At rest, this picture belongs to a wedding album from 1966. Plain, awkward even, it was composed by the photographer whose job it was to snap the parents of the groom. It doesn’t speak of small Galway farms disappearing over shoulders, the ride over the sea, their names. They are Edward Donohoe and Winnie, who was first Una Ryan, then Winnie Donohoe and, for an afternoon, Jane … [Read more...] about Photo Album: The Wealth of the World
Photo Album
Photo Album My Great-Grandmother Discovered
It was the accidental discovery of a vintage photograph, which enabled me to meet my first Irish-American relative, my great grandmother, Ellen Whelan Lyons of Co Waterford, Ireland. At a family reunion in South Dakota, my cousin, John Maloney, had tossed out on the table a bushel basketful of old photos. My wife Nona retrieved from the pile a photo of an … [Read more...] about Photo Album My Great-Grandmother Discovered
Photo Album:
4th of July Picnic
After the Civil War, Philip Cummins, a coal miner from Loon, Clogh, Co. Kilkenny, took his wife Mary Smith (Rakenny, Co. Cavan) and family from the troubling times of the Molly Maguires and Schuykill County, Pennsylvania, and settled in western Massachusetts to work at the Richmond Furnace factory and try his hand at farming. The photo is of the family of Philip's oldest son, … [Read more...] about Photo Album:
4th of July Picnic
Photo Album: An Ocean Away
My paternal great-grandmother Violet May Carroll McHale was born in 1906 in Castlebar, Mayo, and raised as a farmer’s daughter. She and her sisters (Delia, Lucy, and Jane) did much of the grunt work that was usually reserved for males, since their father Martin had a bad leg and couldn’t do it on his own. Violet eventually had to leave school completely at about age 10 to help … [Read more...] about Photo Album: An Ocean Away
Photo Album: Playing Ball With the FBI
My father was wanted by the F.B.I. Specifically, by J. Edgar Hoover himself. ℘℘℘ The founding director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had heard of Tommy Connor’s prowess on the baseball field. A star player in Washington, D.C., in the 1920s, Dad had graduated from high school at 15, put himself through college by 17, and went on to play Triple-A 3rd base for the old … [Read more...] about Photo Album: Playing Ball With the FBI