He is Richard. She is Catharine. I don’t know when they met or married or where. But I know that in 1831, they boarded a ship in Derry destined for America. A young couple, in their mid-twenties, with Baby Annie in tow.
The receipts are few, but they are like breadcrumbs, leading me to my triple-great grandparents. The O’Donnels that had the courage (or gumption, or maybe both) to forge a new future. The O.G.s of the O’Ds.
Catharine, whose family name was Speer or Spear, was pregnant with Esther, born in September of that year.
The young couple laid down roots in Philadelphia. It’s where those roots took hold, where the next four generations would live out their lives. Dressmakers and letter carriers, gardeners and building contractors. War veterans.
Richard didn’t live for long. When he was thirty-nine, he fell from a building. He left Catharine destitute, with three boys and two girls to feed and water.
One of those boys was William Alexander, my great great grandfather, who was eight when his father died. At ten, he was sent to Girard College, a new boarding school in the city for White orphaned boys. William was in the inaugural class. Studied horticulture and apprenticed with John Dick, Sr., a well-known nurseryman of his time.
William did not make a career in plants as this descendant had hoped. But he married Sarah McClellan and together they continued the blood line. Their oldest, Richard Newton, married Susie Jones, and they had John Henry, the first of three John Henrys that includes my brother.
Catharine the triple great stuck it out until ninety-four, living with Annie, who never married. Richard and Catharine are buried in a family plot in an historic cemetery in southwest Philadelphia. The last known residence is in the one hundred block of Mary Street, near the Delaware River. There are some other colorful details about some of the siblings and their offspring, which some day might inspire a novel set in the 1860s. But as far as the O.G. O’Ds are concerned, that’s all I got.
The hotel where we stayed in Belfast is just a few blocks from the public records office of Northern Ireland. We walk over because why not. Nothing to lose. There are lots of others like us interested in making sense of their breadcrumbs. I talk to a librarian, share what little I have of Richard, Catharine, and Baby Annie.
No church records, I say, when asked. No parish name, either. I fly home with the pride of having tried on their behalf.
Of course I wish for a photograph. A few more crumbs. The currency is in knowing that their story — my story — began nearly two hundred years ago. Learning that they lived and scraped and died in the city where I grew into a young woman, a scrappy reporter who worked weekends at a West Philly diner. Knowing that I have walked their streets, sniffed their air. Surely we have crossed paths. Their grit becomes mine, smudged onto my skin like sage.
They are all around, even if the receipts are few.
We die, but not the lineage. There is no green beer here but so much green.
Just loving these post Kim. You're always in my heart. Hugs to you and yours -- all a youze.