Ancestry Magazine

It was a family historian’s dream come true. As an anniversary present, my husband Bob gave me a trip to Ireland–the country some of my ancestors called home.

We climbed from the car to take in the lush green beauty of the Irish countryside where my ancestors lived a century and a half ago. Progress hadn’t spoiled the remote patch of land. I imagine that little has changed from the time my Huggins ancestors lived there. Sheep and cattle were grazing on the gently rolling hills, berry-filled vines covered stone fences, and wildflowers grew up around the long-abandoned house. I picked up a small stone near the front door.

I tried to imagine what life was like for my Irish ancestors who had no choice but to leave for America with three young children as the Great Famine slowly and painfully devastated their lives and dreams. I couldn’t help but wonder what they felt as they looked back at their home and that beautiful place knowing they would never see it again. The tranquil landscape today shows no evidence of the potato failures of the 1840s that took the lives of about one million Irish citizens and forever change d the national psyche. As former Irish president Mary Robinson said, “We can honour the profound dignity of human survival best by taking our folk-memory of this catastrophe into the present world with us, and allowing it to strengthen and deepen our identity with those still suffering.”

The cemetery we visited, overrun with waist-high weeds, gives stoic testimony to the earlier generations of Huggins, and to those who didn’t make it through the famine. The tiny church, where generations of my family were baptized and married, still stands. I was elated to get documents attesting to landmark events in their lives. These papers, stitched together with American records, tell a story of a family right down to the present.

Every family has its own heroes, and some of the heroes in my family come from the place we visited in Ireland. Catherine Huggins, baptized in this West Meath parish in 1834, was my great-grandmother. She was almost twelve years old when she made the journey across the Atlantic. She married in 1865 and raised ten children. My father’s mother died when he was ten, and it was his grandmother Catherine who took him in and raised him as her own.

Interestingly, my research on the Huggins family started thirty years ago with letters from three different sources sharing the “fact” that my great-grandmother was cousin to someone of fame. All claimed that our family’s link to celebrity was Miller Huggins, manager of the New York Yankees during Babe Ruth’s days of glory.

As the years progressed with the Huggins research, I haven’t been able to connect Miller’s English lines with our Irish family. That’s not to say that the story is only “myth.” Maybe this same family parted ways at some point in history. More documents must be consulted, but I’m not ready to discredit any family legend entirely. For as many paper records we can amass, they seldom tell the whole story.

African oral h istory authority Jan Vansina believes that oral traditions provide a more intimate view of events and attitudes, and give voice to people ignored in the written word.

At the end of the day, it matters little whether we are related to Miller Huggins or any other celebrity. The story of his connection to the family was enough to fire interest in my children–long before they became as addicted to family history as I am. That the story sparked my children’s interest in their family when they were young is good enough for me. I look at the documents and see hard facts. I look at the small stone from my ancestor’s home and I’m inspired by the legends that tell me who they were.