Finding a Grave Man

How would you go about finding a graveyard in a little Irish village named Knockerra? In 2005, we still used tabloid-size ordinance maps to navigate the countryside making dangerous U-Turns while yelling at each other. As noted, no cousins were available to guide us; that we were in this townland at all was an accident. I only knew the name, Knockerra, from the legend that my grandmother’s family only came to this hamlet because at the Ryan’s previous home in Tipperary her grandfather had been taken out to a wall and shot by the British for rebel behavior. One of the condemned’s sons according to the story, our Thomas Ryan, was sent as a child to live with an uncle, a priest in Clare. (We have scant proof of the story but why dismiss it when it is so good?)

Young Thomas grew up and emigrated to the states for a time but then returned to Clare. Several stateside relatives had told me that Thomas was buried near here. Near is a relative term and doesn’t cover driving these roads in a van ON THE WRONG SIDE. Irene was the only who among our number besides me who had known our grandmother, Mary Ryan Elliott. Thinking of her brought to mind a very kind but occasionally tart tongued woman whom we visited often in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx. Twice during my pre-teen summers, she took me into her house for the rarest of holidays: a stay away from my five siblings where I received the undivided attention of my grandparents. On those hot July days, she taught me better penmanship, the intricacies of knockout whist, and how to laugh at myself. But what I remember Mary Ryan most for came at the very end of her life. On her deathbed in 1972, she asked for some of her almost twenty grandchildren to visit that she might say ‘goodbye’. When my turn came to go, she lay in her high bed freighted with cancer struggling to talk with me one more time. Those big hands that had lifted and kneaded and stretched so much lay folded on her chest. Gone was the pleasantly sharp woman who when she gave us a quarter as children told us ‘don’t let it burn a hole in your pocket’. Now she was a failing body seeking to touch us one more time, unafraid of her death, and unashamed of its smells and pains. She talked to me of dying, and she said that she loved me. I had been there at her end. To get this close and not try to find that farm that was the place of her beginning with its graveyard nearby filled with other relatives would be a source of regret and I try not to do regret, which is the most useless emotion.

Off the Map

Finding Knockerra on the map, your finger traces from narrow to narrower lines and lanes. Irene remembered that the farm where our grandmother grew up was supposed be next to the graveyard in which her father was buried. We decided that it would be easier to find the right graveyard than to figure out the right farm. And we decided to find the right church because unlike the USA, the Irish tended to bury their dead close to where they would pass every Sunday. A church marked on the map was at a corner on a hill where after a steep climb we encountered a grid of graves.

This church’s thick Vatican II bloated architecture made us suspect that this was not the graveyard we sought. From what Irene had heard, the graveyard was not next to something that looked like a Viking ship in need of liposuction. The church’s lines wanted to soar and lift its inhabitants to paradise, but the sheer bulk of its design made it squat in dry dock. GK Chesterton once said that being Roman Catholic meant that he avoided the tendency of his contemporaries to be captives of their time. Obviously, he died before this style of benighted church architecture sprouted. Now all RCs — or at least the few who still showed up here — were stuck forever in a boring almost present. Thomas Ryan was too much of the past to be on this hill.

Not that this graveyard lacked clues and connections to my family; there were Fennells and Brownes, cousins of mine in the USA. Immigrants from an Irish town often clustered around one destination in the states and then through marriage and partnership tangled ancient connections of the old country even further. Seeing one particular Ryan in this churchyard stunned me because I had heard of him from my grandmother. A blazing white tombstone proclaimed the resting place of Mick Ryan, my great uncle, the older brother of my grandmother, who died just one year after her. The lettering did not stop at flowery dates of arrival and departure but went on to proclaim him as a one time commander of the local IRA. His exploits appear in some oral histories of that time ranging from ambushing Royal Irish Constabulary to being on the run up in Dublin. Encountering him on the page described as “a big, powerful man” with enormous courage and loyalty to match and now in this cemetery celebrated with a grand marker produced that vicarious and seductive pleasure that is a product of genealogy, the credit of being a blood relation of one who has done greater things than us. It put my own deeds in perspective; I too had been on the run but mostly from myself.

