Greetings, friends. (XXVI)

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about something that went right last weekend!

Besha and I are planning a trip to Ireland for her birthday in April, a place to which neither of us have been. Ireland has particularly been at the top of her bucket list for some time, because Besha is an avid genealogist, and she has maternal ancestors who hailed from County Clare.

So our vacation plan, currently, is to visit Dublin for a few days, and then rent a vehicle and spend the rest of the trip exploring Ireland by car and on foot, with special attention paid to Clare and the Burren.

As it happens, I also have ancestors from Ireland. My paternal grandfather’s mother was a lass named Mae Mullen, or so I thought, and she was born in Ireland, or so I thought.

I have only one black-and-white photo of Grandma Mae, but my grandfather Luther was known exclusively by the nickname “Red”. This nickname was evidently so apt that I think no one in his entire adult life but his mother and the United States Army called him “Luther”.

By the time I met him, what little hair he had left had long since turned white, but obviously Granddad Red is the reason my father and I had red(dish) beards in our youth, and part of why my sister Kate has auburn hair. So yeah, we’re pretty Irish.

After hearing Besha talk about her ancestors, the McTigues of County Clare, a somewhat colorful lot, I fairly begged her to find out where my great-grandmother was from. If it proved to be anywhere near the Burren, I wanted to see it.

Now, my grandfather’s paternal line, the Erles, are a branch of a very large clan descended from a family of German immigrants to Pennsylvania in the mid 18th Century, the Hunsingers. Some enterprising Hunsingers in years past have documented the clan extensively. I can no longer find the original database online, but I think there are something like 10,000 of us, mostly still in northern Pennsylvania. I believe some of you reading this may even know other Hunsingers.

(Apparently I could claim membership in the Sons of the American Revolution, if I had in mind to do such a thing. I’ve talked about the martial history of the Erle family in other wars elsewhere.)

Grandma Mae’s family, by contrast, was always a bit of a mystery. The Hunsinger database had nothing on her family, since she married in quite late, relatively speaking. Mae herself was listed by name only, with no other detail.

So Besha took up the case, and found both more and less than I expected.

First off, her proper given name was apparently Effie Mae? Which is still pretty Irish, but Grandma Mae was not herself an immigrant. Probably my father already knew this. Again, I wonder where I get these fragmented half-facts about my ancestors from.

No, Effie Mae Mullen was born in 1887 in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Merritt and Minerva, née Ross. Merritt was born in 1857, also in Pennsylvania, to James Francis Mullen and his wife Mary. James Francis was born in 1834, possibly to a Patrick Mullen, and it is Patrick, born 1778, who was from the old country, specifically County Cork. This last link is surmise; another genealogist has recorded Patrick as Great-great-great-grandfather James’s father, but Besha couldn’t find documentation.

Besha did find, however, record of an application by a James Mullen, wife Mary, for a Civil War veteran’s pension, listing his unit as the 109th Pennsylvania Infantry, Company A. But there are three Privates James Mullen listed in the muster rolls of the 109th, in three different companies, none of them Company A, with three different muster dates. Same private, shuffled around the unit at different points in the war? Or three totally different Irishmen? No fewer than seven James Mullens were listed in Pennsylvania in the 1890 special Veteran’s Census, and quite possibly more than one of them was married to a Mary. We are Irish, after all.

If the Private James Mullen of the 109th — or, at any rate, one of them — is my James Mullen, well, I’ll just say that I’d be proud of him, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be him. The record says his unit fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. On the latter battlefield there is a granite monument to his unit.

James named his first son William Warren Mullen. For General G. K. Warren, the “Savior of Little Round Top,” perhaps? We will probably never know.

William Warren Mullen, Merritt’s older brother, had a son by the name of Cecil who also lived a pretty colorful life. He is named in the local newspaper in 1914 as having been shot in the forehead after exchanging unpleasantries with a gang of street toughs. In 1917, presumably already recovered from his earlier head wound, Private Cecil Mullen went off to fight in France, where his unit wound up in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, along with the 315th Infantry — the unit that later became my father’s — and about 1.2 million other American soldiers. Cecil came home, never married, and his only other appearance in print was many years later, detailing his death in 1948 at the hands of a hit-and-run driver (later found and convicted) while walking home from a hospital. Why was Cousin Cecil walking home from a hospital along the side of a road at dusk? We will probably never know.

While expanding the family tree in search of confirmatory evidence, Besha found that Merritt and Minerva had a granddaughter, also named Minerva, who married a man named Wolfe. It was at this point that Besha looked up from her computer, and, in an absolute deadpan, said “Who’s afraid of Minerva Wolfe?”

Not I. The younger Minerva passed away in 1962, but had we ever met, we would be third cousins, twice removed… or about one degree shy of perfect strangers.

But I was speaking of Grandma Mae. The vagaries of the primary genealogical record are such that the wheres and the whats are sometimes recorded, but with only the most tantalizing clues as to the why. At the age of 13, Effie Mae, the eldest of her siblings, is listed in the 1900 Census as the “adoptive daughter” of her cousin’s grandparents, her relatives only by marriage. But her birth family is listed in the same census, along with her younger siblings, still living elsewhere in Clearfield County. Why? We will probably never know.

Whatever it was that happened when she was a child, it might have contributed to why none of her own descendants liked her very much. My father said of her, “She was rather mean and miserable. Played her sons against each other. She apparently made life hard between [my father’s] Mom and Dad. She died in my mother’s house because she’d worn out her welcome with the rest of Dad’s family.”

How’s that for remembering people for who they really were!

Actually, what I said to my father was, “Well, I’ve always wondered where we all got our touchiness and our hair-trigger tempers from.”

Such is generational trauma. My father didn’t get along well with his father. Maybe it was partly because my grandfather himself had such a terrible mother. Maybe that was partly because of something traumatic that happened to Grandma Mae when she was a child, as the record hints might have been the case. We will probably never know.

I am deeply grateful to Besha for this window into my ancestry that I never had before. I think she loves genealogy for the thrill of the hunt, the gumshoe detective work, the piecing together of primary sources to form the jigsaw mosaic of a clan… but what fascinates me about genealogy most of all are the clues it offers about who we are today.

If you’re reading this, I send my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. More tomorrow.