Journey to Dungloe: Part Two

Irish-American in Ireland

Continued from posting of 8/19/11

There wasn't enough time to find out more about my grandfather Jack before we left. My uncles said that their father didn't talk about his family or his youth, and I didn’t press them. I was confident of the orphan journey story, though, and Ken said we would do some research in Ireland, with original sources in the National Library in Dublin. We spent three days in Dublin, walking everywhere, so entranced by the buildings (many of them elegant, and drenched in the history of colonialism and of the revolutionary years), and the people (welcoming and talkative) that it seemed a punishment to spend any time in a library. We went to pubs in the evenings, where everyone from grandparents to children seemed to go, talking and drinking Guinness and listening to traditional music. We got up late, what with the late evenings and the jet lag; we bemoaned our short time.

We dashed into the gorgeous and ornate 1920s library an hour before closing time on our last day in Dublin. I took on my grandfather, and Ken my grandmother’s family, so he could find land tenancy records. A librarian in the genealogy department showed me how to search the 1901 census; my grandfather would have been ten then, and living with his grandparents. I searched any John O’Donnell in Ireland, age ten, living with grandparents, and found two: one in Dungloe, Donegal, and the other in County Tyrone, which is now in Northern Ireland. But the Tyrone child had a younger sister; my grandfather was an only child.

It’s him, it’s him! I told Ken; now we know it’s Dungloe we need to look. Dungloe is a small village on the very northern tip of Donegal, right on the Atlantic. Ken was skeptical; he said that people said nearly anything they could get away with in census surveys. Ages varied, names varied, and districts shifted. The record only said Dungloe district; we would have to research what that district included in 1901. It’s all we have, I said, I want to try. And the library was closing.

We left Dublin the next morning, heading northwest towards Donegal. Ken navigated the unfamiliar round-abouts (our traffic circles) while driving on the left side of the road, and did it with calm skill. We stopped in Kells for picnic food, and bought the best brown bread I’ve ever eaten. A man we met on the street took us to see the grey stone eighth-century church, monastery, and round tower, built for defense against the Vikings. The round towers weren’t much use and the Vikings triumphed. We spent the night at a bed and breakfast in Enniskill, in Northern Ireland, and arrived in Letterkenny, the biggest town in Donegal, by midday the next day. Creeslough and Church Hill, my great-grandparents’ homes, were nearby, but we needed ordinance maps and local help to pinpoint the farm on which Mary Toner was born. For James Callahan, we only had the general area in which his parents’ farm was located. It had been 150 years since their births; boundaries and names may have changed.

Letterkenny’s cathedral secretary was kind, and tried to be helpful, but their parish records didn’t go back as far as the 1860s. We slacked off for the afternoon and visited the cathedral, built in 1900 when Irish Catholics began to have enough money for such grand endeavors. Immigrants sent money home, too, for the buildings. Catholicism had been outlawed by the English from the early 1700s through the 1830s, and it took decades to rebuild the Church’s internal and external structures. We had dinner at a pub first opened in the 1890s, and then drove out of town to pub with a locally- renowned traditional band playing. We talked and listened for hours, until it was past eleven and dark, and Ken drove along the narrow, unlighted roads back to our bed and breakfast.

When we set out for Church Hill the next day, we were half-way through our short time in Ireland, and I was pessimistic about what we could find in just a few days. We only had some garbled place names for Mary Toner’s family farm, and even less for James Callahan; we knew that the Callahan’s were thick around in Church Hill. But I underestimated the weight that history has there, and the long memories of the people of that place. We stopped at the parish house near Church Hill, and Father McHugh invited us in. He gave us a history of immigration to Philadelphia from the people in rural Letterkenny district, and directed us to the post office in Church Hill. The elderly postmistress in the tiny town told us the turnings we’d need to take to get to Charley Callahan’s farm. He’ll know, she said, where all the Callahan’s are. Many we met seemed to have personal memories that stretched back two hundred years; the result, I think, of an unbroken connection to the land, for those who had not immigrated.

