Chapter 19

Chasing the Dead: Amateur Adventures in Genealogy

“Ancient religion and modern science agree: we are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention. Without us, the physicists who have espoused the anthropic principle tell us, the universe would be unwitnessed, and in a real sense not there at all. It exists, incredibly, for us.”
—John Updike

Our first stop in Monaghan after the slightly disconcerting visit to Peadar Murnane allows the four of us to visit Elliott Flats, now a wind farm on a tumbly forlorn plain up a steep dirt road but also where our people once held land. At first glance, the spot qualified as an ‘unwitnessed universe’, bereft of people for a long time. But now on this August day, we came to pay attention to ‘the flats’. A good old Norse word, flats, but perhaps in this case a bit of a paradox. Does the original meaning of flats — a stretch of country without hills — work when that stretch is itself atop a hill? The Irish likely had a better word. Tilling these places for 9000 years gave them plenty of words to describe a field.

Maybe even Thirty-Two Words as we know from the book of that name by the late Manchan Magan, an account which captivated many a Hibernophile with its attention to Lost Words of the Irish Landscape . Too bad that book wasn’t even written in 2010. If it was I could’ve flaunted that kind of knowledge, asked whether this barren plateau qualified in Gaelic as a Loscán, a rocky, poor-soiled field or a Mothar, a dense, rocky, or overgrown, neglected spot. That kind of showing off, the specialty of youngest brothers, would have enhanced my street cred or what in Gaelic is called soi-chreidsi or meas sráide or clú sráide or deis-bhéalac. The Irish language also has a lot for words for smartassery. Anyway, if it wasn’t for the massive windmills lazily turning on this plot, Mothar would be the choice.

The photos of the space taken by Hilda Dickson a little over a year ago render the wind farm far more attractive than memory recalls. And I can’t ask half of the crew because they’re gone; they’ve left the party. In my last play, Retrospective, the lead character, Rory, laments how dying is like having been at a party and “you take a trip to the John, but coming back discover everybody left.” His longtime foil, Clint, corrects him: “No, man, we left the party. Party’s still going strong.” My brothers Michael (not on the CTD trip as previously explained/justified), Jimmy, and John have left the party. Each employed an ultimate Irish goodbye: died in his sleep, dropped dead, dropped dead. No lingering death bed farewells or famous last words in that tally of fatalities. Half of my fellow witnesses when we visited the ancestral ruins are now dead Elliotts. While my party is still going, Clint’s take above misses how the festivities are fainter without those brothers, key witnesses to my universe, regretted revelers. That’s part of the decision to write about all of this again; to remember them on that day. As if in this witnessing of them, Jimmy and John exist again, returned as friendly ghosts to the party in my mind, Looking, bantering, exploring, wondering as they did on that delightful day.

Why delightful? Like any amateur genealogists, headed to a place with our name attached to it — Elliott Flats — filled us with anticipation and not a little amazement. In a way, we were from here. It wasn’t the views that did the delighting. Elliott Flats lived up to that name in one way. No one bothered to call this Elliott Heights, Vista or The Wind Farm at Mullananalt Estates either. Flats works, and if the name fits, wear it. This expanse — difficult, bumpy, and very windy — seems apt for Elliotts.

To see this spot, Peadar told us to go to Riverdale House, an abandoned hotel outside of town, and then turn right until we see a car park. When we get there with my TomTom GPS confirming each movement somewhat to John’s annoyance, our appointed guide, John Murnaghan, is waiting for us in his truck. The ensuing meeting looks surprisingly like a very dull drug deal — maybe scoring bootleg saw palmetto supplements. Murnaghan is as sturdy as Peadar seemed frail, a compact man with a physique that suggested a lifetime of manual labor but belied his actual age of seventy-seven. Then he was not much older than I am today, which is one of those frequently encountered sobering realizations because he too has since left the party

Yes, John M is the ‘younger man’ of whom Peadar spoke. He had dark eyes that took us all in as we lumbered out of our SUV, and their sharpness was pleasantly balanced with a frequent smile. (On our last day in town, we would confirm that John was owner of an 88-acre farm and a very successful contractor with a sizable family business, Murnaghan Brothers, ensconced in the old railway station building. He never gave away his full identity during our traipsing.)

