Chapter 17
Chasing the Dead: Amateur Adventures in Genealogy

Your first day in Dublin is always your worst
John Berryman

My last day in Dublin was always the worst. Not the only difference between me and the great ‘confessional’ poet quoted above. Impressions of a place depend upon one’s mental map — ‘the internal representation individuals create of their surroundings.’ In my ‘mind map‘, who would want to leave ‘the fair city/Where the girls are so pretty’, ‘The Liffey and the vast gulls’, ‘the Dublin of old statues, this arrogant city’?  What was poor Berryman’s mental map like? No matter where that great poet went, there he was, freighted with abundant talent and alcoholism and bipolarism. He pinballed from McAlester Oklahoma to Minneapolis Minnesota with Columbia, Princeton, and Cambridge Universities along the way. While living in Dublin in January 1967, one of his stops was Saint Brendan’s Hospital, a psychiatric facility. 

That might explain his mental map of Dublin. So far, none of my dozen trips to ‘Baile Átha Cliath‘ resulted in that sort of commitment. But I didn’t write any great poems there either, and John Berryman definitely did even though he was as they say ‘all over the map’ chasing his dead suicided father along with chasing skirts, much drink, and Erato, muse of poetry. Or maybe the dead were chasing him. That can happen in Dublin too.

Seeing someone else’s mental map is hard. Reflecting on our departure from Dublin — no family bones for us to find there — to push off to the Monaghan cemeteries, my paranoia about the anticipated political fight with my brothers occluded any view of their mental maps, the ways in which the differences in which we viewed the journey ahead might play out. My attention was on other kinds of maps.

All kinds of​ them played into our departure from Dublin in 2010: ​road, ​weather​, ​concept, genealogical, geological,​ even histomap​s, those diagrams “representing the development of something over time, … a religion or civilization“, a history portrayed. That was my main interest: map the family history in the context of the larger doings of the time, no matter how disconnected those two dimensions might turn out to be. There was no trying to imagine the mental maps the other members of our quartet held; my assumption (which turned out to be erroneous) was that they were self-evident. And I should have known better: in my day job, I once instructed  each member of a project team charged with launching a new product to draw their mental map of what that journey would resemble. Twenty people on the team. Twenty different maps.

The mental maps of our friends and family who live in Dublin showed clear differences from mine. One of them, Kathryn, inquired over my third (approx.) glass of wine why we were on this trip. What did we expect to find? What would make us happiest to discover?  I ticked off reasons: the Bronx Irish Catholic hajj, a chance to dance around our tribal symbols, a desire to somehow commune with the dead, playing out the detective story, and to maybe find the sources that flowed to make me, and via that process learn how to better tell a story for myself and for my kids. The length and breadth of that catalog provoked her laughter, so I summarized: it would be fun to “chase the dead” with my brothers if we didn’t kill each other in the process. She smiled, accepted my answers, and declared with a wicked look that we’d have a “grand time”.

The benign amusement in that snap of her eyes revealed a shrewd knowingness about us and our bottomless interest for all things Irish. To her, we must seem like first-time stoners in a dorm room fingering handmade ashtrays like ancient sculptures, and scrutinizing album covers as if they were treasure maps. Our obsessions with our diluted Irishness prove diverting to the natives in Ireland. After all, their reality is more like what Sebastian Barry once wrote: “The Irish people. Poor stragglers stuck on the edge of Europe. Took a wrong turn on some ancient landscape. Could go no further and could not go back.” My people went further and then did go back. The cousins’ charts point in the opposite direction of ours, to the future, not the past. Kathryn with that penetrating gaze that distinguishes great Irish beauties seemed to view me as a curio — the Sentimental American Explorer, who might as well have been wearing buckskin and a coonskin cap.

All this tumbled through my brainwaves while in the rented black SUV, our chariot for the chase. John was driving, of course. In a family of control freaks, each of us might have wanted to be the pilot, but John had driven the most on the ‘wrong side of the road’ and he had rented the car: ‘He Who Pays The Piper Calls The Tune.’ Jimmy rode shotgun because he was a very large man and #2 on the birthday totem pole. Brendan and I, a combined 118 years then, were in the backseat, but unlike those nausea-inducing childhood trips, we were allowed to face forward.