A slim, active-looking man in his mid- 60s was working on a van in a driveway when we drove down his narrow road to ask where we could find Charley Callahan. I am he, he said, and immediately invited us inside. In his large comfortable kitchen, he gave us tea and shortbread, and told us that the farmhouse in which we were sitting stood of on the site of generations of farmhouses belonging to the Callahan family. It wasn’t our branch of Callahans, though. He knew all the names of his forebears and their siblings, and my great-great grandfather John wasn’t one of them. He took us to see an old farmhouse built of field stone, with some of its walls still standing. It had been where his great grandfather, Edward Callahan, was born in the 1840s. He told us that our branch was likely the Callahans of Tulanascreen a few miles away. It was already past three in the afternoon, though, and we wanted to get to Creeslough, ten miles north, to see if we could find Mary Toner’s farm. We had only a day and a half left in Donegal, and I wanted to get to Dungloe on Jack O’Donnell’s trail, too. Thank God for long, long light until eleven each night. We promised each other that we would return next year, for the Callahans of Tulanascreen.

On the way to Creeslough, we stopped at the cemetery Templedouglas, the name an Anglicized version of the Gaelic name for the place. Ken, like a good genealogist, took pictures of all the Callahan gravestones so he could fill in his family charts. We stopped too at the church were my great grandfather would have been baptized; the old building was replaced by one from the 1920s, which was locked up, a grey flat stone building with windows so high we couldn’t look in. It was paved all around for a parking lot; no one was there. It stood in a breathtakingly lovely spot, overlooking a lake with low mountains in the distance. It was eerie, though, and had a deadened feel; we hurried away from it.

While we were in Ireland, several life-long devout Catholics told us that the raging priest pedophile scandal had finally turned them away from the Church. The front page headline in the Irish Times the day we left Dublin was: Church refuses to cooperate in priest pedophile scandal. Was the scandal putting the last nails in the coffin of traditional and unquestioning Irish Catholicism? The church in Church Hill looked as if it had been deserted long before.

To be continued next week...

Journey To Dungloe

“If we would have done more research before we left for Ireland,” my husband said, “we would have known that your grandfather Jack O’Donnell never was in Ireland; it was his grandparents who immigrated in the 1850s, not your grandfather in the 1910s.”

True, I said, but then we never would have gone to Dunloe. And that I would not have missed for the world.

Where Do We Come From?

My husband and I traveled to Ireland in July. It was a trip I’ve wanted to make since I was a child and my parents told my brothers and sisters and me that we were Irish-American. My father said that my grandfather, my father’s father, had been born in Philadelphia to Irish immigrant parents, Daniel Francis O’Donnell, and his wife Emma, who both died of influenza when he was two, in the 1890s, and that he had been sent back to Donegal, Ireland to be raised by an aunt. He returned at age 18 to work in the Philadelphia shipyards. He met and married my grandmother Agnes Callahan, the child of Irish immigrants, in Philadelphia. I imagined the filthy living conditions and hard work my great-grandparents must have endured in the Philadelphia slums, with no family to help them, their lonely deaths far from home, and the orphan Jack, traveling with a stranger on the ship back to Ireland. It was a fine romantic story, and it suited my desire for an out-of the-ordinary family history.

Immigrants and immigrant stories fascinated me from the time I can remember, perhaps because there were no immigrants in my small southern Ohio town in the 1950s and 1960s. The most foreign we ever got was a 1963 visit from a Russian family who was touring the US in a cultural exchange program. I read about it in the newspaper, and instantly knew that I had to go to the lecture they were giving in the high school auditorium. My family never attended events of any kind except for church and school. I must have been extraordinarily persuasive, since my mother promised to take me to it. I spent the week before reading everything I could find in the public library about Russia. But on the day of the lecture, one of my brothers was sick, and my mother had to stay home to take care of him. Our town had no public buses, it was too far to bicycle, and a cab was out of the question. People took cabs only to go to the hospital. I was crushed; I had wanted badly to just see people who weren’t American like me, to hear their foreign language, and to know directly from them what their lives were like. But I had to wait until I was in college in Chicago to meet my first foreigners, exchange students from Africa, France, and Germany.

