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Research dossier · People & Ideas

Kevin Mays

Irish rugby union player

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 16, 2023
Entity authorityQ123507789 ↗
Source-derived summary

Kevin Michael Andrew Mays (born 9 August 1949) is an Irish former rugby union international.

Mays, born in London, attended Dublin's St Paul's College.

A lock, Mays was capped four times Ireland in 1973. He debuted in the draw against the All Blacks at Lansdowne Road and featured in three of Ireland's 1973 Five Nations matches.

Mays had four sons who played rugby for Gonzaga College. He is a solicitor by profession.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Kevin Mays” is irish rugby union player. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Kevin, Mays and Irish, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1949, 1973—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1949-08-09. For this dossier, Kevin, Mays and Irish is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “irish rugby union player” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 16, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q123507789. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1949 and 1973.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Kevin Mays”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Kevin Mays primary sources, Kevin Mays archive and Kevin research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Kevin Mays”?
  2. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Kevin Mays” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.