John M was quick to have us off to the next stop at Clones Road: the house of the current owner of Elliott Flats, Mr. John Lennon. As we waited at this next intersection for the owner to come out of his house, our guide elaborated on his assistantship to Peadar. The ‘pilgrims’ (like our crew) came looking for their roots in Ballybay and John M. as a fellow amateur historian was glad to accompany them on tours of the county including the graveyards. He slipped into the conversation a hint that he understood our hope to find some connections to other names. “We brought a fellow up to Sport Hall and found the Smiths,” he offered. That nugget would matter little to anyone else in this neck of the woods but our clan. That evocative place name of Sport Hall was a now forgotten area outside the parish to which we suspected our Elliott GGG belonged, and the Smiths (or Smyths) were a family that started here in Monaghan with the Elliotts and then married into our tribe before all moving to Rhode Island. My brother John had such good records on this lot that we all grinned in anticipation like gold miners being told of a big strike upstream.

Like almost everyone I ever met in Ireland, John Lennon, the owner of Elliott Flats, was exceedingly amiable without being overly enthusiastic. He was glad to take time in the middle of the day to let the Yanks wander around what to us might be ancestral homelands but to him was a commercial venture. We followed him up the hill in our car and waited as he opened the battered gates. We’d never have been able to see this area from the road; the flats were much higher than anticipated. My brother John stopped our car after a few hundred feet when we finally leveled off and showing a cautious acceptance of the utility of the TomTom instructed me to save the exact coordinates of the house to that device in order to have them for future reference. Disembarking we gathered around John M who explained our surroundings with confirming nods from Lennon now and then, “Mullananalt would have been a big farm,” he pointed to a far end of the flats. “Now it’s a wind farm with one of the housings of the turbines right on the spot where the old farmhouse stood before a fire in the 1930s. There’s nothing left of the farming times anymore.” That’s an understatement. There’s nothing at all here; lots and lots of it for as far as anyone could see. Except for those windmills, which we can’t decide whether they look more like alien invaders or artifacts of a race even more ancient than our Elliotts.

The geological survey of Ireland claims that the earth of County Monaghan in some spots is “similar to the modern-day Arabian Gulf.” Beholding the scattered rocks and general bareness, the plain of Mullananalt is not one of those spots. In fact, this mesa is officially known as the ‘Mullananalt member’ made up of siltstone, mudstone, and fine greywacke, a result of long disappeared volcanoes. (From a map found later in the County Monaghan library, another label emerges to affix to this past locale of Elliotts: inhabitants of Silurian Metasediments and Volcanics.)

What could they grow here and how hard would the Elliotts work to do so? The soil is hard and dry; when I stoop to pick up some the wind sweeps it out of my hand. And of wind there is never a shortage on this hilltop plain. Its name before Elliott Flats came along might have been mullagh or mullaigh or mullaidh na n-alt, the latter meaning ‘Summit of the Glens’. It’s hard to tell because Gaelic or Erse is a ‘Goidelic language’ and its characters that we still see on the signs in Ireland as druidic script utilize a different alphabet. The English as insightfully portrayed in Brian Friel’s play Translations botched and  the spelling of many a place name; one of their lesser transgressions.

If its original name was ‘Summit of the Glens”, which would suggest centrality among mountain-valleys — fashioning the course of streams, something has changed in the geography. Though there are hundreds of lakes or loughs in the immediate vicinity, no bodies of water are visible from atop this hill. And in a 360 view of the place, there are no people to be seen either. The loneliness likely prevalent in a place like this plain must have been thick. Not the loneliness of the internet age where our own practices and culture have severed us from one another but the loneliness of place. Ireland is now said to be the loneliest country in Europe, according to European Commission research. One in five adults in Ireland report feeling lonely most or all of the time, compared to a European average of 13 per cent. This is presented in the Irish Times as news, but could the Irish Republic and its citizens be any lonelier than it was for our Elliotts atop this mesa? From the looks of the flats, five out of five adults up here might have felt lonely.

After this first day and opening scan of the old family homestead, we would spend the rest of our time in Monaghan scampering up and down the drumlin hills that as one geology guide put it contribute to the “box of eggs topology” of the area. No sooner has a visitor climbed down one curvy mountain in the Ballybay area than he must start up the next with two more hills on his flanks. But here all is strictly horizontal, as level as a bed board, and as empty as the moon save the giant wind turbines with blades lolling around like the hands on a giddy timepiece.