My parents were not interested in genealogy, and didn’t know much more than the names and lives of their own parents. Why does it matter? They asked me when I questioned them about “where we came from.” I couldn’t find the words to explain why I thought it mattered, then. Now I can. Through knowing my family’s stories, I’m connected to history, to our human history. I know that torturously, amazingly, life goes on despite the pain of death, separation, poverty, and back luck. My people’s past, why they left Ireland and what their lives were like there, makes a difference today in who we are, who I am, and how our descendants’ lives may take shape. Knowing their stories helps me bear my own pain, somehow. In the end, the pain isn’t the most important thing.

The story about my grandfather’s orphan journey was detailed and solid, full of explicit facts and dates. I assumed it was general knowledge in our family. I didn’t question it; it was enough to know that we were Irish. It was an absorbing story that linked us to a country that had great literature, myths, and stories; dances and music that were melancholy and vibrant at the same time; and to a history of oppression, famine, survival, and defiance that stirred my soul with pride. But no one in my father’s family talked of family history. They were storytellers, singers, joke-tellers, urban Irish-Americans who liked to sit around the kitchen table in the evenings with a few drinks in them, telling tall tales. Telling a story and having people believe it was true was a high art among my father’s brothers. Truth was beside the point; the purpose was entertainment. If they had told stories about our family’s history, they would have been inventions, expressed for the sheer joy of invention.

Before we left for Ireland, Ken researched, in the thorough, original sources way of genealogists, my grandmother Agnes Callahan’s family history. We talked, before we left, with my uncles, cousins and second cousins about my grandmother’s parents, and we learned that Creeslough, in County Donegal, was the district where my great grandmother Mary Agnes Toner was born, and that her parents were Daniel Toner and Susan Trainor. My great-grandfather James Joseph Callahan was born not far from Mary Toner, near Church Hill, County Donegal, and his parents were John Callahan and Marjorie Maugh. With this start, Ken found more: my great-grandparents immigrated separately, in 1880 and 1884; they met in Philadelphia at the wedding of his sister and her brother, and married in 1887. In Donegal, we would go to these districts to find their parents’ tombstones, and see their farms, talk with our distant cousins to learn how it was that some immigrated and some did not.

To be continued next week...

What will you do?

You have been in the US for twenty two years. You came, only eighteen, without a visa or any other kind of permission and stayed, working in construction, dishwashing, roofing, farm work, picking apples, and processing fish – in short, any job that you could find. You could get these jobs because the employers could find no one else to do them. Most of the time you got paid, but sometimes you didn’t. You always had work, and after a few years, you went back to Mexico, married your childhood sweetheart, and brought her back with you. You entered the US again without a visa, as did your wife.

You could not stay in your hometown in Mexico. It was a town of the old, of widows and of families living on the money their men sent back from the US. The old people remembered when every family had some land to till and a few cattle to raise, but now the farmers couldn’t get their produce to market. Drug cartels controlled the entire countryside where you were born.

In a few more years, your father got very sick, and you took the long journey to your home town in Mexico. He died before you arrived, but you were in time for his funeral. You had to go back to the U.S.; your wife and two children depended on you. This time, Immigration caught you at the border and deported you. You came back the next day, coming over the border at another, more dangerous crossing, and made your way home to Seattle, because now it was home to you.

You didn’t know that you now had a potential felony charge against you: illegal entry after deportation. Fifteen years go by.

Now your elderly mother is ill, and you are determined to see her before she dies. You fly home, and are able to say goodbye. You come back to the US, crossing at night through the desert after walking for three days, and you don’t get caught. You go home to Seattle, and you work, raise your children, and volunteer to help coach your daughter’s soccer team. Your children make you proud, and your wife talks of immigration reform, that someday, it can’t be long now, President Obama will reform the laws so that you both can get your legal residence.

You are very tired of being undocumented in the US. You have never been able to buy a house or open a bank account because you don’t have a social security number. You worry about what will happen to your children if you aren’t here. There are four of them now, and the youngest is only seven. Your employer, the one who never asked you for your papers in the ten years you’ve been working for him, mentions that he’s going to need to see your work permit. You hear about other undocumented immigrants being picked up by Immigration and deported, in higher numbers than in President Bush’s administration.

