Monday, April 28, 2025
D+173/99
1887 One of my maternal grandfather Dennis Healy's birthdays
1956 The last French troops left Vietnam
1965 US Marines invaded the Dominican Republic,and stayed until October 1966
1967 Muhammad Ali refused induction into the army & was stripped of his boxing title
1996 In Australia's worst massacre in modern history, Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, leading to a compulsory gun buyback program and major changes to gun control laws.
In bed at 10, awake at 3:50, and up at 4:10. I lit my Kitty candle for her and for our grandfather. RIP
Prednisone, day 349; 2mg., day 11/21; Kevzara, day 14/14; CGM, day 13/15; Trulicity, day 4/7. Prednisone at 4:40 a.m. Other meds at 6 a.m.
"Boppa" Denny was my maternal grandfather, Dennis M. Healy. He died when I was 11, my first experience with death. We don't know how old he was when he died. He was born in the Townland of Slaheny, Village of Kilgarvan, in County Kerry, Ireland. There were 14 houses in Slaheny: 4 occupied by Healys, 4 by Sullivans, 3 by Peahens, and 1 by Finnegans. House #5 was a 2-room thatched roof cottage with 2 windows. The head of household was listed in the census as Dennis' brother Daniel, age 30, who lived with his wife Mary, also 30, their daughter Mary, 4, and their 3 sons John, 1, Timothy, 3, and Jeremiah, 5. The pater families was Daniel, age 75, and the mother, Margaret, age 55, who also lived in that same cottage. Dennis gave his age as 24 when he arrived in 1904 at Ellis Island from County Kerry via Cobh on the steamship Oceanic. Years later when he applied for citizenship he gave his year of birth as 1883 which would have made him 21 at Ellis Island. The 'holy card' from his wake and funeral gave his DOB as April 28, 1887, which would make him barely 17 at Ellis Island. The birth registry for my mother lists his year of birth as 1886. Perhaps he was 72 when he died, perhaps 65, perhaps something in between. I think of him today because I've been continuing to read in small bits Sean O'Faolain's Bird Alone. I'm at the part where the protagonist Corny is in London at the Irish pub behind which his Uncle Mel lives. The group in the barroom sings The Ould Ivied Ruin, referring to abandoned homesteads in Ireland and mournful yearning to return. "There were cries from time to time . . or a silence for several verses when the pathos of the thing moved them too much, or thoughts of 'the ould land' they might never see again . . " My grandfather carried a piece of "the ould sod", a chunk of dirt from Ireland, wrapped in a Kleenex in his pocket. I wonder what became of it when he died. I remember looking at it once, unwrapping the frayed Kleenex around it. When Boppa Denny would come to visit us in our basement digs after he had had too much to drink, he would get filled with emotion and curse the English, especially the "Black and Tans" who savaged the Irish during their War of Independence, long after Dennis was already in the U.S. I vaguely remember him once trying to dance an Irish jig in our little living room, losing his balance and falling into a chair. He was a sad man, alcoholic in his old age and probably before, widowed early, left with 3 sons, a daughter, and dim but fervent memories of Ireland.
From my memoir:
My mother’s father was Dennis M. Healy who was from Kilgarvan, County Kerry, Ireland, 6 miles upstream from Kenmare where the Kenmare River empties into the Atlantic. He grew up in the era of Fenianism, Michael Davitt, the Land League, and the long battle between constitutionalists seeking Home Rule and the more radical separatists seeking complete independence from Great Britain, with Charles Stuart Parnell straddling the divide. The country had been hit by agricultural depression starting in 1879 and “outrages” (murders of landlords and agents, maiming of cattle, etc.) in the West where the Healy clan lived rose to three times the ‘normal’ incidence in 1880-82. The struggles with Britain and the Ascendency for land reform, the end of landlordism, and Home Rule and the struggle for complete independence continued well past his emigration to the U. S. and continued through the Easter Rising, the war against Britain and the Black and Tans, the establishment of the Free State and the civil war. It must have seemed a good time to leave Ireland in search of greener pastures. He left in 1904, the year the Abbey Theater was founded and Joyce started writing Dubliners (and had his first outing with Nora Barnacle on June 16th, Bloomsday.) “On the other side,” it was the year Teddy Roosevelt became president.
The immigration records make it clear that the emigrating Healys were almost certainly poor, landless and with no prospect of acquiring land. Their ‘occupation or calling’ is always listed as ‘laborer’ or ‘servant.’ According to some anecdotal evidence I found on the internet, most of the Healys in Kilgarvin were not native Kerrymen but had migrated to Kilgarvin after evictions by the Earl of Donoughmore during the “Penal Times.” The barony of Donoughmore lay about 25 miles northwest of Cork City, about 40 miles east of Kilgarvin. Kilgarvan is now a town of about 550 people in a mountainous area with scant possibilities for eking out a living. I suspect it had a considerably larger population in 1904 but even fewer opportunities to scratch out a living. There was a workhouse in Kenmare, down the road from Kilgarvan, and chances are the only options Dennis and his siblings saw were the Kenmare workhouse or emigration.
