I paid a visit to the lovely Linenhall Library in Belfast yesterday. It is a lovely old building which evokes the distant past but I learned only a few weeks ago that it is not actually from the end of the 18th century as I had supposed.

In fact, te building was a warehouse and the original Linenhall Library was inside the White Linen Hall (which was falling into disrepair and taken down around 120 years ago to be replaced by the current beautiful Belfast City Hall).

Nonetheless, I have happy memories of it from when I was around 17- 19 years old and onwards as my father took me on a visit around the time I was doing or finishing my A Levels and he had taken out membership. He had his Saturday routine for almost all the last forty odd years of his life which started with a visit to the library to read, return and renew books and I would often call in on him there. Sometimes I would just come myself to conduct some research.

Anyway, yesterday I went in with the aim of perusing the Belfast Street Directories but got distracted by The Book of McKee by Raymond W McKee, published in Dublin by Hodges Figgis and C Ltd, 1957. This copy was number 470 of a limited run of 500.

Someone had written in tiny writing in the flyleaf: “… is full of inaccuracies, worthless conjectures and unproved statements… has produced so much confusion and so little of real value. Many chapers could well have been omitted.”

So, once again we have a book about the McKees which has been condemned, and once again the research is slammed without detail. How I would love to have been able to talk to the person who wrote that to acertain where the inaccuracies actually lie!

I can identify readily chapters which are inaccurate, contain worthless conjecture, unproved (sic) statements and which could be omitted [eg Conquest of Ireland by the Milesian Race, Kings of Ireland, Kings of Scotland- some 27 pages in all]. But how much else is inaccurate- the section on the O’Neills? Origins of the name?

Is the connection to soldiers of William of Orange regarded as false or unprovable; is the information on his Northern Irish descendants regarded as inaccurate or unproven? Or are there considered to be inaccuracies in the American branches?

These are things which it would be so worthwhile knowing!