Salon.com > St. Patrick\'s Day

President O’Bama? Irish-American relatives identified

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 16:10:00 +0000

President Barack Obama found out years ago he had an Irish ancestor who fled the potato famine in Ireland in 1850. He can now claim 28 living relatives who also descended from that Irishman, including a Vietnam veteran, a school nurse and a displeased Arizona Republican.

The president's newly identified relatives are revealed in a study released to The Associated Press by Ancestry.com, a family history website whose genealogists also traced descendants of 23 other Irish passengers on the ship that brought Falmouth Kearney to the United States when he was 19.

The survey allowed genealogists to further trace branches in Obama's family tree and others who arrived on the ship, known as the Marmion, on March 20, 1850.

According to the survey, the passengers' descendants live in Canada, Syria and throughout the United States. Among Obama's newly identified relatives is 83-year-old Dorma Lee Reese, of Tucson, Ariz.

"I'm not a Democrat, so I can't say I clapped," said Reese, a retired brain-imaging technologist. "I don't appreciate what he's done by any means, but I do appreciate that he holds that office."

I hate St. Patrick’s Day

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 01:01:00 +0000

On March 17, 1987, I experienced my first American St. Patrick's Day, my first offshore glimpse of my own country, broadcast in psychedelic green. I was a waitress in an Irish-American pub in upstate New York. The night before, I telephoned my parents back home to explain that the pub would be too loud and crowded to call on the day itself.

"Why?" My mother asked. "What's all the fuss about?"

The "fuss" began the next morning with an 11 a.m. queue outside the pub door. It ended at 5 a.m. the following day as the last taxi drivers waited for the final revelers to make their way through snow banks dribbled with human vomit. The intervening hours had been a mosh pit of sweating bodies swaying to the band. All this for St. Patrick, a holy man from Wales who banished snakes and Celtic paganism.

The entire episode was a million miles from my childhood experience on St. Patrick's. Back then, we walked to church in our best winter coats, sporting our sprigs of freshly pulled shamrocks from the fields. And that homegrown, 1960s version is another million miles from Ireland's current Disney-fied extravaganza that borrows backward from its American counterpart.

Irish soda bread scones for St. Patrick’s Day and friendship

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:01:00 +0000

A version of this story first appeared on Bellwether Vance's blog.

Sue's marriage fell apart and we became best friends on the same day. A St. Patrick's Day.

We were new friends that year, with daughters in the same class. On paper we made no sense. She was seventeen years my senior, a native Minnesotan, a former emergency room nurse, married to a cardiologist, living in a mansion. I was ... none of those things, but I could cook. I invited her and her family over for a meal of corned beef and cabbage and "Irish soda bread" scones, filled with golden raisins and caraway seeds.

I prepared dinner and, knowing the serving time would be loose given her husband's schedule, I kept everything at a simmer, ready once he was able to break away. As time crept on and the children grew restless, Sue made a phone call on the front porch while I kept the girls busy with a video, and while her son surreptitiously ate every one of the scones I had laid out on a decorative platter in the center of the table.

Cartoon: The Irish Village People

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:20:00 +0000

Open/Bob Eckstein

St. Patrick’s Day controversy: Is corned beef and cabbage Irish?

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:20:00 +0000

In third grade, my teacher announced that we would be celebrating St. Patrick's Day by wearing green hats and giving ourselves fake Irish names. And so was born that great Celtic patriot Francis McLam, and next to me was the even-more-improbable sounding Mike O'Gotkowski. Our friend Michael O'Reilly was now -- in the face of all this Irishness -- no longer sufficiently Irish, and so he became Michael McO'Reilly. It was my first inkling of how strange Americans are about traditions on St. Patrick's Day, a feeling reinforced years later by watching people of all races and ethnicities pretend at Irishness by getting plowed on green beer and painting themselves like leprechauns. But despite all this, maybe the most straightforward of St. Patrick's Day celebrations, eating the corned beef and cabbage, is secretly one of the strangest.

"My Irish family never ate corned beef," the letter began. I'd just written a story about new immigrants in Queens, called "Where Curry Replaced Corned Beef and Cabbage," and a reader was gently protesting my mention of that stereotypical dish.

A Hibernian in the woodpile

Sat, 17 Mar 2001 20:00:00 +0000

Recently released U.S. Census data reveal telling demographic, or at least attitudinal, shifts afoot in the American population and how Americans identify themselves in terms of race. A New York Times story says 5 percent of African-Americans identified themselves as multiracial, or belonging to more than one race; that's many more than government forecasters with the Office of Management and Budget were expecting.

But this is nothing new for me. In fact, this kind of self-reflection about my mixed heritage is something of an annual ritual. On past St. Patrick's Days, close white friends have joked about my being "black Irish." That's been my cue to trot out a story about my great-great-grandfather, Albert Kelly, who got off a boat from Ireland in Philadelphia in 1868. The family griot, my uncle Douglas who lives in Washington state, says that Kelly married Hilda Cheatham, a Cherokee woman, and settled down on a farm in Mathews County, Va. The youngest of their four children, James Handy Kelly, was my great-grandfather and grew up to spawn my father's side of the family.

A drinking rant

Fri, 17 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

I was once a bartender in Manhattan. Practitioners of that wet trade call St. Patrick's Day amateur night: all those bush-league barflies standing over the gutter, barfing like frat boys. I used to believe the lot of them deserved the Irish nails that would be driven into their shamrock skulls come sunup.

I no longer feel this way.

Ex-bartenders, mind you, are allowed to be snooty about how they handle their waters. I, myself, hadn't had a hangover since high school. Then came last Sunday, the end of my first lost weekend. All across America, ministers were shaking hands with their parishioners while poor Bowman sat upright in a chair with damned monkey music playing in his skull. Feathers on his tongue. The very air sandpapering his neck.

My editor at Salon thinks my experience will be of educational value to those of you planning to paddle out into green rivers on St. Patrick's Day and get MacSkunked.

If my words are to serve as a talisman, you must first look to land far away from Ireland. The land of Ivan and Nyet -- Mother Russia.

Blue Glow

Fri, 17 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Series

The sci-fi series Farscape (8 p.m. Fri., Sci-Fi Channel) has its second-season premiere. Barbara Walters grills John and Patsy Ramsey about the death of their daughter, JonBenet, on 20/20 (10 p.m. Fri., ABC). Conan O'Brien is the St. Patrick's Day guest for Space Ghost Coast to Coast (11 p.m. Fri., Cartoon Network). Wrestler The Rock hosts Saturday Night Live (11:30 p.m. Sat., NBC), featuring a rare TV performance from AC/DC. Angus, me boy, it's been too long. Buddhist monks proclaim Bobby to be a reincarnated lama on King of the Hill (7:30 p.m. Sun., Fox). On The Simpsons (8 p.m. Sun., Fox), a Native American mystic/casino manager lets Bart see 30 years into the future -- and Lisa is the president of the United States. The multi-faceted William B. Davis -- that's the Cigarette Smoking Man to you -- wrote this week's episode of The X-Files (9 p.m. Sun., Fox), in which CSM offers Scully proof of a miraculous disease cure, but it'll cost her. On The Sopranos (9 p.m. Sun., HBO), Richie and Junior have had enough of Tony's leadership, Tony tries to be a better father and Carmela's views on the sanctity of marriage are sorely tested when she hires a hunky contractor to re-do the living room. Elton John is the subject of a new Behind the Music (9 p.m. Sun., VH1), which is followed by Elton John's "The Road to El Dorado" (10 p.m. Sun., VH1), an intimate San Francisco concert featuring his songs for the upcoming animated film "El Dorado."