certificate

Nice piece of history!

The quotation is from 'Lays of Ancient Rome' by Lord Macaulay -

Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate: To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lays_of_Ancient_Rome en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay

The pikes remind me of

I assume that's Father Murphy from old Kilcormack who spurred up the rock with a warring cry. Sometimes Flickr is amazing® www.flickr.com/photos/25354050@N04/3558369524/in/photolis...

thanks Flickr / NLI my distant relative Jonas Watson killed in 1798 Wexford Rising ~ " Lt.-Col., 13 Regiment; fought at Bunker Hill, 1775; ADC to Duke of Kent; 65th Regiment; Governor of Fort Niagara; killed in Irish Rebellion 1798; monument at Castle Bridge Church, Co. Wexford " Terry Watson writes (June 24, 2003): Jonas Watson was a Lieutenant in the 65th Regt. during the battle of Bunker Hill. He had commented earlier, in a surviving letter to his sister Anne, that he must be oldest Lieutenant in the British army. He was promoted to Captain the day after the battle as a consequence of Captain Hudson being killed in action. He was Senior Regimental Captain when he commanded Fort Niagara July 1787 to May 1788. As Major in the 65th, his great wish was to become Lieutenant-Colonel of that regt. He never achieved this but did accept the Lieutenant-Colonelcy of the 13th with permission to sell out, which he did in 1796. He never actually served in the 13th. "

O Mac "®" ! What do all the other illustrations refer to? The burning house and church, the gaelic cross etc? Presumably the original document was gloriously coloured; has anyone found one online?

Why so blue?

Smithsonian here. Here's a little more about cyanotypes. You can find more descriptions of phtoographic media in our search- photography.si.edu Cyanotype Sir John Herschel invented the process for printing a cyanotype—more commonly known as a blueprint—in 1842. Creating a cyanotype involved developing prepared paper with an iron-salt solution. After treating the paper with ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferriyanide, a photographer would place a negative, or even a drawing, on top of it in direct sunlight, causing the exposed parts of the paper to turn bright blue from the effects of the iron. Subsequently submerging the print in water caused the image to become fixed and the unexposed chemicals to wash away, and the iron’s oxidation caused the blue image to intensify. Engineers and architects favored this process for copying drawings because it was stable, efficient, and inexpensive. Thomas Smillie, the Smithsonian’s first photographer, employed this printing method to keep track of his glass-plate negatives. He made and cataloged cyanotypes of each image, after which he stored the corresponding glass-plate negative.

S. P. Langley (who signed this check) was the 3rd Secretary of the Smithsonian (1887-1906) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pierpont_Langley