Under a sulky sky, I walked up the road to seek some direction to that older cemetery. Two men with hardened workman’s builds and dusty paint spattered boots had emerged from a low green building that they appeared to be either taking apart or putting together. The direction of the effort might be unclear, but the evidence of their industry was easily seen in their weary steps. Hearing my quest, they immediately suggested ‘the old graveyard’ at Kilcarroll. I did not offer the name we sought; it was day for dealing with dead relatives and not awkward reunions with possible living ones requiring explanations of why we hadn’t called beforehand —  or ever. The weird ghost-blue eyes of the fellow in the cap were too much like my own for comfort. In any case, neither of the Knockerra men asked for the name. Perhaps they were relatives after all and this desire to avoid potentially awkward conversation lay entwined in some Ryan gene.

Dismissing my paper map as lacking in sufficient detail, the blue-eyed fellow drew a coin from his pocket and scratched a route on the top of a low stone wall in front of one of the few houses there. His hand moved slowly indicating that by this direction we would head back down the long rise until we were again on the Kilrush-Killimen Road. Then the coin scratched a white line at right angles and then another until I was lost in his makeshift geometry. The other man tried to help by stating that this older cemetery was closer to the Shannon, not on the river but on another hill along it. Of course, I had no idea where the Shannon was and that must’ve shown on my face because they gave up, smiled, and said, “Sure, you’ll see a sign.”

We See a Sign

There were no cameras in my phone in 2005 so I wasn’t able to get a photo of the petroglyph drawn by my possible cousin. Why do we visitors expect locals to know where all graveyards are anyway? Our particular ancestors left and now we, their descendants, want signposts to the past posted like highway placards. We expect a Google map of our family myth with 3D views of the old cottages, sloping fields, and headstones that connect us. Could we point them to anything interesting or intimate about our American towns?

Following the memory of the coin-scratched rhombus with little success, I was about to give up when both my wife and sister shouted that we had just passed a cemetery, next to a house and fronted by a small crowd of trees. Hazarding the dangers of any sudden moves while driving in Ireland, I spun to the left as ordered (WIDE RIGHT, TIGHT LEFT… The American tourist’s mantra for driving on the ‘wrong side of the road’ as if quarterbacking your rental car) No sooner had we barreled back to the corner than all of us realized that this mirage of the graveyard was just some old farm structures transformed for a moment by a brief blast of sun into what we wanted to see. Wary of another sudden move, I continued down this little road looking for a place to turn around. Nothing but unbroken high hedges rose on either side.

Almost a half mile from our impulsive detour, I spied the first break in the shrubbery that would allow a U-turn, but just before reaching that spot a tiny brown sign muscled out of the grasp of the hedges and proclaimed Kilcarroll cemetery to be the next left. Our crew erupted in a hubbub of astonishment at our dumb luck as we turned onto a lane so tight that the branches of hedges slapped against the sides of the van. You’re not really in Ireland if you’re not lost on a skinny road under intermittent attack by local flora and ambushed by the occasional crater. The van strained to take this hillock with our full load, but we slowly climbed past fields and the occasional cottage until we reached Kilcarroll graveyard.

Saving Thomas Ryan

Confession: this achievement would not rank as a miracle to other Yank relatives who lacking my reticence got led to this place much more easily by local cousins. But to us now, finding this place was magical, a blessing. We dashed out of the van and spread out on foot among the rows of old and older graves. A duly gray and white sky loomed close as the ceiling of a room. The wind rose up as if the land itself exhaled, and large raindrops anointed us. Here there was a Clancy daughter buried by her father at only 29 years old. There lay a Cusack son buried by his dad when only 27. And then John Duggan who dying in 1845 also did not see the age of 28.

Pope Leo said recently that “…Christians do not call burial places “‘necropolises,’ meaning ‘cities of the dead,’ but ‘cemeteries,’ which literally means ‘dormitories,’ places where one rests, awaiting resurrection.” Thinking of it that way explains how quiet we were even jittery. Having circled several times this particular ‘dormitory’, we found that many graves were ciphers: the stones had tumbled, and the inscriptions almost disappeared. None of us had found Thomas Ryan. Numbed by the ride, we were disorganized. Had we looked at all of the graves? Had we come this far, this magically orchestrated as we wanted to believe by Ryans unseen and overhead, only to fail at the last?

