Gifts belong to a chain of transmission. They oblige us, the recipients, to become the giver. To be given a gift is to be obliged to give in turn. In this way, as Lewis Hyde says in his thought-provoking book The Gift, gifts remain alive and don’t die. Giving when we’ve been given to keeps the gift alive.
The stories I want to tell here center around a member of the immigrant generation of my Irish ancestral line. They were told to me repeatedly by elders on my mother’s side of the family, which is where the Irish heritage is found. My mother’s grandmother Catherine Ryan came as a small girl of five years to New Orleans in March 1854 with her mother Bridget Tobin Ryan and her siblings Margaret and Patrick, to join the father of the family, Valentine Ryan. Valentine had landed in New Orleans on Christmas day 1852.
I heard stories about this voyage across the Atlantic and landing in New Orleans as I was growing up, and have now documented those family stories and augmented them with research. The stories were told to me especially by my maternal grandmother, Hattie, a daughter of Catherine Ryan, and by her brothers who were still living as I came of age, Pat, Monroe, and Ed. Catherine married George R. Batchelor, and these siblings, Hattie, Pat, Monroe, and Ed, were all Batchelors. Monroe was blind with cataracts from the time I knew him, and was such a delight to be around. On his annual round of visits to the houses of nieces and nephews, he’d regale us with stories and play with us as if he were a child, undeterred by his inability to see.
These four elders delighted in particular to tell me and my brothers and cousins about their uncle Pat Ryan, who was eight years old when he, his mother Bridget, and his sisters arrived in New Orleans in the early spring of 1854. When her uncle Pat died in 1893, my grandmother Hattie was five years old, barely old enough to remember Pat, though she remembered vividly his death and events that happened immediately after her uncle died.
Her brother Pat had the longest memory of his uncle Pat. Pat Batchelor, my great-uncle, was thirteen when his uncle Pat Ryan died. Monroe was eight. Ed was not yet born when his uncle Pat died, but he spoke of him as if he remembered his uncle well. The memory of Pat Ryan was so strong, so living, among his nieces and nephews that Ed acted as if he had known this man about whom he spoke who had died before Ed was born.
It’s famously (and rightly) said that the Irish are fascinated with stories, and are often gifted raconteurs, outstanding storytellers. From early in Irish history, oral tradition has been a primary means by which lore, legend, learning, cultural identity, ethical and religious values have been passed on. The Irish side of my family had the gift of telling stories in spades, and my half-Irish grandmother and her brothers were especially enjoyable to be around because they told such engrossing stories, and did so with flair, passion, good humor.
Comparisons can be invidious, but as I think about Hattie and her brothers, they stand in such sharp contrast to my elders on the paternal side of my family. Those elders were generally taciturn, solemn and not especially enjoyable to be around as I was growing up. Not enjoyable in the way the fun-loving, child-centered elders on the Irish side of my family were…. Those elders enjoyed being together. They enjoyed telling stories, laughing, celebrating. They enjoyed talking to and playing with children.
My paternal elders were peaceable, admirable people with a strong set of values, but the cultural ethos they had inherited from their Southern evangelical world didn’t encourage children to be children. They didn’t countenance a lot of high-spirited play. They didn’t tell stories. The one family story my paternal grandmother ever passed on, about her mother’s baptism, was clearly designed to be a religious lecture wrapped up as a family story.
As a boy, I always slept with my two grandmothers when I visited them. I have very happy memories of evenings spent with Hattie. After we’d go to bed, we’d laugh and talk, she’d tell stories, she’d teach me to say my prayers, and she’d ask how I was doing, how I felt, what I needed and what I thought about this or that. My experience with my paternal grandmother Vallie was like night following day in comparison with that experience with my grandmother Hattie. As we went to sleep, I’d try to talk to Vallie as I did with Hattie, and Vallie would quickly inform me that being in bed was for sleeping, and I needed to be quiet so we could sleep.
I say all this to frame the stories Hattie, Pat, Monroe, and Ed told me about their uncle Pat. They were stories full of wit, high spirits, admiration for an uncle who seemed to loom larger than life in their childhoods — and whom they remembered vividly for that reason.
After my Ryan ancestors arrived in New Orleans in the early 1850s, they immediately moved to southeast Mississippi, where there was an Irish colony in and around the town of Paulding. Valentine had, I suspect, already been living there when after he arrived in New Orleans, perhaps working to build the railroad tracks just arriving in that part of Mississippi and earn money to bring his wife and children to America. He did meet Bridget and his children when their ship docked in New Orleans, though the meeting was by accident, I was always told. The story went that when Biddie and her children got off the ship, there was Val walking down the street towards them, not knowing they were arriving on that ship. The luck of the Irish, that story would always end.
