincts as a Traveller.

There is an additional page linked to Traveller/Shelta which offers a reasonable explanation, I think, of where the name "Shelta" came from as the name of our language, and why Travellers both in the U.S.A. and in Ireland have always called it Cant or Gammon instead. I'll provide a handy direct link here if you are interested: Shelta, What's in a Name?

Sometime in the next few months, there will be some amateurish exploration here of the development of the Cant, how old it is and what it might be able to tell us of the origins of the Irish Travellers. There are those who say that we don't care anything about our history; maybe that is so for many of us, and maybe not, but I think there are some of us who would like to know more about it. Surprisingly, many serious scholars disagree drastically about where we came from and just who and what we are.

Since I lack the educational "tickets," and the supporting data as well, to write the history of the Irish Travellers, I believe that exploration may take the form of an anthology of short stories. Each story will concern individuals belonging to what I imagine to be the antecedent peoples whose cultures and bloodlines have contributed to the ongoing legend of the Irish Travellers.

Critics be warned in advance: I intend to invoke the archeology of the Beaker Folk and the Larnian, even perhaps the legends of the Sidhe and the Firbolgs to begin this narrative, already long told when the Milesian Gaels stormed the Irish beachhead to take their place as the masters of that good green land. But after all, these will be merely fictional tales that might have been history, so what harm will it do to indulge me? Such fiction need not be buttressed externally, I say; it merely must stand firm on its own premises.

I will somehow have to juggle that voluntary commitment with one to my extended family, to finish "Baby Rose and the Shaydjook," starring the personalities of my parents and others of their generation. I also feel that the time is nearly ripe to start scribbling a planned multi-generational epic in which a long lost land grant is discovered ceding the area now known as Branson, Missouri to the "Irish Horse Traders," (the Irish Travellers, of course). The working title for that novel is "The Quasi-King of the Pseudo-Gypsies."