The Ties That Bind

My maternal great great great grandmother Margaret was born in the Connemara region of western Ireland around 1830. She and her daughter Winifred (named after Margaret’s mother) emigrated to the United States and settled in Rhode Island. Winifred eventually had a daughter whom she named Mary Winifred. Mary Winifred gave birth to my Gramps, whom she named John Mervyn. Gramps married Marion, my Gagee, and they had my Mom, Dorothy.

Winifred to Margaret to Winifred to Mary Winifred to John Mervyn to Dorothy to me - that’s all it takes to think about seven generations over 160 years or so. When you pare it down to seven people, the decades fall away; the miles shrink; the ocean no longer matters; we are simply family. Winifred, my fourth great grandmother, couldn’t imagine me or my life today, but everything she did was in some way for me. Letting go of her widowed daughter Margaret and her granddaughter and namesake Winifred, as they sailed off to America, never to return, had to have been wrenching. But that journey, that leap of faith, was made in search of a better life. That journey was for me and all the other too-distant-to-imagine generations to come.

It was many years ago that we learned one branch of my family tree had sprung from the soil of Connemara. Soon after, Chuck gave me a single decade rosary made from the green Connemara marble. Over the years, I’ve said many a rosary with the green beads clicking through my fingers. I don’t say the rosary the way I once did, but that small rosary is always with me. I carry it in my purse. It connects me to a tradition, to a religion, to a comforting reflex many generations of men and most especially women in my family have turned to in times of stress and thanksgiving. Most importantly, it connects me to my family. Not just Winifred, Margaret and little Winifred who I know were born in Connemara, but to all my kith and kin, their names unknown to me, who came before Winifred. And it even ties me to my distant relatives, unknown to me, who stayed behind in Ireland and made their lives there, down through the same generations.

We are all family, all bound together; all owing debts of gratitude to the generations that came before us; all owing gifts of knowledge and love to the generations traveling with us and coming after us.