Once my Ryan forebears had settled in Mississippi, Margaret, the oldest of the three children who came with Bridget to America in 1854, married. Margaret was sixteen when the family arrived in New Orleans, and appears on the arrival list of the James Nesmith, the ship that brought Bridget and her children overseas from Liverpool, as a seamstress.
In 1856 in Mississippi, Margaret married Robert Allen Sumrall, whose aunt Mary had married a member of the Irish colony at Paulding, Patrick Brogan, an Irish immigrant who arrived in America in the 1830s and had done well for himself, acquiring considerable property and amassing some wealth. Three years later, Valentine and Bridget Ryan moved their family to Arkansas, with their daughter Margaret and husband Robert A. Sumrall joining them. Both families bought land from the federal government in Jefferson County about twenty miles south of Little Rock. The place in which they settled is now in Grant County, which was formed from Jefferson in 1870. It’s about ten miles northwest of the town of Redfield on the Arkansas River where Hattie married in 1912 and where she lived following her marriage, and where her sister Alice and brother John also lived.
Soon after the Ryans moved to central Arkansas and began to set up a farm south of Little Rock, war arrived, the Civil War. In November 1863, Pat, who had been farming with his father Val, went to Little Rock and enlisted in the Union Army. Pat’s enlistment papers give his age as eighteen. He was actually seventeen in November 1863, and, like many young soldiers during that war (and other wars), he evidently fudged his age slightly to qualify for service. The parish register of Mullinavat, the Catholic parish in County Kilkenny in which Valentine and Bridget Ryan’s children were baptized, shows Pat baptized 14 April 1846. So he was born either on that day or just before it. His tombstone in Arkansas gives only the year of his birth: 1846.
Pat Ryan’s Union Army papers also state that he was born in Ireland and was a farmer, 5’5″ in height with light hair and blue eyes. After Pat enlisted in November 1863, in February the following year he was made wagoner of his Army unit, Co. K of the 3rd Regiment of the Arkansas Cavalry, and from his father’s farm he brought a horse and its trappings to the unit, to pull the wagon.
And it’s at this point that the stories my elders told me about Uncle Pat Ryan commence. Pat, Monroe, and Hattie remembered their uncle Pat as a man always full of fun and of life, who had lost an eye and wore a patch over the lost eye. He was well-known, they told me, for his charity and kindness to those in need. He never turned a beggar from his door, and for that reason, there was a steady stream of beggars to the door of that easy mark, the Irishman with a patch over his eye who always put coins into the hands of beggars and told them, “Now, faith and beJasus, keep that money and ye’ll nivver be a poor man again — By faith and by Jesus, keep that money, etc.”
This is how Hattie, Pat, Monroe, and Ed told me about their uncle Pat, using an Irish brogue and Irish accent as they replicated what he told those who came to him in need. And that patch and the lost eye: they understood that it had something to do with the Civil War, but were fuzzy about the details.
Near the end of his life, Pat and his then wife (his second wife) Delilah filed a claim for a pension for his Civil War service, and for the injuries he had sustained as he ended his Army service — for his lost eye. The papers in this pension file are voluminous and full of fascinating detail. They carefully recount how Pat lost his eye, transcribing his own statement about what happened. As he filed his pension claim and as doctors examined his injuries, he said that near the end of October in 1865, just after he had returned home from service, he was at his parents’ house in Jefferson (now Grant) County and the fire went out. He tried to relight the fire using a flint-lock muzzle gun and as he did that the bottle of gunpowder he’d used to load the gun exploded, taking out his right eye and causing severe injury to his left wrist.
From that time forward, Pat Ryan had no use of his right eye; he lost the eye completely in this mishap, hence the black patch covering it as his nieces and nephews were growing up. Shortly after he returned to his parents’ house following the war, Pat married the widow of one of his comrades, John H. Spann. John’s wife Rosanna was née Hill. Rosanna then died in October 1868, with Pat’s sister Catherine nursing Rosanna during her final illness and sitting with her body as it was prepared for burial, according to a statement Catherine gave for her brother Pat’s pension file. Catherine was, Hattie often told me, a skilled nurse and midwife who was frequently called on by families in her rural community to saddle her horse and come to their houses when family members were sick and, in particular, when a baby was being born.
