My ancestors were from Ireland...

...and that's all I know about them. Really. (Actually, my mother's maiden name was Crawford, which is Scottish -- and probably Protestant if you go back far enough -- but that's it so far as I know; everyone else was Irish.)

I don't know any of their names, where in Ireland they came from, where in America they first settled or even when they came over. This last one is especially tricky, because different people probably came over at different times. If you take my great-grandparents, for example, that's eight people alone. (As far as I know, all of my grandparents were born in this country.) If you take my great-great grandparents, that's sixteen people. That's a lot -- any more and I would use numerals instead of actually spelling out the number. Chances are they came over at different times and settled in different places.

So what can I say about my ancestors that I never met, beyond my grandparents? Well, besides being Irish (or Scottish), they came over in the nineteenth century. The earliest ones may have come over during the Potato Famine in the 1840s and the most recent ones would have come over just before the turn of the century. I've never heard of any of my ancestors fighting in the Civil War --that's kind of a big historical marker for most people -- so I've always assumed most of them immigrated in the 1870s, '80s or '90s.

Where in Ireland did they come from? Most Irish immigrants were poor (why else would they leave?) and departed from the destitute western and southern parts. I imagine they were poor, hungry, barely literate and desperate. What does "barely literate" mean? I would guess they could read and write at about a first or second grade level and do simple math -- the four functions, at most. But even that could be a stretch. They were Catholic, of course, rural, and may have worked as peasants on some (Protestant) lord's plantation. Seeing almost no future in their homeland, they decided to take a chance and cross the ocean in seek of a better life. While I'm sure some of them said goodbye to their parents and families with the idea that they would never return, others thought they would come over for a while, make some money and return rich.

(My grandfather used to sit me on his knee and ask, "Mike, do you think you'll ever go back?" After hearing this for the dozenth time, I would answer, "Where, grampa, where?" It was at that point that everyone in the room would laugh. One time I turned the tables on him. "Grandpa, do you think you'll ever go back?" "If they build a bridge," was his quick response. That was no help. It was only much later that I found out he was referring to Ireland and that this was a common topic for conversation among Irish-Americans.)

Chances are, most of my ancestors landed in one of the large cities on the Eastern seaboard: New York, Boston or Philadelphia were probably the most likely destinations. Once there, they were taken in by the Irish Catholic network of church, city government and the private sector that depended on government contracts -- construction, road- and railroad building, etc. But they didn't stay there forever. I know that one of my great-grandfathers, John Duffy, was born in Schenectady, New York, which is north of Albany; my great-grandfather Jim Coughlin was from Milwaukee (and bilingual in German, thanks to the Milwaukee public schools, according to family legend) and still another great-grandfather, Mike Tracy (nice name!), was rumored to be from Cincinnati. All of whom, apparently, migrated further to Chicago. The rest of my great-grandparents? I can tell you their names but that's about it.

What's next in the saga of my family? I'd have to start with the influence of the Catholic Church.

I hope this is just the first installment of many.