Ireland, My Ireland

from: ILR JOURNAL INSTITUTE FOR LEARNING IN RETIREMENT. Volume 13
by: Maryjane Snyder


Down we went and pulled up in front of a whitewashed thatched roofed cottage straight off the cover of a tourist calendar. By now I was a complete basket case, and no way was I going to go into the home of a stranger. Not so, my husband.

He knocked on the door and explained to the woman who answered that his wife’s mother might just have come from these parts, and we wondered…

“No,” she said carefully. “We don’t have any Yanks in the family. But do come in and have a spot of tea.” I hesitantly climbed out of the car and we entered a large room with a hard dirt floor, a huge fireplace burning peat, and a row of socks strung across it to dry. I sat down and she fussed around and brought tea and scones while we began to talk to lighten the sudden tension.

“You know,” she finally said cautiously, “there is a picture in the loft we were looking at last month. No one knows who it is, and we almost threw it out. But we didn’t.” She pulled a chair over, piled it on a table so she could climb up, put her hand in the hole that was the loft—and brought down the picture and put it in my hand.

Fortunately I was seated or I might very well have fainted. For there was my grandfather, my grandmother, my mother, aged about ten, and her sister and brother. The date was confirmed when Clark pulled out his magnifier and read the inscription on a pin, “Buffalo Exposition 1902.”

With this turn of events Mrs. Nestor began to get more nervous. “We’d better get Himself,” she said, and called the little boy, who was watching all this open-mouthed, “to run to Grandma’s and fetch Dada.”

Himself arrived and slowly the story came out. Mrs. Nestor had been afraid to tell the truth. They did indeed know they had family in the States – an aunt and an uncle. The aunt was the oldest. In Ireland, at that time, unlike many other countries, primogeniture passed down not just through the sons, but through the daughters. The oldest daughter to the oldest daughter and on and on. Mary Nestor was not in that line, but I was of the line of the missing oldest daughter.

Mary and Johnny Nestor had lived all their married life with the real fear that someone would one day arrive from the States and claim their ten acres, cottage, garden and all. They had even thought of advertising in all the papers in the States to see if anyone was forthcoming but decided it would be too expensive. And here we were.

I was horrified. Of all the things I was interested in, ten acres in West Galway were not among them. I assured them, in my innocence, that once we returned to the States, I would call my lawyer and we would straighten it all out. We took pictures of the cottage where Grandma had been born and grew up.

We took pictures of the views she must have seen across the peat bogs and borrowed the family portrait picture, assuring them we would send copies. We finished our trip to Ireland, thunderstruck by what we had just been through.

When we returned home, I called my lawyer who knew nothing about Irish law but undertook to find out. Matters were not that simple. It seems that I couldn’t give the Nestors the land nor sell it to them for a dollar nor in any way give up the lineage. I could assure them of my lack of interest, but my daughter would inherit those rights and her daughters, etc., and who knew?

However, I wrote such a firm letter of dismissal of interest that the Nestors decided that the risk was slight and had the courage to build a real house where we were royally entertained (with tumblers of whiskey) when we returned.

When we went back—and we did, things were more relaxed, and Johnny undertook to explain the magnitude of my grandmother’s sin. Double sin. She married an Englishman, and worse than that—an Anglican!

To understand the horror you must understand that these are the descendants of people who lived in Northern Ireland and who were driven off their fertile acres by Cromwell in the 1600s. Any thoughts you might cherish about there being forgiveness of the English, erase them. I, all these generations later, found I could not bear to read Leon Uris’ Trinity. To this day the people he writes of were my people who were pushed off our land. A pox on Cromwell.