“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...
No comments:
Post a Comment