Ireland: Roads taken and to be taken...

Last year at a conference where I spoke, I was given a DNA kit. I carefully swabbed the inside of each of my cheeks and deposited the swabs in vials and mailed them to Family Tree DNA. The proposition was that Family Tree DNA would take the DNA and figure out where I was from and whom I was related to. I waited a number of months, and since then there has been a steady stream of emails and information including one from a gentleman from Toronto named John Bruggeman, with whom I have a 25 Y Chromosome match. We have been trading notes, trying to puzzle out how we might be related, the logic being that if we have a 25 Y chromosome match then we are related somewhere 5–7 generations back. John is much more genalogically motivated than I, but I have been sharing with him everything I know, as it would be wild to find out something about our family, and to find cousins so to speak who live in Toronto, who were descended from my great-great grandfather’s brother.

What little I know about the Bruggemans, is dramatically greater than what little I know about my mother’s family the Keenans. Bits and pieces, but my grandfather, William Howard Keenan, who was born in 1865, in Southeastern Minnesota, always stated that we were different that the other Irish in America, in that we came before we had to.

Years later I realized that what he meant was that his family had left Ireland before the great potato famine of 1845. 

Yesterday was St. Patrick’s day! Hence, I have always felt this very primal urge to drink beer and Irish whiskey on St. Patrick’s day to celebrate the passage across the Atlantic by my ancestors.

After a day of basketball, I found myself watching Tommy Makem tour Ireland on the local PBS Station.

The views of Ireland were stunning. Brilliant countryside, lovely towns, mountains, and rivers, all of which caused me wonder, why, short of starving had we ever left Ireland. My travels have taken me far and wide, but not to Ireland.

Should I go, I might not come back, and the circle would be completed.

Comments

[Paul McNamara]

Hey, Buzz, I heard that Family Tree DNA is actually a front for the FBI. Hope you don't have any outstanding warrants. ... Actually, it sounds kind of cool, especially for those of us who have done a lousy job of keeping track of the kin.