By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
There are fifteen men from the past two centuries—a father, two grandfathers, four great grands, and eight great/great grands—who by law and blood I can call “father.” I’ve met only one, but I’ve tried to get to know all of them.
How did you go about getting acquainted with long-dead men? Mainly using old newspaper archives, family stories, and Ancestry.com. I was lucky also to have one other unusual source.
For about a decade in the late 1940s and early 1950s, my grandfather Donald R. O’Brien penned a column for his hometown newspaper The Burlington Free Press. He mainly wrote vignettes of local interest/history, but on occasion he shared family details
Why go to all this effort to meet the dead? Curiosity, mainly. I grew up in Northern Utah, far from their New England and New York abodes, and never heard much about any of them when I was young.
And I wanted some personal self-awareness. Writer Michael Crichton explains, “If you don’t know history, you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”
Important advice likely lurks within the details of how those who went before me faced the challenges of their own generation. As the poet Maya Angelou said, “We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors wisdom.”
There’s even value in knowing about the mistakes of the past. George Bernard Shaw once recommended, “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
Personal family history also just is interesting, especially the collective details.
For example, the average age of death of the 15 men I can call father was 68.4. One of them died at age 25, but another lived to be 86. They all were born into and buried out of the Catholic Church.
Only one went to college like me, and he was a writer too. And that elder writer’s grandfather sold books. Their mutual descendant (my father), however, avoided the publishing life, instead working in administration for the U.S. Air Force.
Another one of these fathers owned a successful building materials wholesale supply business in New York City. Others worked as retailers in dry goods, grocery, or meat stores, some even owning their respective establishments for short periods of time.
Many were laborers, working on the railroads and in lumber mills or manufacturing plants. One was a gardener, and another a farmer. One even was a postmaster.
They all got married. Six of the fifteen marriages reached the golden anniversary mark. Several other unions probably would have done so too, except one of the partners to those unions died too soon.
None—except my father—ever got divorced, but I’m sure some of the other marriages also dealt with domestic strife. I’ve heard that at least two of these men were functioning alcoholics who eventually stopped functioning.
Seven of my eight great great grandfathers were born in Ireland. The other one—ironically the O’Brien great grand—was Irish too (with two Irish parents) but born in London, for reasons I have yet to discover.
The great grands hailed from many different parts of the Emerald Isle—Limerick, Tipperary, Kerry, Kinsale, Longford, and County Clare. All of them emigrated to the United States in the 1800s.
Some entered the country through Canada, others on the American Eastern Seaboard. Three of these immigrants left Ireland to escape starvation during the Potato Famine.
Some were naturalized citizens, others not. (Oh my, undocumented workers in the family!)
As proof that the Irish find a few good names and stick with them, four of these great/great grands bore the name of Patrick, my own middle name. Fittingly, two of those Patricks were born on St. Patrick’s Day—March 17.
Despite all this Irish-ness (Ancestry.com says my blood is 99% green), just one generation further back I have a single great grandfather who was French-Canadian. He had the good sense, however, to marry an Irish woman named Cahill.
They don’t technically qualify as my “fathers” but there were some interesting uncles and male cousins in this family group too. Among other things, they earned a few more college degrees but also endured a few more divorces.
One was a doctor, another a lawyer. One a priest, and another a bootlegger. One uncle (by marriage) was close friends with Babe Ruth and another (also by marriage) was a big Brooklyn Dodgers supporter.
One uncle played pro football for a short time before winning the Bronze Star during World War II. Others fought in Korea and Vietnam, and one died in France in 1918 during waning days of WWI. Among my Duffy cousins there were at least two priests and one nun, all three siblings from the same family.
It is an interesting group indeed. Each Father’s Day now, I am honored and happy to remember these fifteen men from the last two centuries whom I can call father.
***
Kevin P. O’Brien (1930-1991). My father was an enigma to me even though I actually met him. He could be the life of any party but he did not treat my mother very well during their 1970 divorce. More details available in my 2021 memoir, Monastery Mornings.
Donald R. O’Brien (1891-1963). My paternal grandfather. He graduated from Holy Cross College and lived/worked in Massachusetts, Chicago, New York, and Vermont. He loved to fish. He also was a writer who never really knew his own father either.
Henry F. Gleason (1886-?). My maternal grandfather. He was a meat salesman in Vermont. He lost his wife and both parents within a difficult 13 month span between 1938-39 and never quite recovered. He later disappeared and my mother said she never knew what happened to him.
Edward W. O’Brien (1866-1891). A paternal great grandfather who died at age 25 from tuberculosis. A Burlington, Vermont store clerk, he showed great courage in the face of tragic ea.
Charles H. Duffy (1851-1918). A paternal great grandfather. His family owned and operated a Brooklyn construction supply company. They loved baseball. One son-in-law was close friends with Yankees baseball great Babe Ruth but another was a well-known supporter of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
William H. Gleason (1861-1939). A maternal great grandfather. He was a gardener who worked his whole career for just two prominent Vermont families. He was married 50 years and old photos show he had wavy hair like mine.
Michael T. Sullivan (1866-1904). A maternal great grandfather. He also was a single father most of his short life. He lost his wife (my great grandmother) just days after she gave birth to their firstborn child (my grandmother). He worked as a grocer and a railroad conductor in Vermont.
Edward F. O’Brien (1828-1906). A paternal great/great grandfather. He was an immigrant, teacher, bookseller, and book agent who was married 50 years and wrote poetry. He outlived 6 of his 11 children and died in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Jeremiah McCarthy (1836-1903). A paternal great/great grandfather. He was born in Ireland and arrived in America during the Potato Famine at age 13. He operated quarry steam engines and street rail cars, worked for the Burlington city water department, and could fix anything. He took in and helped raise two of his grandchildren after they lost a parent to tuberculosis.
Patrick H. Duffy (1824-1900). A paternal great/great grandfather. He died in New York City. I do not know much more about him yet.
Francis Doyle (1830-?). A paternal great/great grandfather. I hope to learn more about him soon.
Patrick Gleason (1816-1898). A maternal great/great grandfather who came to America during the Great Famine. He was said to love his land overlooking Lake Champlain in western Vermont because it reminded him of the old family land overlooking the Shannon River in Ireland.
Patrick Flaherty (1830-1906). A maternal great/great grandfather born in County Clare, Ireland. He worked as a railroad brakeman in Vermont.
Patrick Sullivan (1830 -1916). A maternal great/great grandfather born in County Kerry, Ireland. A resident of Burlington, Vermont, he lived to age 86, the oldest of all my grands.
Thomas Leonard (1830-1902). A maternal great/great grandfather born in Limerick, Ireland. One son (Thomas Jr.) was a priest and his daughter (Mary…see A 150-year-old Irish Woman’s Voice) heroically came to America first as a teen to work as a domestic servant and save money to bring the rest of the Leonard family over across the Atlantic to Vermont.
(Photo: some of the fathers.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
