I began pounding out a few thoughts on the Irish Thing over parade weekend. For whatever reason, once parade weekend was gone for another year, my mind wandered off in other directions. After all, the whole world isn't Irish, nor is being Irish the whole world. Proud as I can be to carry Irish blood, that about says it.If blogger.com had a central casting site, if I asked for an Irish guy's jpeg., that could be him over there on the right. It is an Irish guy, he's not from blogger.com. He's Seamus Sweeney, late of County Louth, Republic of Ireland.
So help me, that is Seamus Sweeney, standing among his potato plants, on his farm in place called The Mills of Louth, the Sweeney ancestral home. The year would be, oh, I want to say 1970/71. Uncle Seamus, to be more accurate, great Uncle Seamus. Seamus, whose son assumed the anglicized James as his first name, was my grandfather's brother. Younger brother, I think.
See, my grandfather never really went on and on about the old country, although he left parents and brothers and one sister behind when he sailed for our shores in roughly 1907. Patrick Joseph Sweeney left The Mills of Louth because things were bad in Ireland, they were hard, there wasn't much of a future. He knew it and wanted more from life. Here he found much more. Including a young woman by the name of Mary Agnes Traynor, Agnes to most. 
They married. She was Catholic, which made a wedding easy. What she was not was Irish. Agnes was English. Patrick and Agnes were marvelous people, just the nicest, kindest, warmest grandparents. My memories of them both are many and wonderful. That's Patrick on the left as a very young man, location completely unknown. 
Somewhere in the early 1920s, Patrick and Agnes grabbed the kids, the two that had come along so far, and sat in a studio for a family portrait. I wonder how they got there? Did they have an automobile? Maybe they took a streetcar. Could be they walked. Left to right, that is my Dad on my Grandfather Sweeney's knee, my Aunt Mary, and my Grandmother Sweeney. They're all gone now.
In total, there were six Sweeney children with my Dad being the oldest. One of them, his "sister" Esther, was actually a first cousin, legally adopted when her mother died in childbirth. Esther is the only one still living.
They married. She was Catholic, which made a wedding easy. What she was not was Irish. Agnes was English. Patrick and Agnes were marvelous people, just the nicest, kindest, warmest grandparents. My memories of them both are many and wonderful. That's Patrick on the left as a very young man, location completely unknown. 
Somewhere in the early 1920s, Patrick and Agnes grabbed the kids, the two that had come along so far, and sat in a studio for a family portrait. I wonder how they got there? Did they have an automobile? Maybe they took a streetcar. Could be they walked. Left to right, that is my Dad on my Grandfather Sweeney's knee, my Aunt Mary, and my Grandmother Sweeney. They're all gone now.
In total, there were six Sweeney children with my Dad being the oldest. One of them, his "sister" Esther, was actually a first cousin, legally adopted when her mother died in childbirth. Esther is the only one still living.
Sitting upon the shores of the other side of my immdediate gene pool were 
the Davies family. Rhys Jenkin Davies and Marianne Terret Davies. Rhys is pronounced Reese. He was known as "Shink," a once popular Welsh nickname. Shink was gone before I got here. I never had the pleasure of knowing my Welsh grandfather. My Welsh grandmother, now there was a great lady. She was my Gram. As you can see, Shink was largely bald. Patrick probably had the same number of hairs in his head the day he died in 1974 that he had the day he walked out of the Mills of Louth in 1909. It's important that you know what once Patrick J. Sweeney walked away, he never looked back.
The Davies family, by contrast, did go back a time or two, making the crossing aboard The Queen Mary.
the Davies family. Rhys Jenkin Davies and Marianne Terret Davies. Rhys is pronounced Reese. He was known as "Shink," a once popular Welsh nickname. Shink was gone before I got here. I never had the pleasure of knowing my Welsh grandfather. My Welsh grandmother, now there was a great lady. She was my Gram. As you can see, Shink was largely bald. Patrick probably had the same number of hairs in his head the day he died in 1974 that he had the day he walked out of the Mills of Louth in 1909. It's important that you know what once Patrick J. Sweeney walked away, he never looked back.The Davies family, by contrast, did go back a time or two, making the crossing aboard The Queen Mary.
Sorry for the tedium. We all have families of which to speak. I am, though, headed somewhere with this.
The matter of loyalty, ethnic loyalty, if you will.
Cornered and forced to choose one and only one, I doubt I could. I feel the same about my ancestry being Irish, as about it being Welsh, as about it being English. Actually, you could unite the Irish and Welsh as one. Technically, genetically, we are of the same tribe. The Irish and the Welsh are both Celts. (Our NBA team notwithstanding, the pronunciation is with a hard C; kelt, not selt. Anyone have a satisfactory explanation for that?)
While proud of my roots, there is also a big part of me that says it's getting about time we wrap up this preoccupation with "what" we are, for what we are is Americans.
Each year when parade weekend comes around, I often think of my grandfather Sweeney. Always nice thoughts, for sure. He was a great storyteller, he had a story for every situation, every occurrence. Patrick was, you could say, a raconteur. Two of his frequently told stories, both short, were;
1) The great admiration he had for the eastern Europeans and Italians who came here at roughly the same time he did, late 19th and early 20th century. Essentially, he thought his great journey was nothing compared to theirs. Many times he told me of how they came not knowing the language, not one word, while he'd been speaking English his entire life. That, he would say, made things easy for him. It was a humble thing to say. Patrick Joseph Sweeney was indeed a humble man.
2) Not so much a story, but rather an observation, and a telling one at that. A number of times in his later years, family offered to send him back "home" for a visit. The thinking was generous, figuring he'd like to see the old country again, to walk the roads he walked as a kid, to spend time with what family he had left, and there was family. There still is. Whenever the offer of a trip came up, his answer was always the same. I can hear him now, his brogue likely as thick as when he made the crossing as a teenager, "Now why would you think I'd want to go back? Why the hell do you think I left in the first place?"
Kind of hard to argue with that.
