Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Katy is represented by
Greg Johnson at
WordServe Literary
Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net
Recent Posts
- Try
- Becoming Brenda Starr
- Off Beat
- Scattered
- That’s It
- So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What?
- The Spoon
- Sciatica
- Sweetheart
- A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose
- However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time
- After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices.
- As with everything in life, balance is key.
- Slow down, you move too fast…
- Yeah, I know. I have issues.
Syndicate
E me at katy @ ngenius.com
Altar
So, it took losing the contact info on my cousin John to send me on a wild-McKenna chase through the Internet, until I found Plunkett, a tour guide in County Monaghan who agreed to show us around the McKenna sites.
There was only one small hitch to meeting up with him, in my mind—the possibility that we’d find out definitively that Grandpa Bernard was a bigamist.
“Whatever you do,” my mother warned before we left Kansas City, “don’t tell the others.” The others are my seven girl cousins in Scotland. Mind you, they are girls to me, but they range in age from 63 down to 48.
“Why would I keep it from them?” I asked my mom.
“They’re getting older,” she said. Um, yeah. And this makes them exceptional exactly how? “And when you get older, you don’t want to know everything. Especially if it’s bad. They won’t want to know, Katy. Just let it lie.”
“OK, Mom,” I said. “I will be sensitive to their advancing age. I promise to divulge information only if they seem to wish to know the truth.”
Plunkett and I, thankfully, did not appear to be talking about the same Bernard McKenna. None of the dates matched up to make it likely that Grandpa Had Two Families and, hey, it was nice to let the old fellow off the hook on at least that count.
But Plunkett really wanted us to find out as much about my family as possible, so he drove us out to Henry’s Pub in Scotstown, Co. Monaghan. Henry, he said, would know someone. After seeing the main (read:only) drag in Scotstown, it occurred to me that Henry might only know “someone.” If I remember right, Scotstown is a one-pub town, and that’s unheard of in Ireland.
Doug and I waited on the street and Plunkett came out after a few minutes. “You’re in luck. Henry told me how to find a 90-year-old woman named Catherine McKenna, who’s lived all her life in the same house she was born in, in Feebaghbane. She knows everything there is to know about that area.”
Feebaghbane? Plunkett had already told us he didn’t know how to find the tiny piece of property (called a townland) which consisted of perhaps 200 acres on a larger piece of land called the Rose estate. I knew that my grandfather was born there, but that’s all I knew.
“Do you mean we’re going there?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we call her first?”
“Get in the car. She’ll be happy to meet you.”
Catherine McKenna opened her door to us and served us tea and brown bread till we were stuffed. She told us stories of all the different branches of McKennas, and who lived where in Feebaghbane.
“We’ve figured out,” Plunkett said, “that Katy isn’t a Red Paddy Frank McKenna at all.” The first thing I learned when I got over there is that if you can’t establish your McKenna family’s nickname, you won’t get anywhere in finding your ancestors. “I thought she was at first,” he continued, “because of her flaming red hair.”
“But then I told him it’s fake,” I explained to Catherine, who laughed. “We’re pretty sure I am of the Barney Neds.”
A Barney Ned McKenna is one who’s great-great-grandfather (circa 1850) was Edward, who came to be known as the “Ned” during a period when McKennas proliferated so rapidly in that area that each family needed a sub-name in order to keep them all straight. The “Barney” refers to my great-grandfather Bernard, son of the Ned, and then again to my Grandfather Bernard.
“Oh, the Barney Neds,” mused Catherine. “I remember them well.”
“You do?” I asked, incredulous. “What do you remember?”
“The Jimmy Neds ran the farm when I was a wee girl,” she said, only she pronounced his name “jammie,” which was so adorable I could hardly bear it. “And his brother Edward used to come back and forth from Scotland to visit quite often…”
As soon as she offered this bit, I knew we were talking about my family. Edward was the brother of my grandfather. Both of them had moved to Kilsyth, Scotland, as young men, presumably because the Jimmy Ned—their oldest brother—had inherited the farm and there was no work for them in Ireland.
“Catherine,” Doug said, “do you know where their property was?”
She gave him a sideways glance and pointed out her window. “Right over there. Did you bring your wellies?”
Just then, her nephew Podge came in from working in the fields and said he’d be happy to drive us around the land in his truck. Podge now owns 50 acres of Feebaghbane, including the sixteen acres that would have been farmed by my great-great-grandfather Edward and my great-grandfather Bernard before passing to the Jimmy Ned.
Podge drove us through his 300-sheep farm and straight to the remaining walls of the Ned’s cottage. “This is the place,” he said, as if he got requests from Americans to see their ancestral lands every day of the week—and I feel certain that he doesn’t.
We took a lot of pictures that day, of Podge and Catherine and Plunkett and us. And especially of the stones that are piled up in remembrance of the Neds and of the walls that still stand as a testament to their lives.
I carried home two rocks that had become loosened from the mortar. There were a hundred more I could have taken, because who knows how long Podge will leave the structure standing? But somehow I couldn’t—I just couldn’t.
Leave them lie, I thought. But even so, make sure you tell the others.
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