My uncle, Mr. Louis Saint-Gaudens, who visited Dublin in the summer of 1890, found the building at number 35, near the head of Charlemount Street and not far from a bridge built over the canal which runs by the southeastern part of the city. There, under the trees that line the banks and in sight of the Wicklow Hills, my father as a baby must have been carried by my grandmother.

The reminiscences continue:

“My mother’s maiden name was Mary McGuiness. Of her ancestry I know nothing except that her mother was married twice, the second time to a veteran of the Napoleonic wars.”

My father’s maternal grandmother’s name was Daly. She married Arthur McGuiness, of whom it is only recalled that he worked in the Dublin plaster mills and that he was a Freemason. Neither of the couple lived to be old. Their daughter Mary McGuiness was born to them at Bally Mahon, County Longford.

To return to the autobiography:

“Of my mother’s family the only member of which I have had a glimpse was her brother George McGuiness, whom I saw in Forsyth Street. I have a daguerreotype of his delightfully kind and extremely homely face—a face like a benediction, as I have heard some one describe it. He, of all men, became the owner of two slaves in the South, and, judging from a daguerreotype, married an equally homely and kindly-looking woman. He was in some way connected with the navy yard at Pensacola. The war cut off all further communication with him.

“Of my father’s birth and ancestry I am as ignorant as of my mother’s, knowing only that his father was a soldier under Napoleon, who died comparatively young and suddenly after what I suspect was a gorgeous spree.”

My father’s paternal grandfather was called André Saint-Gaudens. His wife’s maiden name was Boy. Tradition has it that she sold butter and eggs in the market-place at Aspet, and that she became a miser, leaving under her bed upon her death the conventional box crammed with gold pieces.

The reminiscences continue:

“My father’s full name was Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens; Bernard Paul ‘Honeste,’ if you please, he called it later in life; it sounded nicer. He was born in the little village of Aspet, about fifty miles from Toulouse, at the foot of the Pyrenees, five miles south of the town of Saint-Gaudens, in the arrondissement of Saint-Gaudens, in the department of the Haute-Garonne, a most beautiful country, as the many searchers for health at the baths of Bagnères-de-Luchon know.”...