Dennis sailed to New York on the White Lines steamship Oceanic, departing Queenstown (now Cobh), County Cork, May 19, 1904 and arriving May 26th.. On arrival, he gave his age as 24 as that is the age listed on the “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers” in the Ellis Island records. That would have made 1880 the year of his birth. Years later, however, when he executed a Declaration of Intention to become a citizen, he gave his birth date as May 5, 1883, which would have made him barely 21 when he arrived. Adding further confusion to the issue, the ‘holy card’ from his wake and funeral gives his birth date as April 28, 1887, which would have made him barely 17 when he arrived in New York. It may be that April 28th was his date of birth, and May 5th the date of baptism. To complete the confusion, the Itasca County birth register entry evidencing my mother’s birth on April 15, 1922, gives her father’s age as 36, which suggests that he was born in 1886, making him barely 18 when he arrived in the United States. Whether he was born in 1880, as the immigration record declares, or 1883, as the naturalization record declares, or 1886, as my mother’s birth registry declares, or 1887, as the death record states, is anyone’s guess.
At Ellis Island, he stated that his passage to America had been paid by his brother (no name given) and that he was on his way to meet his sister, Mary Healy, who lived in the Lakota Hotel in Chicago. He had a railroad ticket to Chicago and $6 in his pocket. He stated he had never been an inmate of a prison, an almshouse, or of an institution for the insane, nor had he been a ward of charity, an anarchist or a polygamist. According to the manifest, he was able to read and write. I never knew of any siblings of my grandfather, but the Ellis Island records suggest that the Healy clan of Kilgarvan was not small. There were six or seven “Mary Healy”s from Kilgarvan who passed through Ellis Island between 1898 and 1910, all in their teens or early 20s, including one who arrived only two months before my grandfather, in March 1904. Which was the sister in the hotel in Chicago? Who was the brother was paid the passage? I don’t know. (My Aunt Monica told me that her mother told her that my mother lived with “her aunts” for some period before she married my father. My father, on the other hand, said my mother lived with her father and brothers, not with any aunts. Such are the limitations of having to rely on oral histories.)
The Oceanic was only 5 years old in 1904, built in Belfast in 1899 by the shipyard that was later to build the Titanic, the Harland & Wolff shipyard (of Leon Uris’ Trinity fame). When launched, she was the largest ship in the world and was still the longest ship at 705 feet when Dennis boarded her for America. He was a steerage passenger. There was a lively competition among steamship lines for steerage passengers and, in 1904, the steerage fare (on some ships at least) was only 2 ₤ or about $10. Dennis was one of almost 60,000 Irish emigrants that year who departed Ireland for destinations outside of Europe and the Mediterranean, generally the U. S., Canada, Australia or New Zealand.
How did it happen that he ‘left hearth and home’ for a country far away? Did he go alone? Did he walk across the mountains of south Kerry and west Cork to Cobh? Even today there is only one rail line in County Kerry from Tralee to Farranfore to Killarney to Rathmore and points east, all towns considerably north of Kilgarvan. Cobh is only about 70 miles east southeast of Kilgarvin, now only an hour and a half drive along N22, the Killarney-Macroom-Cork highway, but in 1904, traveling that distance over the challenging terrain of counties Kerry and Cork on foot must have been taxing, even for a young man.
In any event, I know nothing of Dennis’ early life other than he was married to Catherine (or Katherine) O’Shea, also an Irish immigrant, sometime before October 2, 1918 when, as a resident of Taconite in Itasca County, Minnesota, he executed a Declaration of Intention ‘to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince . . . particularly George V, King of Great Britain and Ireland, of whom I am now a subject . . . [and] to become a citizen of the United States of America and to reside permanently therein.” He gave his occupation as ‘pipefitter’, which would indicate welding skills, and 3½ years later, his occupation was listed as “plumber” on the Itasca County birth registry for my mother, but as far as I knew as I was growing up, he was a common laborer, not a skilled tradesman. Prior to 1922, wives did not execute separate Declarations of Intention; thus, I have no clue about Catherine’s place of birth, other than “Ireland.’ I seem to have a vestigial memory, however, that her roots were in County Cork. As to her age, my Aunt Monica informs me that, according to Dennis, Catherine was considerably younger than he was, a typical Irish marriage, but the birth registry for my mother gives her age as 35 when my mother was born, only a year or so younger than Dennis. The anecdotal evidence from my aunt, however, supports the statement on the Oceanic’s Manifest of Alien Passengers that Dennis was born in 1880, which would have made him 42 when my mother was born.
Dennis and Catherine had five children: Cornelius James (called ‘Jim’), born in Chicago on January 25, 1918 (according to his Navy discharge papers); Donald (called ‘Bud’), place and date of birth unknown, but probably Grand Rapids, Minnesota: Mary Norma my mother, born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota on April 15, 1922; and Dennis Brendan (called ‘Bim’) born in Chicago on November 22, 1923 (according to his Certificate of Baptism executed in 1931. The fifth child must have died at birth or in infancy before the births of my mother and my Uncle Bim, for the birth registry states that my mother was Catherine’s fourth child. In 1927 or 1928, when my mother was 5 years old, her mother died of pernicious anemia, an autoimmune deficiency (perhaps hereditary) causing non-absorption of vitamin B-12 needed for red blood cell production. The timing of her death was particularly tragic, for in 1926 scientists had discovered that regular feeding of liver was effective in treating pernicious anemia and in 1928, a chemist at Harvard succeeded in producing a liver extract that was 50 to 100 times more potent than simply eating liver. Pernicious anemia ceased to be a fatal disease just as my mother’s mother was dying from it. Dennis never remarried.
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