By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
My boyhood record player turntable often blared out a song, recorded on a little red 45 vinyl rpm, in which a flower lamented, “I’m a lonely little petunia in an onion patch, and all I do is cry all day.” I loved the song, but did not know at the time that it was telling me something really interesting about my family tree.
Ancestry.com DNA testing tells me I am 99% Irish, including Celtic names like O’Brien, Sullivan, Gleason, Duffy, Leonard, McCarthy, Flaherty, Kennedy, Doyle, Fitzgerald, Cahill, and Hogarty. But what about that other one percent? Apparently, 200 years ago, a little French-Canadian DNA snuck its way into our otherwise green family tree.
The lucky French-Canadian was named Antwin (aka Antoine) Coolon. His surname is spelled many different ways: “Coolon” on his grave marker, but in other places rendered as “Colon”, “Coulombe” or even “Colomb.” Antwin was born in Quebec in 1803, but his (and my) French family line dates back to fifteenth century France, and includes emigrants to Canada from Paris and Normandy.
Based on unconfirmed family legend (meaning it may be just a good yarn instead of true), Antwin was a poor but ambitious Quebec gardener who wooed and married Bridget Cahill, the daughter of the relatively well-off Irish family who employed him. Their female progeny Bridget Coolon later ended the family’s diversion into alternative bloodlines by marrying an Irish Catholic man named Edward F. O’Brien in 1853.
These various iterations of my grandparents (and related Coolons) all lived for a time in Northern Vermont, in the villages of St. Albans and Swanton near the American-Canadian border. Antwin and Bridget Coolon had 6 kids, 4 boys and 2 girls. Just after the American Civil War, they traveled west, but not too far. They moved just across Lake Champlain to Harrietstown, near Saranac Lake in Northern New York.
Antwin, a lifelong farmer, worked well into his 70s as a sawyer on the farm of one of his sons. He died of pneumonia caused by tuberculosis in 1888 at age 84. His wife Bridget Cahill, born in Ireland, died two years after her French-Canadian love and also in Upstate New York.
Antwin’s daughter Bridget Coolon, the second most French-Canadian person in my family, stayed in Vermont after marrying Edward F. O’Brien. She and Edward operated a grocery store in St. Albans, and Edward even served a term as Swanton Junction postmaster from 1868 to 1872.
Old newspapers report some lively and colorful activity at the little grocery store. There was an incident of alleged misappropriation of a horse tethered outside the store. Perhaps to counter any negative impression from that unfortunate event, Edward included a religious bookstore on the premises and was the exclusive agent for the sale of a popular Catholic Church history.
My favorite account of store goings-on was in the St. Albans Daily Messenger on October 17, 1873, which noted: “Mr. Edward O’Brien, a grocery man, on Laselle Street, yesterday found and broke up a mouse nest, and found there in two one dollar bills, three fifty, two twenty-five and eleven ten cent scrips, in a good state of preservation. The mice had taken the money from the money drawer.”
Although the family survived the mouse thievery, a real economic disaster hit afterwards when fire destroyed the store and surrounding buildings in about 1875. Likely seeking a new start, Bridget Coolon O’Brien and Edward O’Brien moved to Burlington, Vermont for a time, and then on to Nashua, New Hampshire in about 1890. Most of their eleven children joined them there.
Bridget and Edward both lived to see the dawn of the twentieth century, but their 25-year old son Edward W. O’Brien did not. He died in 1891 from tuberculosis. (See: My Irish Grandfather confronts the Captain of Death.) The same dreaded disease claimed Bridget’s father three years earlier and her 35-year old daughter Mary Riley (Edward W.’s sister) just five months before. Although Edward W. died too young to do so, Bridget Coolon O’Brien knew and loved his son, Donald Raymond O’Brien, my father’s father. (Bridget and her grandson Don grace the photo that accompanies this article.)
While 99% is pretty close, I must admit that part of me wishes I was 100% Irish. Yet, in our green-dominated family tree, Antwin Coolon and Bridget Coolon O’Brien magnificently stand out as a welcome and worthy infusion of new blood and character. Still, surrounded as they were by the Celts who dominate my ancestral line, they no doubt at times felt like the poor flower who sang to me during my childhood…French petunias in an Irish onion patch.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.
