I’ve been gone from the blogging scene over a week. In fact, I’ve been gone from contemporary society equally as long, as Earl and I drove to upstate New York to visit the area where my early relatives settled, created their large families, worked the land, and remembered the Ireland of their birth.
Every time I make this pilgrimage, it’s a mesmerizing experience. It catches me in that space between the tick and tock of time, holding me to my past and yet not really relevant to my future. Still, part of the person I am in the present. I wonder if my aunt, with whom I’m sharing this particular visit, feels the same.
For the past couple years, Earl and I, with my Aunt Alice and Uncle Dick, determined to make this journey sometime or another. We weren’t particularly specific about when, as we all had to be up for it at the same time. This year, the stars aligned so we made our plan. It meant that my aunt and uncle would drive from Denver, Colorado, to our house in St. Joseph, Michigan so that the four of us could travel eastward to upstate New York together. It also meant 750 miles on top of the 1100 my aunt and uncle had already driven.
But we are a hardy group; and we set out across Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York to check in two days later at Ontario Place Hotel in Sackets Harbor, NY. This was our base from which we met relatives, explored early nineteenth century battlefields, and quietly reveled in being together.
Being together is one of the hallmarks of my ancestral family, and I attribute this to our Irish heritage. It is still on display today and evidenced by an upstate relative’s understanding of the situation. In genealogical terms, Gertrude McDonald is my first cousin once removed, while her children and I are second cousins. But we got to talking about this, and she insisted that in the McDonald family we were all just cousins. The once removed and the seconds and thirds are not considered. I’ve spent enough nights in her house to concur. It’s only the academic in me that defines the degrees of relationship. Put me in a family reunion and I don’t care.
However, our visit wasn’t the stuff of family reunions — those are held every August. Rather, they were the connections of one branch of the family tree with another. The remnants of the James F. McDonald limb with the Henry McDonald limb, James and Henry being brothers born at the end of the nineteenth century. We are their progeny in the twenty-first century and upstate New York is what it is because of our family and others like it.
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