INTRODUCTION Rather than the tidy record-keeping Dutch, this branch of the family springs from the entirely untidy, un-spelling, big-familied and intermarrying Irish. Irish genealogy, I was told early on, was a miasma, and I will not disagree. It does not help that our surnames are very common ones in Ireland and in this country, and that almost 1.5 million Irish sailed to the United States between 1845 and 1855. To figure out which particular Condon or Grady is ours…difficult. As the Irish genealogical researcher John Grenham has blogged “Without some idea of how to measure the likelihood of what you’ve found, its place on the scale of probability, it’s very hard to interpret it…This is especially important for Irish research before the 1850s. At that point most conclusions are balance-of-probability judgments, not cast-iron certainties.” I certainly agree. The Dutch history in America had its upheavals, but even if Irish history and genealogy had been continually recorded, it would be marked by cataclysm in that country and this one: colonization by England and survival and transformation of the peasantry, the Famine with mouths green from eating grass, the hard crossings, the adjustment to an American society that did not want the Irish, the brawling rise of Chicago’s industries, epidemics of diptheria and flu. All of these come equipped with a latticework of fact, but swathed in mythology and story. Somewhere in those mists, the Gradys and the Condons, the Laffans and the Shanahans, and Sextons and the Hacketts and all their kin walked their lives out, born squalling, lovingly raised or not, marrying or not, bearing children in their turn, losing strength and declining, and eventually taking their place in the graveyards. We look across a landscape which grows dim with distance and time, and glimpse what we can…
