I knew very little about my grandmother at all except that my father's birth certificate named her as Lizzie O'Neill, living at 2 Catherine Street, Dublin, where my father had grown up. He had been only four when she was murdered. He had lived in the cellar of a tenement with his foster family, so she must have had a room above. I also had two short newspaper articles giving her address in 1925 at 48 Newmarket, two streets away. I had searched with great care for Lizzie among the records of the Irish General Register Office but had never found her. But when I realised that my father looked just like W B Yeats I started looking again . I had also the police photographs of her corpse at the site of the murder and even the bullet that killed her, both of which were handed to my father in 1961 when he returned to Dublin to find out about her death.