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     I will attempt to find the exact information you're looking for.  I have it somewhere, but I may need a week or two to put it all together.  I hope you don't mind the delay.  As for Edwin and Marianne's address - initially, during the early years of their marriage, they lived in Wexford town, I believe.  Later, around the time Bridget was born (1894?), they lived at 26 Hawthorne Tce., North Strand, Dublin.  Despite a temporary change of address at around the time of the census in 1911, the Halpins called Hawthorne Tce a family home for a couple of generations. I've read the 1901 census and the info gleaned from that will be included in the next email.  Can you locate any photos of Edwin and Marianne?  Until next time, cheers, RCMH. 

Apologies fo the slow response - I'm afraid I only noticed your mssg this afternoon.  Matilda and William are remembered by my relatives (as Willy and Tilly, oddly enough).  William was my grandfather's brother, and got my father his apprenticeship on the Dublin docks.  So, as you might imagine, I have a great deal of 'lore' to pass on to you, and promise to do so over the next couple of days. In the meantime, all the best.  Talk soon, RH.

     Two brothers - Nicholas and John - and the political differences between them had a great bearing on the way the Halpin family evolved over the early years of the 19th century.  Nicholas, Headmaster of Portarlington School (Queen's county, or County Laois) was a Tory.  John (b. 1764), engraver and book publisher/seller in Dublin, was a liberal Whig. On some other occasion I will explain how the influence of these two men affected the lives of their various descendents.  At the moment I will simply list the names of some of their sons and grandsons before recording the details of three prominent and interconnected branches of the Halpin Family Tree: the Rev. Nicholas John Halpin, his son Charles Greham Halpin(e), his brother William Henry Halpin (libeller, journalist, ed. of the Cheltenham Mail and victim of the Railway mania in 1845-46); his other brother Frederick, owner of a hotel in Wicklow; Frederick's 4th son Frederick Webster Halpin, engraver in the US who challenged his father's will (which stated that his property in Wicklow was to be left to his nieces) and lost, and who later tried to exact revenge on the judge presiding over that decision (the Right Hon Judge Keatinge) by making false accusations against the Judge's brother Edward Keatinge, who ran a firm of Confederate Bond Engravers in Columbia, South Carolina in 1863...there is George Halpin, civil engineer and son of John, actually raised by aunts and uncles and who was secretive about his origins on account of the damage they might do to his prospects...James Halpin, distiller, son of John Edmund (engraver, mentioned above) and a '98 man, implicated with another distiller by the name of Hannen in an attempt to rescue Robert Emmett from imprisonment in Kilmainham gaol, later resident in Wicklow, where he opened an inn (this may have been his son, James jnr, I'm presently examining Church records for clues as to the exact lineage here) and fathered, among others, Captain Robert Charles Halpin and the good Dr Stopford Halpin...then there are John Halpin, surveyor and Orientalist who died in 'jungly' country in India; General William G Halpin, US Civil war veteran, arrested in the late 1860's for his role in a disappointing Fenian rising (he had assessed the battle readiness and strength of his volunteers in a raid on a small police station outside Dublin - to his experienced eye any further action would have resulted in the pointless slaughter of his impassioned but thoroughly unprepared troop of patriots, so he sent them home, much to the disgust and mystification of nationalist historians ever since - but he later aquitted himself exceptionally well at his trial; there, his self-defence was aimed not at the court but at the sympathies of the reading public, to which he appealed through the reporting media - it was his plan to use his testimony to rouse the sympathies of the British people, but his otherwise unprecedented approach to self-defence came to nothing after the Manchester 'martyrs' intervened and his cousin, Charles Grehem Halpin(e), from whom he had expected significant moral and political help through the US media and the US Government, died in a hotel in New York City from an accidental overdose of Laudanum)...

There'll be a tad more of this some other time.  For now, glance below for the first posting of what I hope will become an extensive Halpin Family Tree, linking descendents from as far afield as the US, Australia, Canada, the UK, and Ireland.

