news
03-17-2016, 11:50 AM
http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-03-12-1457821329-2539438-shamrocks-thumb.jpg (http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-03-12-1457821329-2539438-shamrocks.jpg)My mother embraced all things Irish: shamrocks, soda bread and fishermen's sweaters. She chose St. Patrick's Day for my father's funeral and, the night before, she mended the old green, white and orange flag so we could fly it at the house during a reception following the service. My mom could tell you the names of the villages in Cork, Kerry and Limerick where her grandparents were born, and I knew my dad's people were from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland.
I'd always been told I was 100 percent Irish and I believed it every St. Patrick's Day of my life -- until now. I recently ran my DNA and the surprising results, which estimate I'm 94 percent Irish, indicate the percentage could even be as low as 81. Surprisingly, I have DNA from Finland/Northwest Russia, but I have a feeling those ancestors go so far back I'll never find them.
Maybe that Nordic trace is what kept my father from being the flag-waving, leprechauns and Erin go bragh type of person my mother was. He loved the Irish playwrights Sean O'Casey and George Bernard Shaw, displayed a family coat of arms with the motto spectemur agendo (let us be judged by our deeds), and had even kissed the Blarney Stone as young man, but he never seemed to care that much about his heritage.
Long before he met my mom, my father was a monk. He wore a long, black habit and a large cross around his neck. He lived in the company of other religious men, prayed morning, noon and night, and taught in Catholic boys schools. After 16 years of piety, he walked away -- or rather sailed away, leaving a French monastery and landing at the port of New York just as his parents had when they arrived in the United States from Ireland in the early 20th Century.
http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-03-12-1457817062-5389698-MaristBroGroup-thumb.jpg (http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-03-12-1457817062-5389698-MaristBroGroup.jpg)
As a member of a religious order, Dad had taken a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience -- maybe a vow of silence, too, because he never revealed much in the way of family secrets. Or perhaps, because of his own parents' silence, he simply never knew the tragic stories I've unearthed by exploring our family history.
My paternal grandparents are a mystery to me. I have a strand of pearls that belonged to my grandmother who, my dad once said, fixed rice pudding on washday. All I knew of my grandfather stemmed from one meager recollection -- a passing comment that his father had been an angry, unhappy man from whom my dad had once hidden under the kitchen table to avoid a beating.
Oh, how I wish I'd been curious enough at the time to ask for more! Instead, when my interest was piqued years later, my dad and his siblings were gone and it was too late to beg for details.
http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-03-12-1457820128-9609237-dadfamily-thumb.jpg (http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-03-12-1457820128-9609237-dadfamily.jpg)
Angry and unhappy. Possibly violent. That was all I had to go on, and once my research started turning up ships' manifests, census data and death certificates, I began to figure out why.
My grandfather's journey to America from Northern Ireland began with a forbidden affair that took a tragic turn. Charles was 18 when he climbed out the bedroom window of a County Tyrone farmhouse to elope with his neighbor, Mary, who was five years older. I learned this when my phone rang at 6 o'clock one morning. An Irish cousin I didn't know existed was on the line.
"My granny and your granddad were brother and sister!" he announced in his thick brogue.
<a href="http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-03-12-1457819965-2454113-Mc1901Census.jpg">
I'd always been told I was 100 percent Irish and I believed it every St. Patrick's Day of my life -- until now. I recently ran my DNA and the surprising results, which estimate I'm 94 percent Irish, indicate the percentage could even be as low as 81. Surprisingly, I have DNA from Finland/Northwest Russia, but I have a feeling those ancestors go so far back I'll never find them.
Maybe that Nordic trace is what kept my father from being the flag-waving, leprechauns and Erin go bragh type of person my mother was. He loved the Irish playwrights Sean O'Casey and George Bernard Shaw, displayed a family coat of arms with the motto spectemur agendo (let us be judged by our deeds), and had even kissed the Blarney Stone as young man, but he never seemed to care that much about his heritage.
Long before he met my mom, my father was a monk. He wore a long, black habit and a large cross around his neck. He lived in the company of other religious men, prayed morning, noon and night, and taught in Catholic boys schools. After 16 years of piety, he walked away -- or rather sailed away, leaving a French monastery and landing at the port of New York just as his parents had when they arrived in the United States from Ireland in the early 20th Century.
http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-03-12-1457817062-5389698-MaristBroGroup-thumb.jpg (http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-03-12-1457817062-5389698-MaristBroGroup.jpg)
As a member of a religious order, Dad had taken a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience -- maybe a vow of silence, too, because he never revealed much in the way of family secrets. Or perhaps, because of his own parents' silence, he simply never knew the tragic stories I've unearthed by exploring our family history.
My paternal grandparents are a mystery to me. I have a strand of pearls that belonged to my grandmother who, my dad once said, fixed rice pudding on washday. All I knew of my grandfather stemmed from one meager recollection -- a passing comment that his father had been an angry, unhappy man from whom my dad had once hidden under the kitchen table to avoid a beating.
Oh, how I wish I'd been curious enough at the time to ask for more! Instead, when my interest was piqued years later, my dad and his siblings were gone and it was too late to beg for details.
http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-03-12-1457820128-9609237-dadfamily-thumb.jpg (http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-03-12-1457820128-9609237-dadfamily.jpg)
Angry and unhappy. Possibly violent. That was all I had to go on, and once my research started turning up ships' manifests, census data and death certificates, I began to figure out why.
My grandfather's journey to America from Northern Ireland began with a forbidden affair that took a tragic turn. Charles was 18 when he climbed out the bedroom window of a County Tyrone farmhouse to elope with his neighbor, Mary, who was five years older. I learned this when my phone rang at 6 o'clock one morning. An Irish cousin I didn't know existed was on the line.
"My granny and your granddad were brother and sister!" he announced in his thick brogue.
<a href="http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-03-12-1457819965-2454113-Mc1901Census.jpg">