Mom dearly loved her aunt Ginny. The youngest of Grandpa Cassidy‘s siblings, Ginny lived her entire life on Lombard Street in New Haven. Virginia Anne Cassidy came into this world on December 11, 1915. This was a full 22 years after her oldest brother, John, was born. Grandpa was 15 years older than Ginny. After all these years, it’s only now coming to me that Mom must have been named for her. Virginia was Mom‘s middle name. This is the…
This feels like a miracle. Or at the very least, an answer from Saint Anthony. The other morning, I woke up full of determination to look into the other side of Mom’s family. The Cassidy side. Surely there must be someone out there who was also a great-grandchild of Patrick and Annie who wants family stories preserved and shared. Right? I started with the youngest of their seven children, worked my way to Marcella, and put together a story about…
As today is the anniversary of D-Day, I went looking for a relative who served during World War II and came across Mom’s Mulligan cousins. Let’s start with John Joseph Mulligan, Jr. He was born in 1920 in New Haven, Connecticut. Here’s a photo from his high-school yearbook: Sadly, his mom – Bertha Prindle Mulligan – passed away when he was only ten. She was 31. Eighteen months later, John got a stepmom. Mom’s aunt Marcella Cassidy married John Sr….
Now that I’m buckling down and finally watching the tutorial videos Ancestry.com provides, I’ve learned the fancy genealogical terms “brick wall” and “breakthrough.” And so, with a bit of a blush and definite tongue-in-cheek, I must proclaim: We’ve scaled the brick wall and experienced a breakthrough! Let’s go back a week, when the luck of the Irish arrived via an email. It was Adrian (who, it turns out, is my third cousin), who had wandered across this blog post from…
Been thinking a lot about my ancestors this week. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants. Three generations ago, the elders were born in Ireland and Canada. Mom wrote this poem in 1972, presumably after seeing a tragic story in the news about a man without a home found frozen in the snow. The Immigrant He looked an immigrant, forever homelessin his makeshift clothes, dead in the snow for days before the photograph was taken.His life had passed to…
I’ve been thinking a lot about Mom and Dad these past several days, knowing they were just 14 years old when D-Day occurred on June 6, 1944. The 80th anniversary of D-Day commemoration brought tears to my eyes, watching news coverage of the war veterans – some of whom had stormed the beaches of Normandy – honored and paying tribute to those who filled the cemeteries after the horrific battles. While reading The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan over the…
I can’t help but wonder what life would have been like if social media was in full force back in the 1960s. More specifically, if The Beatles could have used the internet as they released each new album. Just the thought gives me a bit of a shiver … But that was then and this is now. And every time I hear or see the name of Taylor Swift’s new album: The Tortured Poets Department, I think about my poet…
Once again I bring you a bit of undated prose from Mom’s collection. It’s handwritten on lined paper, with a teenager’s neat, round penmanship. Maybe it was a school assignment. Nowadays they’re called “prompts.” For example: Write, in first person, about a conflict involving at least three other family members. I wish I knew more about my great-grandmother’s personality. Maggie Kelly married Joseph Malachy Regan in Belfast in 1888 and then sailed for America. That tells us she was courageous….
We moved around a lot when I was a kid, so I never got attached to any particular home or community. Not attached enough, anyway, to consider any of the houses a homestead. In these past several years as I’ve sifted through generations of family photos, I’ve seen my maternal grandmother’s handwriting referring to her parents’ New Haven house as a homestead. That was technically correct, as the Lombard Street property included a house, a barn, and (if memory serves)…
It was close to midnight the other evening when I heard it. A train whistle. In the far-off distance. I love the sound of a train, especially at night. It’s so comforting. I asked my musical brother Dave if he knew exactly what chord the whistle plays. Here’s his reply: I’ve heard a lot of different chords from train whistles, but my favorite (which I’ve heard quite a bit) is a major chord with an added 6th, like F-A-C-D. The add-6 chord…