Leaving Home, Coming Home

On following the forbears' path homeward to Ireland, to France

We arrived in Dublin, Ireland in September of 2009 to begin new jobs at Ireland’s largest university, which at the time identified itself as “distinctly Irish.” We had never travelled in Ireland prior to the trip my wife and I made to Dublin for the job interviews, although the maternal side of my family was also, well, distinctly Irish. In fact, I’d never given much thought to my Irish ancestry—it was simply something that was there, and was not a salient part of my identity. I quickly learned, however, that it was meaningful to my new colleagues and acquaintances.

Ruin of a cottage in Meenataggart, Killymard Parish, Donegal

My mother’s maternal grandparents had emigrated from two rural townlands in the south of County Donegal—Tullynagreana (actually a sub-townland, or village, of Crohyboyle) and Meenataggart. My mother’s paternal grandparents had emigrated earlier, during the famine time, from Roscommon and Kilkenny; I know little about their history. My mother didn’t speak much about family. What I know is from a cousin who does genealogical research and whose mother was more vocal about childhood experiences. I know that my great-grandparents spoke Irish as a first language—my aunt remembered that her grandmother always counted and prayed in Irish. I also know that they sailed back to Ireland in 1894 to visit family who remained there (my maternal grandmother, travelling with them, was three years old at the time). Those family connections were, however, long lost by the time my wife and I set foot on Irish soil in 2009.

Once we began work, I found that there was a pattern to first conversations with my Irish colleagues, who were often curious to know whether I had Irish heritage. I would happily state what I knew, mentioning the family names I was aware of (Murray, Ward, McGrory, Leonard) and the townlands where they came from. I suppose I was eager to show that I had some kind of kinship with the country, but was sometimes surprised by the responses to my little speech. Often when I mentioned Meenataggart, people would immediately offer the translation of the name—“field of the priest” or “bog of the priest.” (I rarely mentioned Tullynagreana since I was unsure of how to pronounce it.) Several people with whom I had such conversations observed that I had done a “reverse emigration,” or had “returned home” to Ireland three generations after my forbears had left.

The reaction to the family names was generally anodyne, except for the name “Ward.” A few—especially the true gaeilgeoirs who preferred to speak Irish over English and went by the Irish language versions of their names—would note that Ward was an old and esteemed Irish name, most often rendered in Irish as Mac an Bháird. It was a learnèd family, whose members included notable poets serving families of chieftains in the northwest of Ireland, from medieaval times through the late seventeenth century.

On the other hand, Ward is also a common name amongst Irish Travellers, and is sometimes associated stereotypically with bare-fisted fighters. Nobody ever asked me whether I was from a Traveller family. But on one occasion when I had complained to a colleague from Dublin about an issue I was having with an officer of the university, she remarked “Maybe you can get some of your relatives from the West of Ireland to come out here and straighten him out.” I only understood the assumption behind her remark much later.

I tried to make contact with relatives in Donegal in the first few years we were in Ireland. On one occasion I had found an obituary for a woman named Ward from Meenataggart which had a photograph—she was a dead ringer for my mother! I showed it to my wife who immediately said, “It’s Lennie” (which was my mother’s nickname). But neither that family nor others I contacted believed I could possibly be related. I’m not so sure myself, but it’s not the kind of thing you can insist upon.

I also found that many other things I had understood to be “typically Irish” while in the U.S. were no longer so typical in the old country. In Boston I used to head to the L Street Bathhouse in South Boston most weekends to play handball. There were two two-walled handball courts there that opened directly onto the beach and overlooked Dorchester Bay. It was lovely to be near the water with its marshy scent, gulls squawking overhead, and the morning sunlight gleaming on the water as we knocked the handball back and forth. I’d arrive on Sunday mornings and some of the older Irish men, mostly from Galway, would be cleaning the courts, sweeping up the broken glass left by the hard-drinking “boyos” the night before. To hear them speak, handball was the national pastime in Ireland, just as baseball was in the U.S. They spoke about great matches sponsored by the Gaelic Athletic Association before they left for America. These old-timers moved slowly on the courts, their greatest weapon being the incessant trash-talking and shouts of “don’t choke” as they tried to gain advantage.

