Our Irish Ancestors

When did your Irish ancestors come to America? Was it during the Great Potato Famine of the mid-19th century? Was it more recent? Or was it earlier, pre-Revolutionary War? That's when mine came, in 1771. In that era the vast majority of immigrants from Ireland were Protestant Scots-Irish, or those who earlier had come from Scotland. You can read more about these Scots-Irish in an article I wrote.

I'm excited about a new publication that should be on newstands soon. "Tracing Your Irish Roots" is a culmination of the best articles on Irish genealogy published by Family Chronicle, Internet Genealogy, and the now out of print Discovering Family History. You can order it online. They're offering free shipping until Sept. 1!

Your ancestors may have come through Ellis Island. You can search records here free.

Got any interesting Irish ancestor stories to tell? I'd love to hear!

WB Yeats

W.B. Yeats lived from 1865 to 1939. He was one of the greatest English language poets of the 20th century, and is one of my favorites. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. A troubled soul, he explored the ideas of reincarnation, communication with the dead, mediums, supernatural systems and Oriental mysticism--nothing I would promote. But his poetry is deeply emotional and thoughtful just the same. His first poems were published in 1885. Like Douglas Hyde (and sometimes with him) he translated old Celtic legends and stories. He helped found the Irish Literary Theater with Lady Gregory.

Below is one of my favorite Yeats poems. (I blogged about this poem back in April, but it's good enough to repeat it.)

TO A CHILD DANCING IN THE WIND

by: W. B. Yeats

ANCE there upon the shore;

What need have you to care

For wind or water's roar?

And tumble out your hair

That the salt drops have wet;

Being young you have not known

The fool's triumph, nor yet

Love lost as soon as won,

Nor the best labourer dead

And all the sheaves to bind.

What need have you to dread

The monstrous crying of wind?

Another Irish Poet

Patrick Kavanagh, born 1904 in Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan. He worked on the family farm until he moved to Dublin in 1939. He began his publishing career around that time but most of his well known poetry is from the 1950's and '60s. The photograph is a statue of Kavanagh in a park Dublin, Ireland. Below is a similar one taken in Downtown Disney in Orlando, FL.

Innocence

They laughed at one I loved-

The triangular hill that hung

Under the Big Forth. They said

That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges

Of the little farm and did not know the world.

But I knew that love's doorway to life

Is the same doorway everywhere.

Ashamed of what I loved

I flung her from me and called her a ditch

Although she was smiling at me with violets.

But now I am back in her briary arms

The dew of an Indian Summer lies

On bleached potato-stalks

What age am I?

I do not know what age I am,

I am no mortal age;

I know nothing of women, Nothing of cities,

I cannot die Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.

A Irish Poet

Douglas Hyde was Ireland's first president. He was born in Castlerea, Co. Roscommon in 1860. As a teenager, he fostered a love of the written word and composed stories, poetry, and plays. He also became an advocate for preserving the Irish language, co-founding the Gaelic League (Conradh Na Gaeilge) in 1893. He died in 1949, leaving a legacy of both his poetry and others, which he translated. For example:

A Poem to Be Said on Hearing the Birds Sing by Douglas Hyde
A FRAGRANT prayer upon the air
My child taught me,
Awaken there, the morn is fair,
The birds sing free;
Now dawns the day, awake and pray,
And bend the knee;
The Lamb who lay beneath the clay
Was slain for thee.

An ancient poem Hyde translated:

Feet of fine bronze under it
Gittering through beautiful ages,
Lovely land throughout the world's age,
On which the many blossoms drop.

An [ancient] tree there is with blossoms
On which birds call to the hours
It is with harmony it is their wont
To call together every hour.

Unknown is wailing or trechery,
In the familar cultivated land,
There is nothing rough or hard,
But sweet music striking on the ear.

Without grief, without sorrow, without death,
Without any sick men, without debility,
That is the sign of Emain,
Uncommon is an equal marvel.

I'm not an expert in poetry, and I don't write it, but if you are or if you do, you might find Douglas Hyde's words about the ancient poetry interesting:

I have now shown, and I think proved beyond any question, that the fair flower of poetry had blossomed amongst the Gaels in the seventh century, and possibly for a considerable time before that. They had many measures, or metres, or forms of versification, they had Uaithne (middle assonance), Uaim (alliteration) Comhàrda (Irish rhyme), a settled number of syllables in the line, and of lines in the verse, as far back as the seventh century, at the least. This is to say that the Gaels were three hundred years or more in advance of the rest of Europe, in everything pertaining to poetry.~ From Irish Poetry: An Essay in Irish with Translation in English and a Vocabulary by Douglas Hyde, 1902.