Denise in Donegal

I come from a Philadelphia family that rarely talked about its Irish roots. When I was very young, I asked my Great-Aunt Grace—foreboding matriarch of the Heary clan and my grandfather’s sister—where in Ireland her parents had come from. “That doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “We’re Americans.”

Fortunately, other family members were more forthcoming (and much less snappish) so, six years ago, I found myself laying flowers on the grave of my great-great grandparents, Cornelius and Grace (O’Donnell) McDaid, in a little churchyard on the Inishowen Peninsula in Donegal, the northernmost tip of Ireland. A day later, I was standing outside the small, whitewashed cottage in Ballyharry where my great-great grandparents raised their nine children, just a few miles from the sea. My great-grandmother’s niece, Grace Doherty, greeted me; she had raised her own five children in the same house. She remembered her father’s stories of the ones who went away—William and John to New York, my great grandmother Mary and her sister, Catherine, to Philadelphia. From the fields where we now stood, her father told her, Cornelius McDaid, an illiterate farmer, would watch the ships carrying his four children steam across Tremone Bay, on their way to America. He never saw them again.

Grace invited us inside for tea. While a peat fire burned in the stove, she laid out the kitchen table for us. There were muffins, her own rhubarb jam, bread, butter, tea—all on blue and white Willowware. It was just like afternoon tea at Aunt Grace’s rowhouse in West Oak Lane, right down to the dinnerware pattern. I smiled. No matter how hard Aunt Grace had tried to eradicate her Irish roots, it had ultimately been futile. Even her name—Grainne in Gaelic—is embedded in our family, shared by her grandmother, my mother, the Irish cousin she never knew, and her grandnephew’s daughter who is Katherine Grace Foley, 9 years old. And if you come to my house, you’ll have tea on blue and white Willowware.

For a long time after we left Ballyharry, I felt homesick for a place that is not my home. And, the truth is, I still do feel that way. Which is why I take every opportunity to listen to the music, eat the food, drink the beer, immerse myself in the culture, and add more branches to my Irish family tree. Fortunately, we live in a city where the Irish are the second largest ethnic group. Here, you can get Guinness on tap, an authentic Irish stew, a decent brown bread (mine is better), and hear real Irish music just about any night of the week. It isn’t Ballyharry, but it feels like home.

—Denise Foley