A year later in December 1869, Pat married a second time — Delilah, daughter of Conrad and Sarah Harriett Rinehart. Pat and Lilah never had children of their own, but because they were people of well-known generosity, they were asked repeatedly to take in orphaned children or children without parents. They raised Lilah’s orphaned niece Missouri Curtis and also adopted and raised two boys, Allen Spann and Richard Murdock. Pat Ryan’s niece Alice Batchelor and her brother Valentine Batchelor married Murdock siblings, Thomas and Mary Murdock.
It was that reputation for generosity that led to the events I mentioned earlier, which happened after Pat Ryan died. When Pat died on 18 October 1893, the next day, a newspaper in the Jefferson County seat, Pine Bluff — the Daily Graphic — published a notice that read as follows:
REDFIELD. ARK., Oct. 10.
One of Grant County’s best citizens, Pat Ryan, died yesterday morning. He lived near Orion Church, and that neighborhood has sustained a great loss by his death.
With that notice sending news around the county that Pat Ryan, the Irishman known for his very traditional Irish generosity to beggars and others in need, was now dead, people began to travel to Pat and Lilah’s farm, the farm Pat’s father Valentine had established in 1859, to hunt for treasure they were convinced he had buried around the farm. If he was rich enough never to turn a beggar away, then surely he had buried treasure.
My grandmother Hattie remembered these events very clearly. She told me that after her uncle Pat died, with her mother Catherine sitting with Lilah and helping Lilah nurse him up to his death, Catherine took Hattie and several of the other youngest children in the family and they went and lived with her aunt Lilah for some weeks.
Pat and Lilah Ryan did not live far from the farm of George and Catherine Batchelor, but in those days when transportation (short of trains for long trips) was by foot or horse or horse and buggy, every mile counted, so this was equivalent to taking an exciting trip for a five-year-old girl and my grandmother had happy memories of those weeks spent at her aunt Lilah’s house. The house, which had been Valentine and Bridget Tobin Ryan’s house, was a pretty two-story white frame house with green shutters, quite a step up from the dog-trot double pen house in which the Batchelor family lived. It was on a stagecoach road running from Sheridan to Little Rock, with a spring in front of the house at which people would frequently stop to water their horses or get drinks of water for themselves.
The nice two-story house, the prosperous farm, Pat and Lilah’s known concern to take in orphaned children, the money Pat placed in beggars’ hands: all of this led people far and wide to think that Pat had been a rich man with buried treasure, and following his death, people came from as far away as Little Rock to dig around the farm and hunt for treasure. This was why, I suspect, Lilah wanted her sister-in-law to stay with her for some weeks, to help watch over things and help her feel safe as people invaded her property.
In recent years, I’ve been in touch with the wife of a grandson of Allen Spann, one of the orphaned boys Pat and Lilah Ryan raised. She tells me that her husband heard similar stories from his grandfather Allen Spann as he was growing up:
You may have solved a bit of a mystery of my husband’s family stories. He always said that Papa Spann (Rufus Allen) told them about the barn containing civil war uniforms, confederate money and valuable civil war items was vandalized.
And isn’t that interesting, that stories handed down in my branch of the Ryan-Batchelor family (and spread as wide as distant cousins in California whom I’ve never met but who have been in touch to tell me they were told the same stories when they were growing up): interesting that stories told in one branch of a family can intersect with stories told in an entirely separate branch of a family? Allen Spann and his children considered Pat and Lilah Allen’s father and mother. Allen named his first son Patrick to honor the foster father who raised him.
“My” family stories are never mine alone. They belong to you, too — to you family members of newer generations who weren’t told these stories as you were growing up, but also to anyone anywhere who wants to hear these stories. Because who’s not really family, when all is said and done? And that’s another imperative reason that we need to pass on “our” family stories, the ones given to us as precious gifts by our elders when we were growing up.
Who’s not really family, after all? I think in some ways that’s the very heart and soul of the story Pat Ryan wanted to begin telling his family as he put coins into the hands of needy men and told them, “Faith and beJasus, keep that money and ye’ll nivver be a poor man again.”
For documentation of the information I have shared in this posting featuring family stories about Patrick Ryan, son of Valentine Ryan and Bridget Tobin, please see the nine-part series of postings I published in March-April 2018 with the title “Prob. Died Young, Or How Pat Ryan Lost His Eye (As a Union Soldier)”: No. 1; No. 2; No. 3; No. 4; No. 5; No. 6; No. 7; No. 8; No. 9.
BEGATS AND BEQUEATHALS 