My mental model had held a different picture when envisioning this moment and this place. Colonial Williamsburg wasn’t in the offing, but my previous experience with ruins in Ireland involved walls broken, thatched roofs collapsed — the ghost town of Port on the way to Ardara, the 12th Century church of Saint MacCreiche near Lahinch with its stone heads still scowling at the sinners. They were spooky and incomplete, but there was something there of the past. Here only a middling pile of stones broke the emptiness for a mile into the horizon until my eye reached the base of one of those giant propellers. The illusion of permanence outpaces the lessons of history. There is little reason to find some evidence of Elliotts here after all. Such signs of habitation disappear quickly in most cases. Four hundred villages and hamlets ceased to exist in the second half of the fifteenth century in England as Joyce Appleby notes in her book on the history of capitalism. Only a practiced eye would recognize a wall or ditch that once belonged to such places. That has to be true of Ireland as well. The evanescence of a mere farm in the wilds of Monaghan dismays.

Thinking back on how it felt initially to be on the Flats, an Anglo-Saxon word introduced to me by Katy over at the Anchoress Archives described the initial feeling of that day. “dustsceawung. It’s a kenning, a compound word of dūst (dust) and sċēawung (contemplation), which is heavy with meaning. It encompasses the contemplation of loss, of transience, of impermanence, and, appropriately, the ending of civilization.”

John Murnaghan evidently noticed our blank stares filled with dustsceawung. Extending his hand to a flowering bush stretched out towards the east, he tried to put a little color to the moment: “The fuchsias would have been there at that time,” he ventured. Brendan and I appreciated the effort, but looking frustratedly at each other set out toward that pile of stones. Brendan wanted something more substantial than the promise of a fuchsia to imagine what the place looked like in the time of our people. Drawing closer to the imprint which was all that remained of one of the buildings, we did discover what might have been a vestige of our family — if dietary habits have held steady over 150 years. A grubber lay on its side; a metal implement that when harnessed to a horse could harvest potatoes. When I was growing up, we bought our potatoes in forty pound bags. Peeling potatoes (badly) was one of the first chores assigned to the youngest in my family. A grubber was something that seemed to connect, which was important because my overall impression so far was that Elliott Flats was a void, the family nothingness.

The grubber is a memento of Irish civilization. Prior to the potato’s appearance along with other new world commodities about like beans and corn, societies like Ireland’s were always scraping against the possibility of food shortages. As Joyce Appleby points out, “the potato was richer in calories and grains and could thrive on very small plots. Even more remarkable, potatoes yielded 2 to 3 times more bushels per acre than wheat or barley. They can be stored through the winter and didn’t demand much in the way of cultivation. People are amazingly resistant to changing their diet, slow to adopt strange foods, however beneficial. But the harvesting bounty of the humble potato won over the Irish, who began cultivating it at the end of the 16th century.” Of course, in a calamitous reversal of fortune 250 years later, the blight that struck the potato crop throughout Ireland and especially here in Monaghan not only caused famine but created changes in the population — death and dispersal — that forever altered Irish culture both on the island and worldwide. But the famine didn’t move the Elliotts. Other causes must have come into play.

The sight of this grubber with rusty wheels and sharp curved harrowing spikes brought us much closer to the historical reality of the ancestors we sought than many documents could. This farm tool pushed or pulled by horse (or human, I guess) lifts the potatoes out of the earth without damaging them or mangling them in the machinery. This grubber, a dumb relic that had not lost its teeth, reminded me that the Irish of our past lived close to the ground, which was not how we lived now. Something William Edmundson once wrote strikes me as pertinent to what this place signifies. “People’s identities —and the identities they can choose— are tied to their opportunities to occupy certain roles and to own certain things.” That piece of land was different for my great grandfathers.

And we know it was their land or at least land that they were able to rent from absentee landlords, the Croftons. Our second great grandfather, James Elliott is listed on Griffith’s Valuation. And because of the baptism record in 1858 of our first great grandfather, the one my aunt Mary said I resembled, the younger James Elliott, we know that this land is where our Elliotts lived in the middle of the 19th century. As suspicious as John can be of clues that fit too easily together, those same records below show that a James Flanagan also lived up there on the Glen of the Summits. (Or was that the Summit of the Glens?) The valuation confirms that James Elliott the Elder was renting a house to a Ford. Is it a coincidence that 11 years later his daughter Catherine will marry a Michael Ford after having immigrated to Pawtucket RI? Maybe and that’s why you keep chasing. The more names connected to this place, the more important the day starts to feel.

