It’s an occupational hazard for me that when a famous person has an Irish name but is not Irish, I wonder how far back their Irish ancestry is. You’d have to be under a rock to have missed the headline film of the summer: The Odyssey, directed by one Christopher Nolan.
Let’s take a look in the records to see how far back Christopher’s Irish ancestry appears.
According to Wikipedia, Christopher Nolan was born in 1970 in London to Brendan James Nolan and Christina Jenson. It also says that Brendan was born in London in July 1936.
Brendan would have been a small boy at the time of the 1939 Register (the British beginning of WWII population snapshot). People born under 100 years ago don’t appear unless their deaths have been reported. Brendan doesn’t seem to be uncovered yet, despite his death in 2009, so I cross-referenced the English birth indexes with the marriage ones (on the newer version of FreeBMD) to find his parents were Francis T Nolan and Catherine M Rees who married in Woolwich registration district in 1935. Of course, it would be better to order these records & be 100% certain, but cost and time are prohibitive for a short blog!
Francis is on the 1921 census with parents James and Bridget.1
They both say they were born in England but on both 1901 and 19112, they said they came from Dublin.
Their children were born in a variety of English locations with the first two called John and Edward and born in Colchester. Names of children are often important clues for parents’ names. Francis was born in 1909 – his birth index shows his mother’s surname was O’Hagan.3 I did buy the digital image but, as you can see, her name is actually cut-off. I’ll be asking for a refund!
Sadly, Francis was killed in World War II and records showed his parents as Edward James and Bridget Anne Nolan. Christopher visited his grave in France during the filming of Dunkirk.
Given the possible Dublin location, I searched marriage records in Ireland, and found a marriage of James Nolan of Colchester to Bridget O’Hagan in 1895.4 Their fathers were called Edward Nolan, a railway guard, and John O’Hagan, a fitter. So James must have come home to get married and then returned to England with Bridget.
Neither James nor Bridget were totally consistent with their ages across the 1901/1911/1921 censuses so I thought I’d try them in the 1939 register. No sign of Bridget, but James is there in Abbey Wood, Greenwich with daughter Julia, who later married a Richard Gobby.5 James is noted as a widower, so Bridget had already died by then.
He had his birthdate as 23rd October 1865. What’s seldom is wonderful: this is actually the correct date of birth!6 Here’s James’s birth record, and his mother was called Julia Corcoran.
On Bridget’s side, I also found her birth. Her parents were John O’Hagan and Ann McGough.7
The oldest daughters in Bridget and James’s family were called Ann and Julia, meaning the first four children were named after their grandparents.
So there we have it, Christopher Nolan misses out on Irish citizenship by a generation but he’s probably happy enough with the dual British-American that he has already. Best of all, my curiosity is satisfied.
- 11 Gavin St, Plumstead, London, UK, TNA RG 15, Piece: 03050 Schedule: 298 District: RD 30 RS 4 ED 12, accessed on Findmypast ↩︎
- 11 Gavin St, Plumstead, London, UK, TNA RG 14 Piece: 2914 Schedule: 213 Census reference: RG14PN2914 RG78PN100 RD30 SD4 ED9 SN213, accessed on Findmypast ↩︎
- 1909 Q1 01D 1257 Woolwich, accessed on www.gro.gov.uk ↩︎
- O’Hagan/Nolan marriage, 1/1/1895, Dublin South, 2209150, accessed on www.irishgenealogy.ie ↩︎
- 61 Woodhurst Road, Abbey Wood, Greenwich, Woolwich, London, 1939 Register, RG101/0654B/009/22, accessed on Findmypast. Her married surname is incorrectly updated as Gorby. ↩︎
- James Nolan, birth, 23/10/1865, Dublin South, 8337757, accessed on www.irishgenealogy.ie ↩︎
- Bridget Anne O’Hagan, birth, 28/1/1869, Dublin South, 7638551, accessed on www.irishgenealogy.ie ↩︎