Four Irish-Catholic teenagers and their Scottish-born mother abandoned the family farm, fearfully leaving their home due to the strife of 1920s Ireland. Scorned by the Irish for their Scottish blood and despised by the majority in their native Northern Ireland due to their Catholicism, the teens sought refuge and a better life in the United States.
Up until last week, this was the picture I had of my family history. It was wrong. The truth was more complex than I could have imagined.
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In recent months, I have been reading a lot about Irish history. (I just finished an excellent book called “The Story of Ireland” by Neil Hegarty, from which I drew much of the history in this piece.) My vision of this moment in my family’s history seemed to fit in perfectly with the time period it was supposed to occur in. Nothing was amiss.
The Irish fought their War of Independence against the British in 1919-21, eventually getting the British to agree to the formation of the Irish Free State. But the Irish really didn’t have the leverage they thought they did, and their diplomatic party arrived in London to sign a treaty with the British that wasn’t quite what the Irish expected.
Among the terms sprung upon the Irish was that six counties in the northeast of the island could vote to reject membership in the Irish Free State. The Irish contingent thought a fractured free nation was better than no independence at all, and took the deal. The northeastern counties—filled with loyal (and, in some cases, relocated) British subjects—then passed on the prospect of an united Ireland and remained in the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland.
Some Irish nationalists felt taken by this development, and the Irish began quarreling among themselves. The Irish Civil War broke out in June 1922, and lasted nearly a year. The war turned the Irish Free State in on itself, and allowed those in Northern Ireland loyal to the queen to solidify their power. The chance for a united Ireland slipped further away.
My great-grandfather—along with his mother and siblings—moved to New Jersey in October 1923, five months after the end of the Irish Civil War and in the thick of worsening conditions for Catholics in Northern Ireland. His father, the local postmaster, had died in February 1923 at the age of 50. The death certificate does not have a cause of death.
Here I had a perfect, personal anecdote. It seemed that turbulent period had changed the course of my family’s history, as much as it did Ireland’s. A widow and her children had to flee their homeland, for their own safety.
But sometimes the truth is different from the story you want. And in the course of researching this branch of my family history, I discovered things didn’t quite mesh. Did the family live in County Armagh—as we always had been told—or was it from County Antrim, as the 1911 Irish census and other documents say? Did the family leave Ireland due to political tension, or just because my great-great-grandmother had a better support system waiting in the U.S. than she had in Ireland? They were all possibilities.
Personal stories don’t normally turn up in public archives, and the time to verify them had passed. There is no doubt the stories could be part of the truth, but the reality seemed to be far more complicated. What about the census that had the family living in County Antrim, or my great-grandfather’s birth certificate, baptism certificate and passport—all saying he lived in Armoy, a village of a few hundred people seven miles from the northern tip of the Irish isle?
Still, public records were just as shaky and spottily kept. A family member found a British passport that says my great-grandfather was born in 1908—a year after his real birth date. Other records seemed to agree on and confirm basic details. It seems a safe bet to say our family hailed from County Antrim. My great-grandfather’s father was a postman; his mother, a homemaker.
But, from firsthand accounts, we really only know a few things about my family’s life in Ireland: my great-grandfather lived fairly comfortably there, and his thoughts often returned to his homeland, even if he never got back there himself.
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I had to broaden my scope beyond 1923 if I wanted a good picture of my family.
It turns out I had an army of researchers at my disposal, as several people in my 100-plus-member extended family already had looked into our roots. What they had found was far more interesting than I expected.
Among those with interesting tales was my great-grandfather’s mother. Raised in Scotland, she moved to America, in 1895, as a teenager. She worked as a maid for a branch of the Tufts family in Boston for several years. The patriarch of the family was the heir to the American Soda Fountain Company and the Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina. When the resort’s founder died, the heir moved his family to North Carolina.
My great-great-grandmother decided around the same time to leave the U.S., moving to the north of Ireland, where she had family. Records for her don’t pop up again until 1901, at which point she had married my great-great-grandfather and was living in County Antrim.
Then there are the family legends, people like “the Robin Hood of Northern Ireland,” a notorious outlaw who caused havoc in the 18th century after a landlord evicted his father from the family’s farm. He eventually was captured and hanged in Derry in 1722. The major road between Derry and Belfast, Glenshane Pass, is named after him.
In fact, research showed my family had been in Ireland at least 1,500 years, back to the time of the first Irish kings. One story even credits the clan my family sprang from for bringing St. Patrick to Ireland. And by “bringing,” I mean “kidnapping and enslaving.”
But, years after escaping back to his native Britain, Patrick would return to Ireland and help spread Christianity on the island. He would eventually become one of Ireland’s patron saints, who we celebrate each March in this country with parades and public intoxication.
It was nice to know my family probably helped make that happen.
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Of course, if I had learned anything from this ordeal, it was that it is hard to separate legend from truth. The “truth” was whatever I chose to believe.
The branch of the family tree this piece is about has no one left in Ireland. My grandmother said one of her aunts returned to Northern Ireland at one point to see what had happened to the family farm. None of my great-great-grandfather’s siblings had married or had children. With his family in the United States, no relatives were in the country to claim the property when the last of the siblings died. It was left to the neighbors, who had helped care for the property.
It was a bitter thing to discover about a family that has lineage back to Ireland’s first days, but this story is only one-eighth of my family tree. Two or three of the other branches had roots in Ireland, too, so there is still much to discover about this part of my heritage.
Some argue that talk of “roots” and “heritage” is hogwash, a fool’s game, a dreamer’s exercise. But I’m of the camp that thinks we can draw something about ourselves from the past. Just as a building as a foundation, so does a family build upon itself, shaped by the successes or failures of the past generations. Environment and culture matter.
While I hadn’t nailed down my family’s exact story, it was nice to have a better sense of where exactly this Irish blood I have came from. It means far more than I could have expected.
Rob Anthes is the senior community editor of the Hamilton Post. Connect with him at facebook.com/robanthes.
