I started a long family history project some years ago with my mother’s maternal line, the Van Wagners, and didn’t know how good I had it. For that manuscript, I was the beneficiary of previous research, and also of a certain regard held in archives for an American family whose Dutch roots paralleled the history of the Hudson Valley and New York state. Although virtually nothing was visible of their life in the Netherlands, the Van Wagner generations in America unfurled in a steady line; chronology seemed to unfold.
The other maternal side, the Condon/Grady/Shanahan line, is another matter entirely. Rather than the tidy record-keeping Dutch, this branch of the family springs from the entirely untidy, un-spelling, big-familied and intermarrying Irish. Genealogy in Ireland, I was told early on, was a miasma. Our surnames are very common ones, and since almost 1.5 million Irish sailed to the United States between 1845 and 1855, figuring out which particular Condon or Grady is ours is…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 have learned to agree.
The history of the Dutch 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 America that did not want the Irish, the brawling rise of Chicago’s industries, epidemics of diphtheria and flu.
All of these come with a latticework of fact, swathed in story. Somewhere in those mists, the Gradys and the Condons, the Laffans and the Shanahans, and Sextons and the Hacketts and all their kin, my 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.
It is impossible to see much detail, but important to remember that their lives were as full of incident as our own, small and large, humorous and tragic, humdrum and wearying. We glimpse what we can. We hope they had their measure of joy. We hope their shades appreciate this look, and the attempt to delay their entire loss to memory.
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I have two granddaughters. They are the only members of their generation in our family; for now, they are the last. Their mother is Russian by birth; some ancestors on her side were dissidents and intellectuals and were, for a time, exiled to Siberia. Others were naval officers; many were ethnically Jewish.
The girls’ names are Russian, but they carry the blood of the Irish and the Dutch tracked in my two books of genealogy essays and also the largely unexamined line of Guilfoyles and Dwyers, who became farmers in central Illinois. They also carry both Highland and Lowland Scot through my husband, all four of whose grandparents were born in Scotland.
Like all of us, they are preceded by a great number of forebears. The first in my line, the Dutch, settled in the Hudson Valley before 1700; their mother arrived as a child from St. Petersburg in 1996. Their predecessors, then, have been arriving on these shores for 350 years. The girls are, in other words, entirely of immigrant stock, and entirely American.
When my granddaughters run on the beach, I imagine a vast swirling fan-shaped cape of ancestors trailing their small shoulders, extending into the high blue sky, where they join a throng.
All those people flung across all those countries and continents, whose lives and choices and couplings have led to these two small people playing in the sand, all that past behind them, and all their futures ahead in the shape of descendants yet to come.
I have opened the door and added a new box to that closet, to hold their photos and school drawings and little medals and keepsakes.
They are taking their place in line.
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This piece is drawn from my two books of genealogy essays – The Van Wagners in America: 1637 to 1943, and The Condons and the Gradys before 1911. In these works, I attempt the possible (placing my ancestors in a framework of historical events and geography) and the impossible (peering into the past to see who these people were.) Both are available on Kindle; twice strangers have found me to say that they are some kind of cousins.
Photo by suzyhazelwood | Pexels
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