You decide to make an appointment to see an immigration attorney to see if there is a way to get your papers. You go to the appointment with your wife and sixteen year old son. Your son wants to go because he is determined to help you. He thinks that because he is a US citizen, he may be able to get your residence for you. The attorney asks about your immigration history, and you tell her. She asks if you are afraid of returning to your home town, if you fear that someone will try to kill or imprison you. No, you say. She asks if you have been the victim of a crime. If you have been the victim of a serious crime in the US and reported the crime to the police, you might be eligible to request a visa to stay legally in the US, she says. No, you say, but your son says, but Dad, what about when you were beaten by the Seattle police?

So you tell the attorney: You got in your car to drive your child to a doctor’s appointment. You drove a couple of blocks. You didn’t know that the police had cordoned off several streets in order to find a fugitive. A policeman stopped you, dragged you out of the car, and beat you with his pistol in front of your screaming five year old. He told you to go ahead, complain to the police chief, see if he cared. So you did complain. You went to the police station near your house, and asked for the captain. You said you had a complaint about police conduct.

After you waited a while, you were shown into the captain’s office. The captain said, yes, this is a serious allegation. I’ll send an investigator to your house to take your statement. Here’s my card, the captain said, so you can call me. But the investigator didn’t come. A week later, you called again, and then you called the third and last time a month later. But the captain didn’t return your calls. You say that you don’t want to try again, and besides, it’s been more than two years since it happened.

The attorney says you have no options because of your deportation, and then your re-entry to the US without documents. This is a federal felony, she says. If you are picked up by Immigration, you will be deported immediately, without any opportunity to see an immigration judge. You may be prosecuted for the illegal re-entry, too, and face up to five years of federal prison time. Your son, the one who was sure he could help you, begins to cry.

What will you do?

Before I Die

Everyone called him Don Julio, giving him the courtesy title not only because he was elderly, but because he had dignity, and was unfailingly polite. He came to the US from Mexico when he was already in his late 40s, after his wife died and his children had emigrated. He sold his small piece of farmland to pay for the journey and the smuggler; he couldn’t keep a farm going without his wife’s help. He planned to live near one of his children and work at whatever he could find; he had no grander hopes than mere survival. He believed his true life ended when his wife died.

The US held a surprise for him, though. A year after he arrived in Seattle and found work as a construction laborer, he met 25 year old Diana at his son’s house during a birthday party for his grandson. He was entranced by her quiet self possession and her seriousness; he found her small, neat figure and her shy smile beautiful. She loved his courtly manners and his lean strong looks, and was moved by the way he listened closely to whoever spoke to him. They were both from rural Nayarit, the Mexican state on the Pacific side of the country, and both were in the US without documents.

He got up his courage, feeling like he did when he was 17 and asked his future wife to walk out with him for the first time, and called Diana a week after the party to invite her to a restaurant for a Saturday night dinner. She said yes. He was more nervous than he could remember ever being as he got ready for that evening, and went to pick her up. He berated himself for being an old fool who wouldn’t have the first idea about what to do with a young girlfriend, and a dullard who would have nothing of interest to say. He felt so discouraged that he almost called Diana to cancel, but the memory of his wife’s words came to him. A few weeks before she died, his wife said, “Promise me that you will do your best to enjoy your life; promise me. Our lives are so short….” He hadn’t thought about those words until now. He took it as a sign, his wife’s blessing.

The first date went well, and so did the others. Don Julio and Diana married a year and a half after their first meeting, and had their daughter Lissette a year after that. Three years later, their son Rodrigo was born. Don Julio continued healthy and strong, and worked construction through his early 60s. He then found work as a cashier in a Mexican butcher shop in Burien, a small town south of Seattle, until his late 60s, when he became too tired to stand on his feet all day in the busy shop. Diana insisted that he stop work; she said that her salary as a hotel maid, and Lissette’s earnings at McDonald’s, were enough to keep the family going. Don Julio finally agreed to stop work at the butcher shop, but he did all the family cooking and cleaning and laundry. Diana joked that she lived like a queen at home.