As we returned to the others, the Messieurs Murnaghan and Lennon were confirming Peadar’s statement about what Elliott Flats was best remembered for in the village: teaching dogs to hunt and race. “The racing field where the dogs were trained would have been right down there,” he said stretching an arm across the vast vacancy. Maybe it wasn’t always lonely. Manchan Mangan offered a Gaelic word for a field for games or dancing: Reidhlean, but those are usually not atop a mountain. “They had a wheel and a rope and they tied a dead hare to it. Then they’d turn the wheel and the dogs would learn to follow.” With the exception of my brother Michael who I suspect was only in it for the beer, no one in my family had ever hunted. And the use of Elliott Flats for this enterprise might post-date the fire in the 1930s. Slim stuff on which to build any idea of the ancestors. John and Jimmy seemed to be struggling less with this than Brendan and myself; the visage was proving to be more distancing than coalescing. The past seemed unavailable for a moment, but then I chastised myself for not trying hard enough. The endless panoramic views, the sky, the ground, the air, the coordinates were the same. Start from there.

Or rather start from nowhere. Sky, rock, wind: all of those were part of this interface for my relatives who lived and farmed and walked and wed and died here in Mullananalt. Extract the externalities — long twisting blades of the windmills, crumbling stone roots where a house used to be — and I might with some imagination get a sense of their consciousness in the past. Not in the sense of history, or in the routine of life, but in the instant of experience. Is there something that is just so dissimilar about our respective perceptual abilities that would render that reality unrecognizable to me? Or is there some dimension that both of us might share irrespective of the passing of time? Look straight up or look straight down and what we have is what they saw, where they breathed. Brendan seemed to have sense of what it was like here. The smile on his face now and the intensity of his hawk-like gaze suggest he has attained — a communion conveyed by some essence of place.

I hold a fervent suspicion of any romanticizing in this venture; spare me the mumbo-jumbo of walking in the footsteps of the forefathers. Such wariness arises in part from the inbred cynicism of the Elliott household and in part from working in places like reform schools and locked psychiatric units where romanticizing could have gotten me killed. I don’t want to gild these moments or plant myself in some sort of Thomas Kinkade lit landscape. But being there all of a sudden — emphasis on BEING — gave an ineffable connection beyond time, a knowing imbued in this space. I don’t think that the world stops at the tip of my fingers. I do believe that there is more than what we see, and recognize as many others who have undertaken trips like this might also have recognized that in contemplating this possibility sits a risk of playing the fool. On this high plain on that day, my witnessing wandered from surprised disappointment to cautious wonder. It felt good for my soul. Perhaps it is the irregular diet on Irish trips that fuels such rapid changes in disposition.

As I rejoin them, my two eldest brothers are exhibiting great industry in assaying the landscape. John is gathering every scrap of information from the way the farm faced to the foot paths to nearby towns. Later he will compare these notes to a thousand data points already in his files to retune the Elliott profile and eliminate distracting data. Jimmy is asking about the way things worked: what would the fields have yielded? What kind of machinery might they have had? How far to market?

I smile at these big American guys with white hair walking around and asking questions both pragmatic and arcane about the empty field where once our forebears lived. It’s all very practical and solid from their side and at the same time all very fluid and ghostly from Brendan and myself. Perhaps there are multiple ways to the past: John and Jim amass the statistics in the stories of what went on and climb them as if they were a bridge to an imagining of the others on that land. Brendan and I in our staring at the sky try to dance with the local spirits. Both methods work. Both produce the witnessing and the delight. For me part of that delight is from being immersed in a devotion to the past that four brothers have in common instead of separated by an eddy of conflicting beliefs.

Brendan is gathering a few stones from the pile that Lennon has generously offered to us. I take one too and the big chunks will be with the two of us in the back of the BMW for the rest of the trip. (Brendan will discover trying to board his plane home that airport security considers large rocks in carryon to be weapons. Who knew?) John tells me again to capture the exact location. I reach down to the GPS and select the coordinates function. I select ‘choose current location’. X marks the spot. Or so I thought. At John’s bidding, I will repeat the same procedure at Murnaghan’s house and at a crossroad meeting spot designated as the start of the next day’s graveyard hunt. I feel very clever descending the hill cuddling the GPS savoring our witness of Elliott Flats