In my early trips to Ireland, the most valuable resource in venturing beyond Dublin was the ordnance maps for their detail even though they were clumsy and required switching from one county to the next. Navigators had to flip back and forth between Rand McNally and the more detailed chart that could identify features like some little lake jumping up beside us or suggest a way around a herd of sheep lollygagging in front of the car.

For the first time on this trip, I brought my GPS, loaded with Ireland’s digital profile. Yes, Google maps for Ireland existed then, but remember my device was a Blackberry and inadequate to real time navigation. Brendan and Jimmy were quite interested in the TomTom. John looked at it and me as if I was showing a stethoscope to a shaman, a typewriter to a medieval scribe. The loaded maps capable of magnifying to a street corner in Ballyjamesduff did not impress him. He liked the sense of navigating by his memories. The GPS spit out a turn by turn route as if our journey was a proof of a geometrical theorem, but that stirred only disdain in our leader. John was a black-belt control freak, and that little screen was a ninja assassin of his navigation.

Getting out of Dublin to the north used to require traveling a succession of smaller and smaller roads until near Sligo the so-called highway resembled a very long and narrow driveway for a country estate. Today we escaped via an expressway with tolls to match and enjoyed European driving for the first half of our trip. That’s where the cars go very very fast and the authorities employ sneaky devices to remotely give tickets. As John, a skilled and steady driver, whisked us along the M1 we began a conversation about the genealogy goals in Monaghan, today’s destination. Then the GPS awoke and abruptly commanded us to exit. It did so first as a warning, then a requirement, and finally as an autocratic imperative. However, only after John admitted that this recommended route, while not in his plan, was also a possibility did we ease off the superhighway at Charleville Bridge. Jimmy, our navigator, warmed to the use of the TomTom; he reported our average speed, our miles to go, and our anticipated time of arrival as if co-piloting a transatlantic flight. There was no beverage service.

A GPS device concentrates for us the coordinates we occupy at the expense of draining our attention from the countryside; we didn’t have to remember an old tree by a pub as the sign for our next turn or look as closely for half-hidden road signs. There is a shift in the experience. Paying such thorough, even frantic, notice on previous trips to the roadside was necessary so as not to miss any landmark that would confirm we had not yet gotten lost. The attention that strange surroundings demand becomes optional.

Another GPS advantage is that the people hurtling down the highway weren’t yelling at each other about mistakes with directions, hurtling into a bog because a thin red line of a road on a tattered page proved illusory in the real world, or skeetering into a ditch when the map blew into the driver’s face. These were all things that happened to me on past Irish adventures. We were now going from here to there as if on a conveyor belt and yet I had no intention of turning off the GPS. The poetry of getting lost had paled for me. In our chasing the dead, traveling in straight lines was worth losing a little sense of where we were. And to be honest it made me feel a little bit more in control. Or so I thought. The sureness of the GPS (even if ― spoiler alert ― not always reliable) relieved us of that anxious focus and tucked us snugly into the car. That’s what screens do: fold us into an artificial actuality.

The actual actuality looming was Monaghan where we knew our Great Grandfather James Elliott was born. Due to those improved highways, we were only in the car for a couple of hours (blessedly curtailing opportunities for any putatively prohibited political discussions) before crossing into the county at Aclint Bridge. In all of my previous time in Ireland, Monaghan represented a halfway mark in journeys to Donegal, a stop for gas and biscuits and bathroom breaks, all related activities. And Ballybay never appeared on the itinerary as that town lies off the main highway, the N2. Thus, I had never noticed the way in which the county seems to insert itself into the rest of Ulster. See below; don’t blame me — the Brits drew those lines.

Finally, we reach Ballybay, the place where our guide, Peadar Murnane, lives. He is the co-author of At the Ford of the Birches : the History of Ballybay, its people and vicinity. He is guru for Elliott finding. As John moseyed the BMW up the main drag of town, the GPS had completed its service for now and we were soon to realize that we would be operating in Peadar’s mental map while chasing our dead here.