You may think that’s a kind of a make-up of a story about my grandfather getting three or four relays of horses all in one night. I don’t wonder you would think so. Perhaps I thought so myself when I was a child listening to it at the fireside; but, stop awhile; wait till I come to write my chapter on genealogy, and come to show you how my grandfather had family relations and connections in every corner of the county, and then you will not be surprised at what I am saying. You’ll be more surprised at what I have to say yet.
The White boy indictment was before I was born. Soon after I was born, my father got into trouble with the head lord of the soil by selling to Mick Hurley, the carpenter, four tall ash trees that were growing in the kitchen garden back of the house. Lord Carberry claimed that the trees belonged to the soil—belonged to him—and that my father had no right to cut them down and sell them. My father had as much right to that soil as Lord Carberry had; he had more right to it, in fact.
One of the Irish histories I read in my youth has these words: “The O’Donovans—a branch of the MacCarthys—had extensive possessions in the neighborhood of Ross.”
They owned all Ross, and all around it, but the turn in the world came that turned them and turned many other old Irish families upside down, and left the Englishmen on top.
CHAPTER VIII.
A CHAPTER ON GENEALOGY.
When I was a little fellow, I got so much into my head about my family, and about what great big people they were in the world before I came among them, that when I grew up to be a man, I began to trace the genealogy of that family, and I actually did trace it up the generations through Ham, who was saved in Noah’s Ark, to Adam and Eve who lived in the Garden of Paradise one time. While at this work, I was for a few years in communication with John O’Donovan of No. 36 Northumberland Street, Dublin. He was professor of the Irish language in Trinity College. At the college, and at his house I met him whenever business would take me to Dublin. He had then seven children—seven sons, “an effort of nature to preserve the name” as he says in one of his letters to me. I don’t know—sometimes my thoughts are sad, at thinking that perhaps it was my acquaintance with those children when they were young, in the years ’54, ’5, ’6, ’7, ’8 and ’9, that brought them into association with me, and with my crowd of people when I came to live in Dublin entirely in the years 1864 and ’65. John, Edmond, and Willie were the three oldest of the seven sons of John O’Donovan. The three of them were put to jail in Dublin charged with connection with Fenianism. John was drowned in St. Louis, Edmond was killed in Africa, and I was at the funeral of Willie in Calvary cemetery, Brooklyn. I’ll come to them again. Now, I’ll get back to my genealogy.
Some of my friends may say: “To Jericho with your genealogy; what do we care about it! We are here in America, where one man is as good as another.” That’s all right, for any one who wants to have done with Ireland; all right for the man who can say, with him who said to me in New York, one day, twenty-five years ago: “What is Ireland to me now?” “Sure I’m an American citizen!” All right for him who wants to forget all belonging to him in the past, and who wants to be the Adam and Eve of his name and race, but it is otherwise for men who are no way ashamed of those who have gone before them, and who do not want to bury in the grave of American citizenship, all the duties they owe to their motherland, while it remains a land enslaved.
It would be no harm at all, if men of Irish societies in America, in introducing other men into these societies would know who were their Irish fathers and mothers. Any man who is proud of belonging to the old blood of Ireland, will never do anything to bring disgrace upon any one belonging to him. I don’t mind how poor he is; the poorer he is, the nearer he is to God; the nearer he is to sanctification through suffering, and the more marks and signs he has of the hand of the English enemy having been heavily laid upon him.