"How do you mean who do I think I am?," barked Nancy, revealing the upper octaves of her flinty temper that I hadn’t seen since the latter, trying days of her glorious Camogie career.

"Young woman, you listen, who do YOU think you ARE, ringing here with that attitude. In my day, I’d have…"

There isn’t a woman this side of Abbeyleix who’d best Nancy when she puts her mind to it, but, still, I took the phone. "What appears to be the problem," I asked, deploying the conciliatory tone that has served me through countless fractious meetings of the divisional board.

Turned out the young lady was a researcher for that tv programme where people explore their ancestry, and she wished to have me as a guest. I agreed, of course, and on Thursday we met at the county library, where Nancy and herself sheepishly made their peace.

"Here Noel," the kindly librarian pointed out, "is your grandfather on your mother’s side. There are contemporaneous accounts of his picking up a bullet wound in the lower back while fleeing Boland’s Mill. Next we hear of him is stalking catfish in Alabama, around about 1932. The good times didn’t last, though – he was convicted of the murder of his neighbour and hanged in a village square in 1933."

Nancy grimaced. "A sad oul’ do," I said, to camera.

"Your grandmother brought the children, including your mother, home to Ballybore," added the librarian, resolving a question that had long troubled my siblings and me.

I discovered my maternal great-great grandmother was a priest’s housekeeper in the west of Ireland in the 1800s. Displaying the kind loyalty I like to think of as a family trait, she moved from parish to parish with the same priest.

Despite never taking a husband, she mothered two sons who dabbled in cricket before straightening themselves out to live good lives. One played for the county before an objection centring on his mother’s maiden name brought a six-month suspension.

He won the appeal without the backing of his own club or county board. "That’s where you got it from, Noel," the researcher said, "a man of high principles, like yourself, going it alone for the cause of justice."

I found a great-granduncle who brought the railway to Canada before meeting an American woman and settling down a few miles outside Portland, Oregon. They were devout Catholics and raised 17 children. In a frank letter to his mother, he described his wife as "a cantankerous, demanding, oinseach who grants me not even a moment’s rest."

Latterly, he abandoned his family to poverty, and died a secret bigamist near Cobh. "You’re in good company, Noel," joked the researcher, "you’re no-one if you haven’t a bigamist or two."

We had blacksmiths, coopers, money-lenders, pick-pockets, umpires, satirists, campanologists, land-grabbers, and an uncle who apparently fought on both sides during the Nine Day War.

The revelation of the gruesome death of my paternal great-grandmother’s half-brother while attempting a solo trek across an Austrian mountain pass caused a lump in my throat, particularly the part revealing his final words, spoken to the herdsman who fed him his dying drop of water: "For God, for Caitlin Ni Houlihan, for the county, and, most of all, for Ballybore."

The researcher, a lovely girl after all, said it was far and away the most intriguing programme of the series, and added I was an easier man to deal with than Linda Martin. We sent her a leg of Ballybore lamb when we got back, and thanked her for healing our 20-year rift with RTE dating back to the Up for the Match controversy.

I’ll let you know when it’s being aired.

Congrats to John Connor, Donal Garvey, and James McGovern who correctly said Paul Bealin and Brian Stynes played midfield for Dublin in ‘95. Copies of Sam, Liam, Strikes and Schemozzles, the GAA quiz book published by Collins Press, are on their way. Feel free to donate them to your club, which is what I always do when I won prizes. Noel knows who he is. Email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ; visit www.knowledgeablenoel.com; and Facebook (Knowledgeable Noel.)

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