Emily Dickinson famously observed that if she read a book that made her feel “as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
This is an experience I know well, one I’ve had a number of times when I read a passage so perfect, so pure, so heart-opening that I feel turned inside out by what I’ve read — the top of my head opened up.
I had that experience reading passages I won’t ever forget in Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost (NY: HarperCollins, 2006) in which he chronicled his years of search to discover what happened to some of his relatives in Ukraine who vanished (they were murdered) during the Shoah.
Mendelsohn says he began that search at the age of fourteen. He writes about how most people who live and die fall into the abyss of the forgotten; they are not remembered and will not be remembered, though we would not be here had they not lived before us. This passage in The Lost will stay in my head and heart forever, I think, in the same way Patrick Joyce’s observations in the passage I highlight above from his Remembering Peasants will stay with me:
For everything, in time, gets lost: the lives of people now remote, the tantalizing yet ultimately vanished and largely unknowable lives of virtually all of the Greeks and Romans and Ottomans and Malays and Goths and Bengals and Sudanese who ever lived, the peoples of Ur and Kush, the lives of the Hittites and Philistines that will never be known, the lives of people more recent than that, the African slaves and the slave traders, the Boers and the Belgians, those who were slaughtered and those who died in bed, the Polish counts and the Jewish shopkeepers, the blond hair and eyebrows and small white teeth that someone once loved or desired of this of that boy or girl or man or woman who was one of the five million (or six or seven) Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin, and indeed the intangible things beyond the hair and teeth and brows, the smiles and frustrations and laughter and terror of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust are now lost, or will soon be lost, because no number of books, however great, could ever document them all, even if they were to be written, which they won’t and can’t be; all that will be lost, too, their pretty legs and their deafness and the vigorous way they strode off a train with a pile of schoolbooks once, the secret family rituals and the recipes for cakes and stews and gołąki, the goodness and wickedness, the saviors and the betrayers, their saving and their betraying: most everything will be lost, eventually, as surely as most of what made up the lives of the Egyptians and Incas and Hittites has been lost. But for a little while some of that can be rescued, if only, faced with the vastness of all that there is and all that there ever was, somebody makes the decision to look back, to have one last look, to search for a while in the debris of the past and to see not only what was lost but what is still there to be found” (pp. 485-487).
Just as Mendelsohn did with his search for his family members lost in Ukraine in the Nazi years, at the age of fourteen, I began searching for information about my Ryan ancestors in County Kilkenny, Ireland. I naively wrote letters to newspapers in Kilkenny and Dublin asking if anyone had information about them.
We knew, when I was growing up, only that they had emigrated from County Kilkenny. That information was preserved in family stories and that place is engraved on their tombstones in the cemetery some twenty miles south of Little Rock in which all my Ryan immigrant ancestors are buried. We did not know where in Kilkenny they had lived, however. By my grandmother’s generation, the contact her mother and siblings and parents had had with Irish relatives ended.
It was not until the 1990s that I finally discovered where my Ryan ancestors had lived in Kilkenny. Even after I began to find correct information (with the gracious, unexpected help of a non-relative who was a Ryan teaching school in Piltown), I was not entirely sure I had the right place. Such records as Kilkenny Archaeological at Rothe House in Kilkenny sent me were garbled, badly transcribed (by schoolchildren, John Ryan told me), and each one cost a small fortune to prize out of the hands of that archive.
As I continued my search for concrete information about my Kilkenny ancestors, my Ryan contact in Piltown, John Ryan, kindly invited me to come to Piltown and stay with him and his wife Maura (again, he wasn’t related to me, but from a Wexford Ryan family), and told me they’d drive me the short distance of five miles to Mullinavat, where it appeared my Ryans were living when they emigrated in the early 1850s.
Once there, I could look at the Catholic parish records and confirm whether my ancestors appeared in them. When John and Maura took me to the Catholic parish, I encountered quite an obstacle in the parish priest, who was determined not to let me see the records. He insulted me in one way after another.
First, he told me I couldn’t see the parish records since I might publish information about people who had illegitimate children appearing in the parish baptismal record. I reiterated to him that my sole interest in looking at the parish records was to find my own ancestors. I had no interest whatsoever in publishing information about illegitimate births I might spot in the parish records.
He then said with a sneer, “They won’t be in the parish records. The people who left Ireland during those years were too poor to leave records.” Finally, he said, “Lindsey, that’s not an Irish name anyway, is it?”
I’ve subsequently discovered that my Lindsey family descends from an Irish Lynch family closely related to the Irish king Brian Boru, one of the so-called Dalcassian families who descend from the same ancestor from which Brian descends.
At long last when the parish priest allowed me see the parish baptismal registry, I turned to the section where I hoped to find the baptismal record of my great-grandmother Catherine Ryan, who was born 19 August 1849 in County Kilkenny, according to her tombstone.
When I turned to that date in the Mullinavat Catholic parish baptismal register, there, on that very same date, I found Catherine’s baptism record, with the notation that her parents were Valentine Ryan and Bridget Tobin, names I already knew as her parents’ names from my family’s stories and from their tombstones: all these relatives are buried next to each other.
This was one of the most moving experiences of my life. I had searched so long. And I felt humbled and grateful, since I considered myself to be reconnecting to my family’s roots and past on behalf of my whole family. The last time I ever visited one of my grandmother’s brothers, Monroe, a very sweet old fellow who was blind all the years I knew him, he told me that he had promised his mother Catherine to take her back to Ireland, but she had died before he could fulfill that promise. In a way that has long been typical of Irish families, he was deeply attached to his mother and never married.
I felt as if I were “going back” on my great-uncle Monroe’s behalf, on behalf of my grandmother, who was very dear to me, on behalf of their mother Catherine — on behalf of my whole family.
After extracting the information I was seeking from the parish records, I went into the church and sat down and began to sob deeply, tears pouring down my face. I felt overwhelmed.
And the passage above, which I read as I finished Patrick Joyce’s book Remembering Peasants: it evokes that memorable, somewhat sacred experience I had in that parish church in Mullinavat.
BEGATS AND BEQUEATHALS 