For as long as I can remember, our family’s lore about my great-grandparents’ emigration from Ireland includes the phrase “they missed the blizzard.”

For some reason, I always assumed the blizzard was in Ireland and the newlyweds escaped it. Although blizzards are not entirely foreign to the Emerald Isle, neither are they a regular occurrence.

It turns out, the “escape” was on the arrival side. The year was 1888 and in March, America’s northeast was paralyzed by ice, snow, wind, and white-out conditions. Joe and Maggie Regans’ future hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, recorded snow drifts as high as 40 feet. The northeast suffered a loss of 400 lives.

Thankfully, the Regans were still in Ireland.

Joseph Malachy Regan was 21. He worked at a hardware store.

Joe knew it was time to leave his hometown of Belfast, Northern Ireland, for a land where his Catholicism would not be used against him. His youngest daughter (my grandmother), Cecelia, would later write: … as a teenager, he experienced so much bigotry and injustice because of religious beliefs … he decided to immigrate to America.

My Aunt Bunny remembers hearing that her grandfather had witnessed a Catholic boy’s brutal murder and vowed he wouldn’t raise a family in such circumstances. He would find a better place.

Joe married Margaret “Maggie” Ellen Kelly at Belfast’s St. Peter’s Cathedral on February 1, 1888.

The newlyweds set sail in the spring and arrived in their new country in April of that year.

Their deep faith would steady them as they tragically lost their first two children, William at age six and little Mary at four years old. There were nine more, all who survived to adulthood.

It would be 1973 before the next Great White Blizzard struck New Haven. Pop and Gram Regan had left this world by then, content that their children and grandchildren would continue their legacy of family, hard work, and freedom of belief.

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