I Wish

 

 

Ancestry.com is a wonderful thing, something I never expected anything from except perhaps to discover a few ancestors. It delivered so much more than that.

My parents’ generation of our family all grew up in South Philadelphia, second generation Americans. They were city kids, a bit more streetwise than I ever was, but then, I was the protected female offspring who wasn’t allowed to do many of the things my brothers were.

When my parents’ generation grew up, they all moved out to the suburbs. Most of those relatives moved to Delaware County, PA. My parents moved to Bucks County, on the other side of Philadelphia, instead. Whenever he was asked why he didn’t move to Delaware County, my father would reply – with a bit of truth as well as irony – “Because it’s too damned close to the relatives.”

Granted my parents grew up a block away from each other, and their cousins – my dad had many – all lived a block or two from each other. You couldn’t walk to the corner store – or the corner bar – without bumping into a relative. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing.

When I grew up, the relatives barely knew my brothers and me, other than what we looked like from the annual Christmas card, where the three of us were posed in some scene (Santa’s elves, flying in spaceships over the city, delivering Christmas wreaths in the snow while a ceramic deer looked on).

We visited some of the relatives once or twice a year, and others a few times in my lifetime, but they seldom, if ever, came to our house. When they did, they looked at us and our surroundings as if they were visiting a strange planet and we were the resident aliens.

Even though they lived in the suburbs, as did we, their neighborhoods had sidewalks; ours did not. Our neighborhood had summer homes on stilts, and those houses had outhouses; they had weekly streetcleaners coming down the street. Even though we didn’t live on or near a farm, some neighbors had chickens and roosters, and one had ducks. Our area was really more rural than suburban.

All of my grandparents lived in the city. They were first generation Americans whose parents came from Irish stock. My mother’s parents had both died long before I came along, so my dad’s parents were the only grandparents I ever knew.

I’m sure if I’d asked my grandfather, he would have told me about his family. He was a good one for a story. But he had a stroke when I was about 9, and was difficult to understand after that, so by the time I was old enough to think of the questions, he couldn’t give the answers. He died when I was 10.

My grandmother never seemed to want to talk about anything to do with Ireland beyond saying her parents were born and raised in Ireland – especially if you mentioned that her maiden name was English. Since we only visited them on a few holidays a year, and my grandmother, after feeding us kids milk and some of her wonderful cake, got busy with making dinner and talking with my mother, there never seemed to be a chance to sit down with her and find out the family history. By the time I was old enough to want to delve into family history, she was living with my uncle’s family and later was in a nursing home, so I couldn’t really get information from her.

I heard that someone had had a family tree done – this was in the days before the internet – and I set about getting a copy. First I was told my father’s aunt – the only remaining one on his father’s side – had it. I wrote to her, and her reply was wonderful. 

She referred to me as her namesake – I wasn’t. We didn’t spell our first names the same way, and my mother was adamant that I had not been named for her, of all people. She was delighted that I had written, and knew all sorts of things about me, apparently from other relatives. She didn’t have the family tree. She said one of my uncles had it, so I wrote to him, and he sent a copy.

I wish I’d asked the aunt if I could come visit her. It didn’t matter to me that other people in the family didn’t like her – my mother said that although the woman was childless, she told everyone else how to raise their children. I would like to have spent an afternoon with her and learned what she knew of the family history. But I didn’t think of it until years later when I actually had a car, and by then she was dead.

I always knew my mother’s family better than my father’s because we visited them more often. My mother’s identical twin sister was a prolific producer of children, so we were at their house at least once a year, and her other sister lived near them. My mother’s brother lived in the outskirts of the city, not far from us. I knew the stories, but when it came to the people, my knowledge ended with my mother’s grandparents.

Armed with the family tree from my dad’s side, I had a bit more history, but without the stories. Our family had actually married into part of the family tree that went back several more generations to a Lord Someone-or-other.

I had always assumed my family came over because of the Great Hunger (what most people mistakenly call the Famine). I was wrong. They didn’t leave Ireland until the late 1880s.  Having survived two potato crop failures, I wondered why they left.

With the advent of the internet and Ancestry, I got some of my answers. They did not come from the website itself; they came from an email on Ancestry from someone who turned out to be a third cousin.

Because of that email, I had the opportunity to meet both the sender and many other third cousins who live in England and Northern Ireland. I am Facebook friends with many of them. I consider that knowledge and those friendships a gift.

I love discovering relatives I never knew I had. And when I have the opportunity to meet them, it’s thrilling to me.

Recently, I met another of the distant cousins with whom I’m Facebook friends.

On my last trip to the UK, I didn’t ask anyone over there if we could get together because, having done so before, and having been met with excuses from a few, I thought perhaps I was being a bother, and they weren’t as interested in our meeting as I was.

I was surprised when two of the cousins I’d met before wanted to get together. But even more surprising was that another that I hadn’t met before reached out to see if we could meet. It surprised me, then, toward the end of our afternoon together that she said, “Well, I guess you can cross me off your list now.” I hope she was joking. I am never quite sure, when people say things like that, whether or not they’re serious. I genuinely liked her, and would be happy to get together again, just as I was very happy to get together again with the other two cousins.

The thing I haven’t yet discovered is why everyone else from our family who left Ireland went to England, while my direct ancestors came to America. I wonder, if someone asked them why they didn’t go to England if they would’ve said, “Because it’s too damned close to the relatives!” But so far, I haven’t discovered a reason.

I would love to be able to afford to get the kind of in-depth family history that people who appear on Finding Your Roots get.  It’s possible, but I think I’d have to win the lottery to be able to do it. Of course, they wouldn’t be able to surprise me with a famous relative. I already know about and have met the Broadway actress in the family.