I’ve written here before about how much fun I’ve had working with www.Ancestry.com to check out my family roots. I got so involved in it that I took my first trip to Ireland this summer to meet with some top geneology researchers to commission a detailed study of the Irish "Lacy" family. I also had a chance to go to J. Kennedy’s Pub while in the Emerald Isle. Quite a dive, I might add.
My research was exciting because using Ancestry.com and a U.S. based researcher, I was able to trace my family all the way back to William Lacy, II, who reached New Kent, Virginia by ship in 1652. My family history on my father’s side has been 100% Irish, at least through family lore. The Lacy men usually married Irish girls over the more recent centuries, and yes there is surely some blarney in me for sure. I love the story and song of Molly Malone. I enjoy a Guinness and I like Harp better, I love that quart of Jameson Irish Whiskey that Tom Fuentes gives me every St. Patrick’s Day. I can’t imagine a better lunch than Corned Beef and Cabbage and an Irish brew. If they made white wine in Ireland I’m sure I’d love that too.
But apparently there is not as much Irish in me as I was lead to believe by a now long deceased family tree, with no living relatives on the Lacy side to counsel with.
But there were some tell-tale signs……While Ireland is 95% Catholic, and I am a Catholic by personal choice, my father was Episcopal. I asked him about that and his response was it had something to do with him singing in the Boy’s Choir at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco….and that is why I was originally baptized Episcopal. But he acted 100% Irish, Republican Irish, and I didn’t quite get it.
The Irish researchers started to come up with more disheartening info for me in the last weeks. William Lacy, II, they told me, traveled from Bristol, England to the New World, and not directly from Ireland. I dismissed that as a transportation issue of the times. Then the U.S. researcher told me William was married in the Episcopal Church in New Kent. I dismissed that as just British prejudice against Catholics, the idea being at that time, around that late 1600s in the colonies, you couldn’t get anywhere in business if you weren’t a Church of England type person. But what killed off all hope, was the revelation of both the U.S. and Irish-based researchers, that William had signed an "Oath of Allegiance" to the Church of England to get on the boat; that until the 1800s the Lacys in Virginia only married English girls from established English families, and the final blow: that research showed beyond a doubt that my family gave refuge and succor at their plantation home in New Kent, VA to Tory General Cornwallace’s troops, apparently on their way to or from the decisive Yorktown battle that the Brits lost to General Washington. To top it all off, William Lacy, II had apparent roots in Yorkshire, England. That’s where Yorkshire pudding was invented.
Confronted with the facts, I am surely more English than Irish. And I don’t know what to make of it. I have been in a Jimmy Carter-style malaise for two days. But now I kind of understand why I always secretly disliked the "Yankee-Doodle" stuff at White House diplomatic welcoming ceremonies I attended during my service in the Reagan Administration.
One way I am dealing with it, is that I downloaded onto my iPhone Sting’s sad but beautiful "Englishman in New York." I am trying to push into that the feelings of an alienated "Englishman in Orange County." The sweet sadness and self-pity is a little appealing, but I imagine I’ll discover some obscure English white wine that will get me going on that angle soon, and change everything!