In Dublin things were not as I thought they might be. I asked about handball courts and the best response I got was that there was an old court somewhere, but that handball wasn’t played much anymore, at least not in Dublin. Dubliners seem to associate it with the West of Ireland. Someone suggested using a squash court, which is about half the size of a handball court. Once, when we were in County Waterford, I got talking about handball with a sales person in a sporting goods shop who observed that in the area there was “an old priest” who was “trying to bring it back” and taught the game to a handful of youthful students at the local outdoor handball court. I never played handball in Ireland.

We spent more than twelve years in Dublin, retiring at the end of 2021. We had found that the land of “céad míle fáilte” (one hundred thousand welcomes) had never truly warmed up to us, nor we to it. It didn’t feel like “coming home.” I remarked about this to a colleague at some point, saying that while people were generally friendly, we still felt like strangers. The colleague told me not to feel bad since his was a Norman name, and as a result he was “still treated like a blow-in.” The Covid pandemic had also brought an uncomfortable feeling of isolation—confinement for a couple years to an island in the North Atlantic has that effect. It made our feet as eager to leave the country as my forbears’ had more than a century before. So again, we left home, this time for France.

I also have French ancestry, though it is much more obscure than my Irish heritage.

My paternal grandmother emigrated from Nova Scotia to the Boston area at around age 13, alone, carrying with her two wool blankets that her mother had woven from sheep the family had raised. I know since she told me this when she gave me the blankets. She was Acadian from Larrys River, a small coastal community in the extreme east of the island. And she had a typical French name—Mary Ellen Pelrine as on her birth certificate, or Marie-Hélène Pellerin in her français acadien. She was always known as “Helen” in America.

I had tried to learn more about the Acadian community she had left behind but came up with scant information. It appears that the inhabitants had been spared expulsion by the British between 1755 and 1763, during the time of the French and Indian War, and had settled in Larrys River in the early nineteenth century. The community’s ancestors had probably come to Acadie from the port of Saint-Malo in the seventeenth-century to serve in the fishing industry. Certainly the name Pellerin is still common enough in that borderland area between Brittany and Normandy; one genealogist traces my grandmother’s family to a small commune in Normandy called Bacilly.

Views of Saint-Malo, France

It was partly with this information in mind that we travelled to Brittany in 2018 to scout the area for a potential retirement destination. We spent time in Rennes, which we loved, and even more time in Saint-Malo, which we also liked (in spite of the crowds of Parisians who had come there for a long holiday weekend). We planned to explore more of Brittany on a separate trip, and had booked flights and lodging in Nantes as well as in the Morbihan coastal region, but the Covid pandemic had other plans for us: staying home, confined to a two-kilometre radius from our house in south Dublin.

The pandemic also played a role in our final choice of retirement destination, as plans to explore several locations we had not yet visited were impossible to realise due to public-health measures. We chose to move to Nice, Côte d’Azur, a city we had visited several times previously, and which registered very favourably on our list of retirement requirements.

NIce: Musée Masséna, Marché de la Libération ; Nice Port et pointus

There was certainly no illusion that our move to the south of France would be some kind of ancestral homecoming. My French heritage is too distant, as are the Breton and Norman coasts from whence my ancestors came. But Nice is a welcoming place, as towns and cities in border areas, with their mix of natives and newcomers, often are. We like the friendly civility of French social conventions, warmed by Mediterranean culture, the access to the sea and fresh food markets, and the ease with which we access essential services. It’s a peaceful and unhurried place, with warm radiant sunshine and the murmur of waves caressing the nearby beaches. We had sought tranquility and peace of mind for what seems to have been a long time, and at least for the moment, we seem to have found it. That’s enough, I think, to make Nice worthy of being called “home.”