Not a close one. It is the same family. I grew up believing that we were descended from the Austrian Taaffes because my father and his brothers had been brought up to believe it, but then his youngest brother got into genealogy when I was in college and it turned out we're descended from one of the other branches which eventually emigrated direct from Ireland, which doesn't stop it from being funny that the historical Eduard Graf von Taaffe was a dead ringer for my father's third-oldest brother, give or take nineteenth- versus twentieth-century fashions in mustaches. In other words, I am not in line to petition for the restoration of either the Irish or the Austrian titles. Technically I have an ancestral castle in Ireland, but so do a lot of people and in any case it's a private clinic these days. (Smarmore Castle near Ardee; I've never been there. Taaffe's Castle in Carlingford is a sixteenth-century tower house which I did visit in 2004, a picturesquely ivy-flourishing, slate-roofed ruin that isn't on the water anymore because the harbor was dredged and the docks built up. selkie and I checked out what had happened to Ellischau when I was in D.C. and it didn't look occupied, either. [edit] It's a cultural monument of the Czech Republic! Speaking of places that the borders changed out from underneath.) I still feel sentimentally attached to taaffeite.
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Not a close one. It is the same family. I grew up believing that we were descended from the Austrian Taaffes because my father and his brothers had been brought up to believe it, but then his youngest brother got into genealogy when I was in college and it turned out we're descended from one of the other branches which eventually emigrated direct from Ireland, which doesn't stop it from being funny that the historical Eduard Graf von Taaffe was a dead ringer for my father's third-oldest brother, give or take nineteenth- versus twentieth-century fashions in mustaches. In other words, I am not in line to petition for the restoration of either the Irish or the Austrian titles. Technically I have an ancestral castle in Ireland, but so do a lot of people and in any case it's a private clinic these days. (Smarmore Castle near Ardee; I've never been there. Taaffe's Castle in Carlingford is a sixteenth-century tower house which I did visit in 2004, a picturesquely ivy-flourishing, slate-roofed ruin that isn't on the water anymore because the harbor was dredged and the docks built up.