And then Marjorie, her red hair flying about her, announced success . She stood before a stone the color of dark oatmeal with its pocked legend saying this grave of my great grandfather was erected by his wife — his second wife, my grandmother’s mother — Mary Troy, who would survive him by 40 years. Realizing from the gravestone she lived until 1958, seven years after I was born, surprised me. Why if she was still living was she never mentioned in those Bronx living rooms where her daughters all sat of a Sunday on the same couch clucking and chuckling with each other? I took in all the tales and never heard her name. Was this because of bad blood, chilly connections, or just a casualty of transatlantic communications in those days? The possibilities were unsettling. A saying that those aunts used came to mind: “Be careful what you chase, you just might catch it.”

But that queasiness passed because standing there felt so delicious. I imagined going and seeing all the graves of my people in Ireland. Finding the first grave of an ancestor is like discovering a secret room in your house, a mixture of mystery and possibility, a possible opening to new knowledge. Why graves? They’re history slung on a hill and when we stand near them something emerges even if it is as spookily indecipherable as the letters turned to runes on those long-toppled slabs in Kilcarroll graveyard. Graves might firm up or confound ideas of who we are. Either way, they are an invention that allows us to ponder (and perhaps fantasize) how much of our thinking, laughing, crying, speechifying, sweet talking, rhyming, praying, blustering, loving, hating, drinking came from the bones beneath us.

Here with Thomas Ryan, I tapped another line into my life that began in the Bronx in 1951. This line was to someone I never knew but from whom there was this connection to one half of those stories of my childhood that were intended to tell us who we were. This guy was the grandfather my father and his siblings never met. Was he more like my father winning a depression era job out of 400 applicants, being a navigator over The Burma Hump in WW II, graduating top of his class as an electrical engineer? Or more like my one uncle who was a wild motorcycle cop, or the uncle who was rear gunner in a World War II B17, or the one who went out of his way on his cop’s beat to rescue stray dogs? Those last three were all the same uncle, my father’s youngest brother, Edward Ryan Elliott. Simultaneously, I realized here how much I wanted to know and how unlikely it was that I would ever know much. But I could see that his daughters, those Ryan women, waited until after their Dad died to sweep off on the soon doomed Lusitania into Newport in 1915 as maids and governesses, a town they would leave for solid lives (mostly) in the Bronx. Why did they wait?  My grandmother was 26 when she immigrated, a later age than most women of that time and place. We go to graves because their solid facts provoke and shape stories that we make part of the story of our own lives. Going to those graves and trying to figure out what part of us came from what part of them constitutes a sort of inspection of the piers beneath the edifices of our existence.

“You should regard yourself as the sole author of all your future achievements and the grateful beneficiary of all your past successes,” David Brooks wrote wisely long after this moment of mine on Kilcarroll Hill. But going to graves reminds us that we are beneficiaries also of others’ successes, of the feats of our forebears. I didn’t need to worship my ancestors, but I did need to recognize them, to remove some of the anonymity from these benefactors. In knowing more of our beginnings, we might make better sense of our ends. In genealogy, the target can be ‘who am I? ‘Or ‘who were they?’ Or both, if what we are after is resolving some of the uncertainty of our identity. That goal explained why as we all packed into the van, I vowed not to wait for another accidental day to dig further, to reconstruct the underpinnings of my heritage.

Or so I thought. What actually happened is that I went home and did almost none of those things. The enduring present prevailed. Career and family created a gravity that I chose not to escape for genealogical adventures  — until five years later, 2010, when my eldest brother John, by tradition head of the Elliott clan, disclosed his own plan for an Irish odyssey to County Monaghan to unearth Elliotts and to County Donegal to find furtive Connaghans.  Four of us went. That trip forms the stem of the rest of this book, which I first drafted after the trip.

But now, fifteen years later, John is dead: he toppled like a felled tree when his name was called in a Doctor’s office and the force of his descent broke his neck and fractured his skull where inside already a misdiagnosed and then maltreated brain tumor loitered. That catastrophe — John’s joining the dear departed — was twelve years in his future when he called me with that invite to accompany him on a genealogical adventure. And that death makes this version of my book different from the one I wrote back then. Now he and others of my blood are among the dead that I am still chasing.

This book has been with me for so long now it counts as a companion, a sympathetic witness to all sort of thoughts about my family, life, and me, but I’m ready for this particular pursuit to end. Nothing to be done but to wrap up the tale in chapters and verse.