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
John McKenna
I guess it was about four years ago that I took to googling myself.
I know, I know. It’s a silly waste of a half hour, but every once in a while, it’s fun. I loved experimenting with parts of my name, and then with different combinations. Even simply the word “Katy” brought up fallible higher in the search than I believed possible.
It was the surname “McKenna” that opened up my world, though. You see, when I was growing up in Kansas City, there were only a few McKennas in the phone book, and they were all my aunts and uncles. Each time the new white pages came out, I’d sit with the monstrosity upon my wee lap and open to our page. Our column, actually. OK, our per-column-half-inch, to be exact.
There we all were: Robert Baillie McKenna (my dad), Uncle Bernard, Aunt Mary, Aunt Cathy, Uncle Eddy, and Uncle Francis, their names scrunched together in print rather like the lot of them appeared in person—huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The only one missing in the whole wide world from our little enclave (that I knew of) was Aunt Rosie, who had stayed behind in Scotland when her sibs emigrated during the 30s and 40s. She and my dad talked long-distance every Christmas, so that was kind of like finding her in the phone book in my mind.
Except not. Because you see, when a branch of the family stays behind and exists only in a telephonic brogue thick with both static and emotion, you end up being drawn to that limb your whole life long. The break with the past isn’t clean like it might be with some immigrant families, you don’t forget those who came before with their unfinished stories and their unsung songs—you can’t.
At least, I couldn’t.
Four years ago, a casual google search for the name McKenna led me to the genealogical coup of my dreams, although at the time I hadn’t dared to imagine that there was another McKenna out there on the same search as I.
When I clicked on the McKenna discussion forum, a fellow named John claimed to seek relatives from Kilsyth, Scotland, where my father was born. John was born there also, in the 1940s, and offerred that his grandfather was a man named Edward, who came to Kilsyth from County Monaghan.
Probably not my McKennas, I thought, since I’d never heard of Edward, who would have been my grandfather’s contemporary. Besides, I remembered my father’s words on the day I first realized he was half Irish, that his own father had been born there and then married a Scottish woman.
“Where was he from in Ireland?” I asked. I was perhaps ten or eleven at the time, and only knew about the Scottish side which was pretty difficult to dismiss since I was surrounded by broad brogues.
“Ulster.” My father was famous for his one-word answers. Usually, I understood the word, but I’d never heard the term Ulster until that day, didn’t know about the border counties or the civil war or the fact that my father’s nickname as a young man had been “Dev,” after DeValera, the much-loved hero of the Free Irish Republic.
“Ulster?” I asked. I knew to expect another one-worder, but I felt like I really scored that day. Four words, then seven more in disclaimer.
“Near Belfast. County Armagh. But we don’t talk about that side.”
I let it go, because I had to. If you could have seen the look on his face, you would have dropped it, too. He squinted in concentration as if looking through a camera’s viewfinder with the glaring sun defying his vision’s best efforts. And then he said as little as possible, or possibly—who can say for sure?—all he recalled.
Dad wasn’t talking, and a ten-year-old kid can only get so far with the Golden Book Encyclopedia. But I never forgot those eleven little words, and wondered when I found John McKenna’s message on that genealogy board just how far I’d been misled.
County Monaghan? Just over the border into the Republic from the county Dad specified, a border whose blood-drawn lines were disputed during my grandfather’s time, one of the three counties of Ulster which ended up in the Irish Free State at the end of a very long day.
I left a message for John McKenna four years ago, and with a few tentative emails, the family mysteries began both to unravel and to profoundly deepen.
And now, finally, I’ve met the man.
- While I am thousands of miles from the John McKenna tha Katy writes about in this blog, I have a strong feeling of connection when I study the picture of our newly discovered Irish relative.
Posted by John McKenna on 05/16/06 at 03:23 PM
- Johnnie--Hey, I finally got you to comment, little brother! It only took nearly six years. :) Yes, I told Frank and Mary Quinn that the John McKenna over there looks like a slightly older version of you. He says we McKennas are all pretty good looking, as long as we don't inherit the McKenna forehead. What's that? I asked. "It starts here," he said, pointing to his eyebrows. "Then it goes up to here," he continued, pointing to his hairline, "and then it just keeps going." Ah, right!!
Posted by Katy on 05/16/06 at 03:56 PM
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