Family History, Part II

John and Luke with our lovely guide Jamie Doyle.

We set out this morning on a clear, bright day in Jamie Doyle's SUV. The sunny southeast they call it, yesterday's rains notwithstanding. The west gets a lot more rain from off the Atlantic. Jamie was taking us to a place called Brownstown. Brownstone isn't exactly a town; it's more like an area or locality or township. He knew of two places that Dunne's may have lived.

We have all been focusing on the Dunne's as that is who we are looking for. But when Jamie heard that John's last name is Carroll (sounded like Kerr when he said it), he remarked, "John Carroll? That's a real Kilkenny name." We are in County Kilkenny now and though we are looking for Dunne's, Carroll is the more common name. We don't know as much about where the Carroll side of the family in Ireland as they came to Peoria via Canada.

John said last night, "This genealogy is complex." Part of the reason is because families keep using the same names over and over. John's family is a case in point. In the older cemetery we looked in yesterday, John found a Carroll headstone from 1886. Amazingly, the names on it were John, Mary, and Tom. John's dad's name was John, his mom was Mary, and his brother is Tom. My own family is rife with Jim's, Joe's, Tom's, John's and Bill's.

Jamie showed us many places today. Here are a few.

This is the house that our relative John Dunne lived in. I think that he was the last of our branch of the Dunne family to live in Brownstown. Other earlier relatives lived in this house as well. We will have a clearer picture of all of this when we return to Dublin to be with our cousin Brid, who possesses much knowledge about our family's history. Learning genealogy is like putting together a never-ending puzzle.

These are some buildings on the Knox Farm, where the Dunne family worked and lived. It is possible that John's grandmother lived in one of these houses. Though she left Ireland in 1892, decades after the potato famine. we surmise that her life was probably difficult and prospects not good. Why else would a 19-year-old with only a fourth grade education leave her family to sail across the ocean to a strange new country? Mary Ann (Annie) Carroll's life did get better in America. She married and had six children. Years later, she was able to send for her mother Johanna and her brother Tom, who joined her in the United States.

Jamie Doyle was so kind to us. He showed us three different churches in the area where our family may have attended. This is St. Aidan's and, it dates to 1800. It had beautiful stained glass windows, with inscriptions in old Irish at the bottom.

In the cemetery at St. David's, we found the grave of Nellie whose name was written in the old book that Jamie had.

We also visited a very old cemetery, with at least one grave dating to the 1500's.

There are many people buried in this cemetery who couldn't afford a headstone or proper burial. The tufted areas in the foreground of the photo below contain graves of such people. We could feel the stones under our feet as we walked. Possibly we have relatives buried here, even Thomas, John's great grandfather.

Jamie was sensitive as he talked about our family, some of whom were likely very poor. There is shame in being poor, isn't there? And yet, in some ways, it seems so arbitrary. We who aren't poor can think that this is because of our own efforts. But we don't pick the times and the families we are born to. Potato famines, wars, genocide, and grinding poverty can all force families to flee their homes for other countries. We are seeing that today in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries and to a lesser degree in Latin America. Our ancestors were in the shoes of the refugees today. The slogan on a receipt from the famine ship the Dunbrody reads, "We celebrate the past to awaken the future."

I think about all my relatives and all the people who came before us. Many of them had such hard lives, and they worked so hard also. My life is easy compared to theirs and in large part because of their sacrifices.

Our experiences remind me of the last line of George Eliot's "Middlemarch."

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."