This blog category includes stories about the Regan family, who emigrated to America from Northern Ireland in 1888.
Pop and Gram settled in New Haven, Connecticut, where they started a family and a business. They had 11 children, nine of whom survived to adulthood.
This blog is written by one of their great-granddaughters.
Mom’s cousin Patty sent me a wonderful photo via email this week. The (unfortunately) undated photo shows their Aunt Marguerite (a nun my generation knew as Sister Amabilis) outside with a group of children, looking at a birdhouse. No doubt they were her students, as Sr. Amabilis taught first grade for 58 years. (That’s right – nearly six decades!) Mom adored her aunt, and wrote to her regularly. Sr. Amabilis saved the letters all those years and they were eventually…
Mom would be pleased that her poems – even those from long ago – are causing her children to research and reminisce. This poem was written in August of 1977 following the death of someone named Madeline. A friend? A relative? I checked first about a certain writer friend, but she spelled her name Madeleine and lived for three more decades. A search on our massive family tree on ancestry.com brought me – at last – to Madeline. Madeline Sturmer….
My Aunt Bunny (Mom’s younger sister) has told me this story more than once. Just this week, I found a poem Mom wrote about it. Although it was usually up to them to call on their grandmother, the Cassidy sisters of Fair Haven could always count on their Gram to pay them a visit during that time of the month, armed with a bottle of the cure. Gram’s backyard on Lombard Street connected with the Cassidys’ well-kept yard behind their…
To know her was to love her. Sister Sylvia reminded me so much of my dear great-aunt Sr. Amabilis. It was uncanny. Both teachers, deeply religious, tiny, and loads of fun. I met Sister Sylvia about 30 years ago at a tourism meeting. She was smart, kind, and sort of sassy. Her home was on the hill in Ferdinand, at the Monastery Immaculate Conception. She was their Minister of Hospitality. A few years later, we built a big new roller…
February is a short and often gloomy month, so it felt appropriate to read Great Expectations for the first time. It’s a long coming-of-age story, full of Dickensian characters and coincidences. In the afterglow of reading a really good book, I tend to search for related podcast discussions and non-snooty book reviews. This episode of the Backlisted podcast provides a humorous yet sincere discussion of Great Expectations, Mr. Dickens, and even some sad, sad attempts at musical-theater adaptations. Meanwhile, here…
Growing up, our family had a Christmas tradition of going around the dinner table and each naming our favorite gift. Not the gift of family, faith, talent, or brains. This was about what had awaited us under the tree that morning. A toy, a doll, a game. Looking back over the decades, I’d have to say my favorite unwrap-it gift involved multi-generational family members, plus talent. It was this painting: In short, this is a painting that Grandpa Vayo (Dad’s…
I can just hear my Grandma Cassidy bursting forth with that staccato laugh of hers, and then chiding me for using the word “gospel” in the title of this post. But Grandma, it’s okay. I didn’t capitalize “gospel,” so I don’t need to go to confession over this. We’re good. My younger brother was crazy about Grandma, too. Six years younger than me, Bill had a few extra years living close to her once Mom and Dad moved back to…
My great-uncle Pip was an animal lover. The more I ask relatives about him, the more I learn about the animals he loved. Many dogs over the decades. But it didn’t stop there. A goat named Fanny. A horse named Spot. Sheep. Bees, even. And today is his birthday. He was the eleventh and final child born to Joe and Maggie Regan, Irish immigrants who settled in New Haven in 1888. Pip, baptized Edward Thomas Regan, was born November 17,…
Farmer Gary sets an annual goal for himself: Complete the harvest before Thanksgiving. Yesterday, he finished combining ‘beans and today he’s planting the last of the winter crops. And all without a scarecrow. I can’t help but wonder if “city folk” would even know about scarecrows were it not for The Wizard of Oz. (As an aside, it still makes me laugh to remember Harry’s high school story about sitting in a quiet classroom, taking a final exam. The silence…
As a young girl, Mom had a pen pal, her Aunt Margaret Regan. Known to non-family members as Sister Amabilis, she was only 16 when she entered religious life. It was September 1943 and Mom was 13 when she wrote this to her aunt, who wasn’t permitted to visit her family very often. It was September 1943; her older second-cousin Eddie was on furlough from the Army during World War II. Eddie wrote on the back of the photo, “Quit…