By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
As one year passes and a new one starts, I wonder if it possible to get more Irish as you get older. Scientists would argue no, that genetic makeup is set at conception. Yet, I think I have found a way to do it in 2019.
With a name like Michael Patrick O’Brien, I always thought of myself as pretty thoroughly Irish. This was confirmed unofficially by the other family ancestral names I knew about…Gleason, Sullivan, Duffy, and Leonard.
Then, about ten years ago, early one morning at work, Ancestry.com sent me an email offering a free 21 day trial subscription. The company was a client of my law firm, and the idea of tracing my lineage was intriguing, so I signed up.
I logged in and typed on to the new O’Brien family tree the names of my six or so known relatives. Soon, little leaves started popping up, Ancestry.com’s way of offering me hints about possible other family members. Eight hours later, on the same day, I was working at it still.
I did not do any other work that day. I kept my door closed, ignored all knocks, skipped lunch, and let all phone calls go to voice mail. It was the definition of obsession, but from it emerged a fairly detailed family history.
After several more weeks of research work, I learned that my ancestors also bore many other Gaelic surnames too, such as McCarthy (also McCarty or McCardy), Doyle, Flaherty, Fitzgerald, Kennedy, Hogan, Lynch, Murphy, Killary, Halvey, Carroll, Barrett, Barron, and Cahill. The only odd name among this very Irish group was Coolon (also spelled as Coulombe or Coolin).
This was the French-Canadian name of my paternal-side, great great-great grandfather Antwin (Antoine), born in 1803. It turns out that Antwin’s family dates back to the fifteenth century, emigrants from Paris and Normandy in France.
Based on unconfirmed family legend (meaning it may be just a good story instead of true), Antwin was a poor but ambitious gardener and farmer living in Quebec, who wooed and married the daughter of the well-off Irish family, the Cahills, for whom he gardened. His daughter Bridget married a man named Edward F. O’Brien in 1853 in Burlington, Vermont, and they became my great-great-grandparents.
Other than my French-Canadian outlier, the whole clan was Irish. My wife Vicki looked at the long list of names from Ireland and said, “You must be pureblood Irish!”
We got to test that notion a few years later, with the development of the now-popular DNA testing kits. I bought two of them. Vicki and I each filled a tube with saliva and sent them both in for testing. A few weeks later, Ancestry.com told me I was not 100% Irish…only 90%!
Later, the kids got into the DNA game too. One is 67% Irish, another 62%, and we still are trying to get our youngest, the son in college, to spit into the tube.
About a year later, just when I thought settled the question of whether my blood was pure green, Ancestry.com sent me a new genetic analysis, explaining that because the science that analyzes DNA changes, “we have a new update for you!” It turns out I am 97% Irish. (Actually, it said Irish/Scottish, but I have just been ignoring that second part.)
I am getting more Irish as I age! (Evolving just like a good bottle of the Glenlivet, but then again we are ignoring that scotch part of the equation, right?) How could this possibly happen?
One friend offered a plausible explanation-it was due to the cumulative intake of potatoes, Guinness, and Irish whisky over many years. I think the real reason may be that I know a lot more about my heritage now than I did when I wore a younger man’s clothes.
An old Irish blessing expresses the hope that one might live to comb gray hair, but maybe that looks at things the wrong way. The real blessing is that in living to comb gray hair, one actually may become more Irish.