    

Anyone interested in the 19th cent. Halpins of Wicklow town and surrounding locale may like to read what I have uncovered during my own research.  I too am a Halpin, a direct descendent of Robert Wellington Halpin, Town Clerk and Postmaster, among other things (some less savoury, depending on how long your memory is).  I've yet to figure out exactly where RW was born, but I'm pretty sure he was a blow-in.  He died exactly 6 months after the death of his beloved wife, Frances, on October 2 1883, and is buried "in the family grave" in Wicklow cemetery. 
     According to the local newsletter his son, Robert jnr, was elected Secretary to the Harbour Board on November 14 of that year.  Robert jnr's brother Edwin, my great grandfather, married a Wexford girl, about 5 weeks after his father Robert's death.  Since the Halpin's were staunch loyalists and devout Protestants, Edwin's marriage to Marianne (nee Murphy - her family were Catholics living in Ram st., Wexford, and her father was a Shoemaker) was considered to be a betrayal, a rejection of his own kind and of his birthright. By marrying 'out' and marrying 'down' (ie. into a class 'well beneath' his own) Edwin effectively severed all links with the Anglican (Episcople) community in Wicklow, and as far as I can tell had very little contact with his family after that, until a rather tragic episode around the time of his death in abt 1925. 
     By that time Marianne was dead (1915?) and Edwin's sisters (there were 3 in all - Frances, Emma and Ada...I think Frances died a young woman and her two surviving sisters continued to run their father's Main st., post office for years after his death, which left them in dire poverty by the 1920s) were in need of care.  An unknown person - probably a concerned Wicklow resident -  then contacted my grandfather (James Albert, Edwin's 2nd son) and notified him of his aunts' situation.  He was not long married at the time (1925?), an illiterate Catholic veteran of WW1 living on Clonliffe Ave., Ballybough, North Dublin.  I believe James Albert responded to the news about his aunts' difficulties by catching a train to Wicklow and returning to his home on Clonliffe ave., with at least one of his aunts (Emma), who was given a room upstairs, where she remained bedridden for a year before passing away.  My aunt Kathleen still recalls Emma attempting to belt her with a wooden stick as she - a six year old at the time - taunted her from the bedroom doorway. Apart from Edwin, Robert jnr , Frances, Ada and Emma there was another brother, Samuel, who died ("much loved") in abt 1915 in Drogheda.  If anyone can tell me anything about Sam, Robert, or any of the sisters, I'd be very grateful indeed.
     I realise the above is rather confusing and perhaps a tad too narrow in scope to interest many, so let me put a few things into a wider context, for the possible benefit of a larger audience.
     My gg grandfather, Robert Wellington, was Captn Robert Charles Halpin's 1st cousin.  According to my aunt, Edwin was closer to Robert C's brother, Dr Stopford Halpin, who was based mostly in Arklow town, I believe.  Stopford spent his first years in general practice in Cavan town, under the supervision of his uncle, Dr Charles Halpin, renowned for the desperation of his efforts to find a way to beat the blight that contributed so much to the severity of the Great Famine.  The dates here are approximately 1845-50.  Stopford often spoke of Charles whenever he visited Robert W and family at their home in Main street, Wicklow, emphasising Dr C's humanity, his disillusionment with the Anglo-Irish community after what he considered to be its unacceptable response to the Famine, and his tendency late in life to refer to himself as "an Anglo-Celt". 
     It ought to be said here that the fraught political climate of those years had a tremendous influence on the way the Halpin family organised itself around the country, determining strict alliances based on how strong one's ties were to the Crown.  For example, Charles himself was ambivalent about the political stridency of his own brother,  the Rev Nicholas John Halpin, the brilliant Shakespearean scholar and, as editor of the ultra-Tory newspaper The Dublin Evening Mail, one of Daniel O'Connell's most effective and relentless critics.  It needs to be pointed out, however, that the Reverend's objections to O'Connell were not simply vulgar or bigoted, but revolved around what he felt was O'Connell's sectarianism - his apparent equation of Catholicism with what was essential about 'Irishness' - and the divisive implications of O'Connel's vision for Ireland's future.  As a boy, Nicholas John Halpin had listened to horrific stories about the bloodletting and savagery of the French Revolution and was, as a consequence, deeply opposed to 'rule by the mob'. 
     I'm afraid I'll have to leave things there for the time being.  I will return to this site on Wednesday, when I hope to complete the 'story' with details of the family's spread to the US and Canada. 

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Regards for now, Raymond C Halpin.