Twenty or so years ago, on a links golf course on Ireland’s west coast, a local caddy asked me about my own links to the area. I told him what little I knew about my greatX4 grandfather on my mother’s side. He called to a caddy the fairway over, and pointed to me: “He’s a Listowel boy!”
I hadn’t thought of myself that way before, but have on occasion ever since, to the erratic degree the thought holds meaning. I’m a Listowel boy. I’ve been there once, just long enough to discover that the church in the town square has become a performance space (not such a conversion, that) and Carmody, my sister’s married name, is prominent there. She liked hearing that.
I’m a Listowel boy. A golf caddy called that out loud enough for the other caddy and the ancestors to hear, through a howling wind coming off the Atlantic. I’ll call him Seamus, as there’s a measure of shame in this story. If that’s not stating the obvious in a tale of Irish Catholic migration.
Seamus said two things that day that stayed with me over time. The other was when he talked me out of hitting a 3-iron off the tee of a long par-4. It was my first and only time on the course, and I meant to lay up short of a hazard that ran across the fairway. He scoffed. “Hit everything you’ve got,” he said. “You’ll never get there in this wind.” So I hit driver, a low screamer that carried no more than 200 yards before landing and bouncing and rolling and rolling until Seamus looked away and the ball disappeared into the hazard, never to be seen again.
I’d like to think later that day, at the pub down the road from the golf course, the regulars heard about the Listowel boy who reached the unreachable hazard. Probably never happened. Connecting with the ancestors is like that. You need a caddy’s help to find the strays.
My greatX4 grandfather was Michael Costello. He was 43 when he sailed from Cork Harbor to Quebec in 1825 with his wife Honora and kids ages 8 to 24, among them my greatX3 grandfather Daniel. Michael survived little more than a year after migrating, leaving his wife with seven (ship record) to nine kids (various sources via Ancestry.com).
The conditions of the Costellos’ crossing are captured in this description of a small family on the same boat: “(father) came on board sickly, took fever 2nd June, died at Quebec hospital; wife took sick shortly after, produced a child in the 8th month convalescent at Quebec – hurried off to Lachine, arrived on Saturday evening; took dangerously sick on Sunday and died at 12 on Tuesday – child died and was buried at Kingston; two boys and two girls – very fine children are left orphans; I left 8 dollars belonging to them in Mr. Reades charge; their chest by some mistake has been left at Quebec.” (http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/passengerlists/amity1825.htm)
I wonder if Michael and Honora knew that family. And what came of the kids? Were they Listowel boys and girls? Whose ancestors are they and what did they inherit? On the shipping record of the Amity, Michael is identified as a farmer and “a good honest well-meaning creature.” I’d like to think I’m a creature in that mold.
Michael may also have been a deserter, though this is one of those stray facts I need an ancestral caddy for. He may have been one of the last Wild Geese.
Irish soldiers who fought other people’s wars on the European continent from the 16th through early 19th centuries are remembered as the Wild Geese. A Michael Costello was among the last of these Irish fighters. So was Michi Costello. Ancestry.com has unearthed records for both of them, and I suspect they’re the same person and might have been my greatX4 grandfather. They may be no relation. Michael/Michi is listed as a deserter in Belgium. In the Napoleonic and other wars on the continent, there were as many reasons to desert as there were deserters. In some battles, is desertion simply a harsher word for migrating to somewhere better? As an Irishman, Michael wasn’t fighting his own war in the first place.
Thomas Meagher yearned for his Irish to fight for their own nation. Meagher is the subject of “The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero.” For Meagher, the Wild Geese were a model for the revolution he dreamed of for Ireland. He was born in Ireland at roughly the same time Michael Costello and his family were leaving the poverty and persecution for something better. Timothy Egan’s book provided me with invaluable insight into the time and circumstances of the migration. Egan titled a previous book “The Worst Hard Time,” and yet I can’t imagine anything worse than the 1820s Ireland he describes in “The Immortal Irishman.”
Egan writes: “The small potato farms, worked by the peasant class, were not idyllic in any sense. In the rural areas, half the families of Ireland lived in single-room, windowless hovels. Huts were of thatched roofs over sod, the walls made of dried mud that liquified in the rain, with beds of straw, floors of packed dirt, a table serving as the one piece of furniture, a hearth smoky from smoldering peat — and a pig in one corner, a family’s prized possession.”
Egan ties what the Irish migrant left and came to through this quote from Gustave de Beaumont: “I have seen the Indian in the forest, and the negro in his chains and thought that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness, but did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland. An entire nation of paupers is what never was seen until it was shown in Ireland.”
I may never determine whether the Michael Costello who was my greatX4 grandfather is also the Michael Costello of the Wild Geese. The time and place are right. But knowing matters less, really, than understanding what the Costellos left and how they began anew. Egan’s book provided an invaluable sense of that.
Amid my ancestors, I tend to confuse the tragic lives of Michael Costello and Francis Young. Both boarded ships for what became Canada in Cork Harbor around the same time, in Spring 1825. Both were among Peter Robinson Settlers, their moves funded by the British man for whom Peterborough, Ontario is named. Both had more kids than money. One migrated as a recently widowed father of nine (Young), the other left his wife a widow shortly after arriving in Canada (Costello).
I am drawn to that shared experience of loss. What is the legacy of loss, for children whose mother died just before a trans-Atlantic move, or whose father died just after? Those two families, Costellos and Youngs, would come together to give life to my grandmother, Bibiana Costello, aka Beebe, aka Bridget. She would marry a man born two months after his father died in a logging accident, and who would later die on the operating table, leaving Beebe a single mom with five kids. My mother was a child when her dad died, and she carried that loss with her until the day she died. Leaving her own home in Alberta for the Southern California where I grew up just added to it.
Loss isn’t only about dying. Migration, even with hope of a better life, can be loss, too. So much, so many are left behind.
Though she’d never been, Mom didn’t need a caddy to tell her she was a Wicklow girl.
A human being (v.) 