Well it is St. Pats and this day strangely holds new meaning me.
It was only about a month ago that I found "Skeletons" in the family closet.
This is the half of the family that I don't hang with much.
They are far more quirky than I (as hard as THAT is to believe.)
So, having invested my genealogical research throughout the years into the obvious half of my family -the French Canadian/Acadian side, I managed to ignore the other half - writing them off as being "probably" English, (derisive snort!) and calling it done.
Well...how wrong I was.
My grandmother was apparently full of Green-Leprechauny-Goodness.
(She had the maiden name "Ready", which is a bastardization of the name O'Reddy and more formally, O'Rhiada.
I guess, like alot of Irish immigrants, they dropped the 'O'.
I always wondered what the big deal was with St. Patricks day and my mom.
The woman worked for 3 days to turn beef brisket into corned beef with its accomanying cabbage and potatos.
Her simple answer to my query was always, "Thats what we do on St. Patricks day.
Gramma did it, and her gramma before her did it, and I learned from them how to make it."
Poor gramma, She was a saint.
She married an itinerant Hell-Fire-and-Brimstone-Screaming Preacher who dragged her around the hot southwest, making her and the kids do migrant farm work while he preached from town to town. I can remember him kicking her under the table, interupting her conversations when he wanted to speak, and he would say to her, "Shut up Ethel!" and then he would commandeer the conversation.
Nice compassionate man.
He beat his sons when they found some bottle caps in the street and played with them.
He accused them of stealing the bottle caps.
He beat my mom in the face with a jelly ladel when she was 18 because she put on make-up and went to see a movie.
It is the only time that my gramma got in his face.
She grabbed the ladel right outta his hands, and she told him to "stop that this instant!"
As the story goes, apparently he was stunned by her boldness.
In his pause, my mom raced out the door and ran away to Astoria.
She went on to marry a catholic Frenchman and later returned with him and two children, to Oregon.
So there is apparently a fair quantity of Irish in me that I never knew I had.
Somehow I will have to square with that half.
;o)
mih-
Wow... yeah... I found out some stuff about my mom's side of the family actually by accident.
ReplyDeleteShe knew about it but I didn't. Her uncles were all musicians (some still are) and some led a not so great life and have married more than once. So we have family we've never met atleast I haven't.
And when one of my mom's uncle's died I found him on the "social security death index" and made a note that he was my great uncle. Someone wrote back and said "it's sad to hear he died... he was my dad." and it wasn't one of the kids I knew from him. Found out he had been married before and my mom had met a few of the kids way back when before everything changed.
So yeah... It was weird finding out we had all these new 2nd cousins floating around... he had about 8 kids from the first marriage I guess. Then 2 or 3 more on the new one. And then twins... which is another story...
Geneology can be weird.
~L~