By Brendan Loy
My mom has been doing some genealogical research, and has apparently found the answer to a question I've long wondered about: just how many generations ago did the Irish side of my family (the McNamaras) emigrate from the old country and come to America? It seems the answer is six. My dad is a fifth-generation American on the McNamara side, and I'm sixth-generation.
According to my mom's research, my great-great-great-grandfather, John McNamara, was born in Ireland in 1822. His wife Mary, my great-great-great-grandmother, was also born in Ireland, in 1828. I don't know when they got married, but it seems they had their first child in 1855 or thereabouts, in Connecticut. Their fifth child, born in 1863 (also in Connecticut), was Daniel, a second-generation American and my great-great-grandfather. Dan McNamara begat Joe McNamara, who begat Helen McNamara Loy, my paternal grandmother. And the rest, as they say, is history. (Though as Nana Loy would point out, "What the hell do they know? They're a bunch of horse's asses anyway." Or words to that effect. :)
My understanding is that the McNamaras always claimed that they had come over before the Great Potato Famine, but we've never been sure if that claim was accurate. It has been speculated that certain proud members of the family might have wanted to separate themselves from the riffraff, if you will, by pretending they weren't forced to come here because of starvation, as so many other "shanty Irish" were. Well, now we finally have some dates, and let's see: if we assume that John and Mary were married in Ireland, and that she was at least 18 when they got hitched, that would mean they left Ireland sometime between 1846 and ~1855.
The famine was from 1845 to 1849. Ahem. You do the math.
So my ancestors, it seems, were quite likely refugees of the Great Potato Famine. Interesting.
UPDATE: Belatedly, it occurs to me that my logic vis a vis the timetable may not be entirely airtight. All we know, I think, is that John and Mary were both born in Ireland; we don't actually know that they emigrated together, as adults, as opposed to emigrating separately, as children, and then meeting and marrying in America. The latter is also possible, and it would not be at all surprising if two first-generation immigrants met in this country and married each other; immigrant communities were very tight-knit in those days. If that were the case, it would mean the McNamaras did indeed come over here before the famine.
Of course, the other thing that's odd about this whole train of thought is that, although I talk about these great-great-great-grandparents as "the McNamaras" because they are the ones who carried the name McNamara, the reality is I'm really only talking about a small sliver of the Irish ancestry from the "McNamara side" of my grandparentage (i.e., from my Nana Loy). One-eighth of it, to be exact. John and Mary McNamara were Nana Loy's great-grandparents; they represent a mere 12.5% of her bloodline. Yet she was 100% Irish. That means seven-eighths of Nana's (and my) Irishness came from other ancestors, who may have emigrated at other times, under other circumstances.
Regardless, I find this sort of stuff fascinating. I wish I knew more about my ancestors; I'd love to read their life stories, if they were written down anywhere. Even little snippets of information, though, make me feel more connected to these long-ago ages past. For my Immigration Law class at Notre Dame last fall, we had to write a brief paper about our own "immigration history," and in the course of researching it (again mostly via my mom), I learned all sorts of stuff I'd never known before, like how the Loomers (my maternal grandfather's side) are really a very old family in this country, dating back to the mid-1600s, as I recall. They didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they weren't that far removed from it either. ... Alas, very very little is known about the Loys. We don't even really know where they came from, or what the origin of the name is.
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