Mary, Annie, Vince, Doreen and Me

Did you survive another St. Patrick’s Day? Me, I didn’t partake in the revelry, although while sitting at home I did enjoy a nice pint of Guinness—possibly two—which I poured and imbibed with extra mindfulness; St. Patrick’s Day of course being an occasion for those of us with Irish heritage to reflect upon our history and where we came from.

With that in mind, I watched the CBC documentary Famine and Shipwreck, An Irish Odyssey. It’s impossible to relive the stories of the Irish and the Great Famine without feeling the sadness—and the anger.

About a million Irish died under starvation conditions during the Great Famine in the 1840s. The potato blight was only part of the story. How else can one characterize the English landlords’ and administrators’ actions—sending surplus food and livestock out of the country in the midst of a devastating famine—as anything other than genocidal? It was surely one of the most heinous and callous mass crimes in history. In the resulting diaspora from 1845–1852, another one million Irish fled their homeland, mostly for Canada and the United States.

Naturally, I can’t help but think about my ancestors and what they must have gone through to escape starvation in Ireland. Though many of the details remain unknown, especially on my father’s side of the family, this is what I know from my mother’s side of the family:

My maternal great-great-grandmother, Mary Keoughan Delahanty, was born in County Kilkenny in the southeast province of Leinster in 1815. She and her husband, William, had six children: Patrick, John, Thomas, Elizabeth, Michael and Annie. William Delahanty died when the youngest, Annie, was just two years old. Four years later (I don’t know the exact year, but I assume it was in the late-1840s), Mary and five of her six children left Ireland. The second-oldest, John, by then a tailor, stayed behind.

Like others who fled the poverty and starvation, Mary Delahanty and her children boarded a sailing vessel, possibly a “coffin ship”, and set out across the North Atlantic for Canada. They were at sea for three weeks. Annie was just six years old. What a journey that must have been for a little girl, leaving her home and sailing off into the unknown. And a journey like that in those days was no sea cruise, especially for those with little means; it was a harrowing and dangerous voyage. For the poor, destitute Irish, conditions on the coffin ships, the cheapest fares available, were as bad as it got—not much better than slave ships. Death rates of 30% were not uncommon.

These ships, crowded and disease ridden, with poor access to food and water, resulted in the deaths of many people as they crossed the Atlantic. Owners of coffin ships provided as little food, water, and living space as was legally possible – if they obeyed the law at all.

Annie, her mother and siblings survived the voyage to Canada and settled into a new life in P.E.I. around the Vernon area, east of Charlottetown. It was no coincidence that many Irish were drawn to Canada’s smallest province with its picturesque rolling green hills and russet soil that was ideal for growing a familiar staple—potatoes.

In September of 1872, Annie Delahanty, likely in her mid- to late-twenties by now, married Walter Grant, a widower. She bore him 11 children, of whom the fifth, Joseph, died in infancy. Annie and Walter’s seventh child, Edward Vincent Grant, married Winnefred Brown. Vince and Winnie, as they were known to friends and family, also had 11 children: Frank, Ruth, Ethel, Anne, Art, Mary, Vic, Rose, Walter, Rita and Doreen. They were raised on the homestead farm in Millview, not far from Vernon.

The hardships were not left behind in Ireland, however. In the 1930s, the Great Depression was not kind to the Grant family. Rita died in 1930, at only nine years of age. Anne died in 1931, at the age of 21. Rose died in 1934 at the age of 16.

Vince and Winnie Grant’s youngest child, Doreen, my mother, made it through those hard years. She’s the baby in the picture above. Born in 1924, she would have been a month shy of her sixth birthday when her nine-year-old sister Rita died. Less than a year later, now six—the same age her grandmother Annie had been when she had crossed the Atlantic—Doreen saw her older sister Anne pass on at the age of 21. She was nine when 16-year-old Rose died.

Having weathered the Great Depression, my mom came of age as a young adult while the world was at war. She became a nurse, working for a brief period of time after the war in New York City, and in 1948, she married my father, Gordon Justin Kelly of Charlottetown, the son of Frederick Kelly and Aline Landrigan. They had eight children, of whom I am the youngest.

In 2006, Doreen and Gordon Kelly’s son, Vince and Winnie Grant’s grandson, Annie Delahanty and Walter Grant’s great-grandson, Mary and William Delahanty’s great-great-grandson—all distilled, sliced and diced into the person of yours truly—stepped off an airplane and set foot on Irish soil, bringing it all back home.

But that’s a story I’ll save for another time.

For now, let me just say that it’s important to know where you come from and who you come from. Looking back over the journey of my forebears—even as refracted through these meager, stark facts—I recognize an enduring thread, a common character. There’s a resilience and a strength in my family, which I’ve witnessed in my time, and I see it woven into the story of my ancestors.

Not that the Irish have a monopoly on hardship or resilience, but these facts, these stories, these connections, they come with Irish accents. And they echo in the present. And while there are details that remain unknown to me, if my brief time in Ireland taught me anything, it’s this: a span of five generations is not as large as it seems. In fact, in my family right now, we can gather four generations in the same room. What I wouldn’t give to be sitting next to my great-grandmother, Annie Delahanty, asking her what she remembers of her early years in Ireland, of that Atlantic crossing, and of starting a new life and planting new roots on this side of the ocean.

So when St. Patrick’s Day rolls around, we raise our pints and we invite our friends to join us in celebration and merriment. I’m told we in North America celebrate St. Paddy’s Day on a grander scale even than in Ireland. And while the revelry is surely welcome—god knows it’s been hard-won—St. Patrick’s Day isn’t just a day to be measured in pints. To me, it’s a day to celebrate ancestry and to be mindful of those enduring threads woven into the fabric that connects the past and the present.

For those of us who trace our origins back to Ireland, may we live that celebration in every heartbeat, honour that history with every success, and consecrate that journey with every kindness shown to those in need, and in all the love we share.

I’ll leave you with this Irish poem:

It is easy to be pleasant
When life flows by like a song
But the man worth while is the one who will smile
When everything goes dead wrong
For the test of the heart is trouble
And it always comes with years
And the smile that is worth the praises of earth
Is the smile that shines through the tears