On my 21st birthday, Dad presented me with a dusty old document – a legal brief, foolscap in size and bottle green in colour. A family heirloom written by his dad, my grandfather Thomas Logue, and now it was mine. Something about the Irish Boundary Commission and the Derry Nationalists. The whole thing had been bent in half for at least 50 years. We raised a glass of bubbly wine and suddenly I was an adult.

It was 1998, John Major was out and Tony Blair was in, the Belfast Agreement was in its seventh month, the Omagh bomb was still ringing in ears, and the Bloody Sunday Tribunal had just been established. Growing up in Derry, the war was like white noise, and the Border a normal part of life.

What a pivotal time from tension to hope, from war to peace. Despite this I was planning a trip to Australia as soon as I finished university. Before leaving, I left strict instructions to grab the legal brief in case of a house fire. “It’s very important so look after it.” It was at my mum’s house in Kinnagoe Bay, Donegal.

You can imagine the amount of attic clear-outs, house moves, and spring cleans that goes on over 25 years, so every time I visited from Sydney I always checked where it was and if it was damaged. It often travelled for various family projects, up and down the road from Kinnagoe to Derry to Burnfoot and then to Lifford to the county archivist, then to Derry and back to Kinnagoe. Over and back, and along and across, the Border that went from “provisional” to “confirmed” in 1925, 100 years ago.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty established the Irish Free State, and the following year in 1922 partitioned the country via a provisional “six-counties” Border. The Treaty also set up the Irish Boundary Commission to recommend the final delineation of the new Border.