Grandma Blackett, Elizabeth Kavanagh, came from a musical family. Her father, John Kavanagh, had been Musical Director of the Theatre Royal, Belfast in the 1860s and at least two of his sons followed him into the entertainment business.
John Kavanagh's eldest surviving son, James, started out in his early teens playing in his father's orchestra in Belfast but soon joined the Carl Rosa Opera Company. After a break of a few years working as a drummer and circus clown in the USA and UK he rejoined Carl Rosa as tympanist and remained with them for 35 years until his death in 1924. He was then the longest serving member of the company.
His younger brother John Henry Kavanagh became a music hall artist, performing comic songs and working all over the United Kingdom. From an early age I had seen a photo of him as little more than a boy, dressed in his stage gear, but many years later, when I started to research this side of my family I was amazed to find the sheet music of "I Was There", one of his popular songs with a picture of him on the cover dressed and posed almost exactly as the one taken in his youth.
I've been lucky enough to locate several members of the Kavanagh family, including two second cousins, firstly John Henry Kavanagh's grandson, John 'Kav' Kavanagh, whose father Johnny Kavanagh also became a music hall comedian (as did Kav for a while), and secondly Myra Lycett (to whom I am grateful for the photo of our great-grandfather), the granddaughter of my great-uncle Joseph Kavanagh. My mum used to say that Joseph was extremely good at yodelling, and he also regularly sang at concerts in and around the Startforth area.
In 2007 Kav and I were interviewed by Sally Magnusson for BBC Radio 4's Tracing Your Roots programme, which included a snippet of a 1988 recording I'd made of my mum reminiscing about her life. I also sang and played my great-uncle's song, "I Was There".
What became of my great-grandfather I don't know. After he lost his job in Belfast, when the Theatre Royal closed, he and his family moved to England and were living in Bolton, Lancashire in 1871. The family seem then to have moved to Leeds, Yorkshire, which my grandmother subsequently gave as her place of birth, as did her brother Joseph. (My grandmother, however, kept her Catholicism, and presumably her Irish birth, secret until her death bed, when she called for a Catholic priest.) My grandmother and her mother later moved to Startforth, Yorkshire (just over the river from Barnard Castle, Co. Durham), where my great-grandmother was living as a widow in 1881. I was told some years ago by a cousin that John Kavanagh had at one time been a dancing master in Barnard Castle but no record of this, nor of his death, has been found and I have no idea why they moved to the north-east.