By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I realized early on that I loved writing.
This explains the many volumes of childhood “books” and “newspapers” that I “published” and foisted on family, friends, and even total strangers, much like I still do today with this blog. I was the only one in my immediate family, however, who engaged in such strange behaviors.
Where did it all come from? After years of sporadic study and unscientific research, I think know the answer. It is a form of genetic blarney implanted in my DNA years before I was ever born.
My Irish Catholic parents/siblings were/are all fine, bright, and intelligent folks, but they did not write much, or at least as much as me. They tolerated my writing fits and compulsions, but never offered any suggestions about their origins.
Then one day, my mother told me that my grandfather Donald O’Brien—who died before I met him—wrote a regular column for a Vermont newspaper in the 1950s. It was a revelation. Unfortunately at that time, we did not have copies of anything Don O’Brien published, we lived over 2,000 miles away from Vermont, and there was no such thing as the internet.
As a result, many years passed before I read anything my grandfather wrote. When I finally did some of read his writing, I felt an ink bond with the man I never met, a connection that grew stronger when my father’s second wife gave me Don’s 1930s era typewriter.
Thanks to a 2016 trip to the microfilm vault at the University of Vermont and to my heavily-used account with Newspapers.com, today I think I have almost everything Don O’Brien wrote. He modestly called himself a “scribbler,” but he was a skilled one. I have published a few of Don’s writings here on the blog before (see: Irish Going Strong, Says the Good Fairy).
Still, despite this discovery, there were only two of us. Maybe Don and I were the odd outliers in a family that had many talents of which writing was not a common one?
I thought so until just a few weeks ago when, thanks to Ancestry.com, I e-met Brenda Costello, my third cousin on the O’Brien side. Brenda sent me some information about our common great grandfather (and Don O’Brien’s grandfather) Edward F. O’Brien. And guess what? Edward O’Brien loved writing and books too!
Edward’s father William was born in Ireland, but for some reason, the family ventured east across the Irish Sea and Edward was born in London, England on August 28, 1828. Edward arrived in America as a young man in 1849, during the Great Hunger (Potato Famine) of the mid-1800s. He went to Indiana, where he taught school for a short time. Later he came east and settled in northern Vermont.
In Swanton, Vermont, Edward met—and in August 1853 married—Bridget Coolon, the second most French-Canadian person in my family (see: French Petunias and Irish Onions). Edward did farm and laboring work, and served a term as Swanton Junction postmaster from 1868 to 1872. The family also operated a grocery store in nearby St. Albans.
I knew he liked writing when I read how Edward included a religious bookstore on the premises of his Northern Vermont grocery store, and that he was the exclusive agent for the sale of a popular Catholic Church history.
Old newspapers also report some more lively and colorful activity at the little grocery store. There was one still-somewhat-undefined incident of alleged horse misappropriation. My favorite story, however, was published in the St. Albans Daily Messenger on October 17, 1873, which duly 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, Edward and Bridget O’Brien moved to Burlington, Vermont for a time, and then on to Nashua, New Hampshire in about 1890. Most of their children joined them there.
Edward and Bridget both lived to see the dawn of the twentieth century, but their 25-year old son Edward W. O’Brien (my great grandfather) 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 Edward’s/Bridget’s 35-year old daughter Mary Riley just five months before.
Indeed, although Edward and Bridget had eleven children, only five of whom were living when the couple died in the early 1900s. Before he died, Edward also indulged his love of writing and books in his Nashua retirement. Old newspapers indicate he was a local agent for author Mary Abigail Dodge, who wrote under the pen name of Gail Hamilton.
Dodge spent part of each year living in Washington, D.C. in the home of Maine Congressman James G. Blaine, who was married to Dodge’s first cousin. Blaine was Speaker of the United States House of Representatives at the time, and a frequent presidential hopeful (he narrowly lost to Grover Cleveland in 1884). My great great grandfather Edward O’Brien sold Dodge’s works about Blaine, as well as Blaine’s own two volume biography called Twenty Years of Congress. Once in a while Edward even picked up the pen himself.
The Nashua Daily Telegraph included this little tidbit in its August 29, 1903 report about the fiftieth anniversary of Edward’s and Bridget’s wedding—“Mr. O’Brien has devoted himself considerably to writing and the following verses were given by him as part of the entertainment” at the Golden Anniversary celebration.
To honor what was described as a “remarkably happy” wedded life, Edward wrote this poem for Bridget:
Fifty years ago and afterward
*The morn was fair, the sky was clear
Our hearts were all aglow,
When to the nuptial altar we went—
Fifty years ago.
*But youth must have experience
The World’s ways to know,
And we have had our ups and downs
Since fifty years ago.
*The years have gone with wondrous speed
Though seemingly were slow.
Today we rejoice with loving ones,
Since fifty years ago.
*We cannot boast of hoarded wealth
No glistening gold can show
But friends we claim and friends we have
Since fifty years ago.
Just as I have done for my grandfather Don O’Brien, I hope I can read and collect other poetry or prose that my great great grandfather Edward O’Brien wrote.
I am not certain I fully believe the truth of old adages like “It skips a generation” or “It’s in the blood/genes” or “The acorn does not fall far from the tree.” After discovering Edward and Don, however, I am convinced that maybe this O’Brien writer thing is not such an outlier concept after all.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
