“Do ya think y’ll ever go back, Kenny?” my grandfather asked me. I was ten-years-old, and the two of us were in his basement workshop. I was puzzled. “Go back where, Grampa?” I asked him. He stopped what he was doing. He looked up from his workbench, “To the o-o-old country”; he answered with a smile. I don’t remember the remainder of his story, just that he had fascinated me with a far off land called “Ireland.” Over the years, I began to create a role for myself in that story.
I was born Roman Catholic; baptized “Kenneth Patrick Kerr” on St. Patrick’s Day at St. Patrick’s parish in a Boston Massachusetts suburb. All of this came together to create a story of where I believed my family to be from, how they came to the USA, and who I believed them to be. In my young mind, I came from oppressed Catholic ancestors who fled the potato famine and the oppressive Protestants.
I didn’t think much about my grandfather’s story, or the myth I built around it, until three years ago. It was then that I saw the National Geographic program about the National Genographic Project. This project uses DNA mapping technology to locate mutations on the Y chromosome. It then uses DNA archeology to identify common male ancestry. I participated in the study. When my results arrived, it challenged my story and everything I believed about my Irish ancestors. I found that I was not Catholic by ancestry—just by birth. My ancestors were Scottish Protestants who arrive in the early 1600’s as part of Queen Elizabeth’s attempt to establish a protestant majority in Northern Ireland. My great-grandfather married a Catholic and they moved to the USA to avoid social complications. My story was complete fiction.
I was recently introduced to “The Danger of the Single Story,” as explained by Nigerian-born writer and story teller, Chimamanda Adichie. She contends that we are “impressionable and vulnerable” when we encounter a new story. For Adichie, the “single story” has disproportionate power, “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.” This made me think of my own story—my own “single story” and the myth I had created. I found I was not alone when I read Martin Fletcher’s book, Silver Linings. Fletcher writes:
The great myth is that today’s Irish-Americans are all descendants of those impoverished Catholics who fled to America in 19th Century “coffin boats” to escape famine and oppression. It is a myth so strong that most Irish-Americans identify with today’s nationalists and republicans and Unionists are regarded as the bad guys.
In actuality, the majority of early Irish Americans were Presbyterians of Scottish descent (or Scotch-Irish) who were mostly poor tenant farmers who were imported into Northern Ireland to establish a protestant majority in Ulster. They were not treated much better by their Anglican landlords than the native Irish Catholics and, by the end of 1775, the 250,000 Scots-Irish comprised one-sixth of the population of the American Colonies. The emigrated for greater opportunity and were not loyal to Ireland at all cost.
That single-story, described by Fletcher, is exactly the same myth I created for myself. And now my mission is get the complete story.
