Guest Blog & Photos by Sarah McNaughton
I’ve come to Ireland in search of something that has more to do with home than anything foreign. Many students stumble upon what they didn’t even know they were looking for while studying abroad; but I know what I’m looking for.
Though family has never been a primary focus of mine, as an Irish American I’ve always been caught up in the typical if not clichéd traditions of the culture of my ancestors: step dancing, believing in faeries, reading Joyce and Yeats, telling long and outrageous stories, and so on. My mom was the ultimate Irish step dancing mom, curling my hair and polishing my shoes before every competition, and stitching our tartan onto pillows for Christmas presents. My dad spent many years researching his dad’s side of the family, the McNaughton branch, and, although Scottish, he found our crest, our slogan, our recipes, even our castle. He learned Gaelic, worked for peace in Northern Ireland, and looked into our supposed rivalry with the Campbell clan. So I considered myself and my family to have a thorough understanding of where we came from.
But when my dad passed away unexpectedly in 2007, one of my first thoughts was, “There’s so much I don’t know.” You forget to ask the pertinent questions because they’re not pertinent at the time, and knowing what’s for dinner seems much more pressing. Then comes the moment when you realize you know nothing about your family even though you thought you knew everything.
Time passed and I still didn’t seek the answers to the questions about my family I’d wanted to know. It wasn’t until this year that I had an opportunity to research my heritage in the form of a classic college experience: studying abroad. So as I prepared for my internship with a media company in Dalkey, Ireland, I also prepared to research my family and see the “homeland”, even if I wouldn’t see it with my dad like we’d planned.
Although I knew a lot about the McNaughton side of the family because of Dad’s research, I knew little about my dad’s mother’s side. I thought I knew that my paternal grandmother was born in Ireland and then immigrated to New York as a teenager, that her name was Mary, that she once returned to Ireland for several years so her husband could work.
Turns out her name is Gertrude. She was born in Buffalo, New York, and they never went to Ireland.
It might strike many as odd that I didn’t know my own grandmother’s name, but you have to understand my family to understand my confusion.
The McNaughtons are lovely, bright people, but tend to be somewhat disconnected from each other and the rest of the world. I come from a clan of brilliant and hilarious individuals who are all unable to be prompt and have terrible trouble remembering things. In a McNaughton conversation, a single train of thought only goes so far as to connect with a different rail before it goes flying off a cliff to crash to an untimely end.
So it took several months and dozens of repetitive, nagging questions before I was able to patch together some basic information from my distracted relatives’ answers. For example, depending on the family member you ask, my great-grandmother’s last name is May or McFadden or May-McFadden or Moore or Campbell.
After so many confusing conversations with family, I realized I was clinging to my roots without knowing what those roots really were. But those difficult conversations did help me to begin looking in the right direction. I was able to find out from my great-aunt (the most straightforward member of the family, even at eighty-two years old) that my great-grandmother, also named Gertrude, was born in Derry in Northern Ireland. She is the one who immigrated to New York. She is the one who returned to Ireland after a divorce and placed her two eldest daughters in an orphanage in Glasgow, Scotland, for a few years when she couldn’t afford to care for them.
So the story continues.
You expect when you go to your homeland to have some big revelation or run into a long-lost relative. I’m not sure what I had in mind; maybe I would meet an eighty-year-old second cousin who happened to be walking up the same grassy green knoll I was, who would offer me a cup of tea and tell me family stories of yore. Instead I’ve spent the last four weeks sitting in my room at night, probing the Internet for even the slightest clue of where to look for signs of my great-grandmother. (It turns out looking for a “Gertrude Moore” in Ireland is like looking for a green shirt at Autzen Stadium.)
I’m feeling more American and disconnected from my family tree even as I sit a bus ride away from my great-grandmother’s hometown. A trip to Derry will hopefully help me piece together some of great-grandmother Gertrude’s details, and while it may be naïve of me to hope to find the Glasgow orphanage my grandmother stayed in, this trip has clarified at least one thing for me so far: it’s finally time to start asking those important questions.
Read more stories from study abroad students in our Spring 2010 series, Blogs from Abroad. To learn more about Sarah visit her travel blog and portfolio of writing and design work.