Don Julio now had time to listen to the radio in Spanish in the mornings; his favorite show was a daily news program that had an immigration attorney for a weekly show on immigration law. At least once on each weekly show, someone called in to ask the attorney about immigration options for people who had been victims of serious crime in the US. The attorney would say, yes, if you have been the victim of a crime like domestic violence or a gun or knife attack, and reported the crime to the police, you might be able to get legal status for yourself and your family. The purpose of the U visa, she said, was to encourage undocumented people to report crime to the police, without fear of deportation for doing so. This is so we have a more secure society, for all of us, she said.

Don Julio made up his mind to consult the attorney, and Diana agreed. Years ago, when Lissette was seven and Rodrigo was four, Don Julio suffered a ferocious knife attack in their home, during a Thanksgiving dinner they hosted. One of their guests, a single young man who they had met at their church, suddenly picked up the carving knife and stabbed Don Julio three times in the chest before fleeing. They called the police; an ambulance shortly arrived and took Don Julio to the hospital, where he stayed more than a week, recuperating. The police caught the attacker and charged him with the crime. Don Julio still had shortness of breath due to his scarred lung, but the attack didn’t make them stop inviting guests to dinner.

Don Julio and Diana were both worried about their undocumented status. President Obama had not done what he promised to do to reform the immigration laws and provide a path to legal residence for the country’s 12 million undocumented people. They had neighbors, friends, and Don Julio’s oldest son all who had been arrested by ICE and given voluntary departure, but who had returned to the US again. Diana’s employer, a large hotel chain, had recently begun the process of checking staff social security numbers to verify legal status and permission to work. If she lost her job, only Lissette’s minimum wage job would stand between them and losing their house trailer. It would be two years before Lissette would graduate from community college with her associate’s degree in nursing, and two more years before Rodrigo would graduate from high school.

They went together as a family to the appointment with the attorney, the kids included. The attorney asked a lot of questions about their history in the US, and then said that it sounded as though Don Julio might be eligible for a U visa, for victims of crime, and that Diana would be included in the visa. With the visa, they both would have work permission for three years, after which they could apply for legal permanent residence. It would be a two-step process: first to get the police and the prosecutor to certify that Don Julio had been a victim of the crime of felonious assault, and that he had helped the police in the investigation of the crime; and second to apply for the visa, proving that Don Julio had suffered “substantial harm” as a result of the crime. But the crime happened more than 14 years ago; would the police still have the record and be able to certify that Don Julio helped in the investigation? The attorney said it might not be possible to get police or prosecutor certification, but that she would try for it, if the family was willing. They were.

The attorney submitted the paperwork to the police to begin the process; sometimes police departments take a month or so to respond. A month went by, and still no response. Then, Diana called the attorney. Don Julio had been very ill just in the last few weeks; his doctor did tests, and said that Don Julio had cancer, advanced cancer. “Will I still be eligible for the U visa if my husband dies?” she asked. How very cold and heartless she is, the attorney thought; while her husband is dying, she is focused on herself. Yes, the attorney said, you will be, as long as the police will certify you as a victim as well, since you were by his side when your husband was attacked, and suffered psychological trauma. You also were a witness, and gave your statement to the police.

Over the next few weeks, while the attorney pursued the U certification with the police, Diana called twice more, each time to ask the same question. Each time, the attorney said the same thing: yes, you will qualify as long as the police will certify. At each call, Diana reported that her husband was getting weaker; his cancer was too advanced for chemotherapy, and his only treatment was pain medication. Then, another call to the attorney. This time, it was Lissette, Don Julio’s daughter. My father died yesterday, she said; he insisted nearly every day, since he was diagnosed with cancer that we assure him that my mother would still qualify for the U visa after his death. We told him that she would, but it was so important to him that he made my mother call you several times. Yesterday, before he died, he said that at least he will die happy, knowing that she will qualify.

Don Julio was buried in the US, where he wanted to be. Others had their ashes sent back to Mexico so they could be buried there, but he told Diana that he had a second and happy life here, and wanted to be close to his wife and children, in death as in life. Diana is still waiting for the police or the prosecutor to certify the crime against her, and she is still hopeful. But she knows that the time is coming when her employer will check her status to see if she has work permission. And then? Will Rodrigo have to quit high school to support the family? Will Lissette have to quit college?

To be continued….