I don’t even know why I’m telling you all of this, except that so many of you have become my community over the years. I share things here much the same way I would if you were sitting in my living room, and this woman is one of the most important people who ever came into my life.
On my first trip to Ireland in 2003, I was doing genealogy and stopped in the little town of Enniscorthy in County Wexford. I asked a woman in a shop if she knew where I could find a fairy ring. She told me most people her age and younger didn’t believe in fairies anymore, but said the man in the jumper pumping petrol might know.
Well, first I had to figure out what a jumper was. I was looking for something like the jumper I wore to school, basically a dress with a shirt underneath it. I finally figured out that in Ireland a jumper is a sweater, found the man pumping petrol and asked him about a fairy ring.
He told me I needed to find a woman named Gretta and proceeded to tell me where she lived. Now where I come from, you don’t just drive to some stranger’s house, knock on her door and announce that you’re looking for fairies. But I was in Ireland, so that is exactly what I did.
This tiny little older lady answered the door and I explained why I was there. What I didn’t know was that I had just knocked on the door of a well-known local historian who had written books about Irish history and knew more about that part of Ireland than I could have learned in years on my own. I have always believed that meeting was both fortuitous and divine intervention because that one knock on a stranger’s door changed every trip I would make to Ireland afterward.
Well off we went the next day. She took me to one of the great fairy rings in Wexford, and before I went into it she told me to mind my step and follow behind her. She told me about the fairies, the Druids and the old beliefs connected to the land. She showed me Druid graves and places where Catholic priests secretly held Mass in the old days when they had to hide from the British. She took me to places connected to the old kings of Ireland and told me the history while I was actually standing on the ground where it happened.
We went to Huntington Castle and walked with me through the famous Yew Tree Walk where one of those magical Ireland things happened I will tell you another time. There are places in Ireland where I can stand among those ancient trees and stones and feel something I simply cannot explain. Ireland is the most spiritual country I have ever been to, and yes, I have been to Israel. Israel was deeply spiritual to me because of my faith, but Ireland was different. Ireland was the land of my ancestors. There is something about putting my feet on the same ground where my own people were born, lived, worshiped, struggled and died that touches a completely different part of me. Sometimes Ireland has felt less like a country I was visiting and more like a place I somehow remembered.
On another trip she eventually took me all the way to County Mayo to find the places connected to my McNally ancestors. One day I was walking down a street in Ballina, where my great-great-grandfather came from before leaving Ireland in 1859 during the famine era on one of the coffin ships, when an elderly gentleman came up to me and said, “You are a McNally.”
I had never seen this man before. He didn’t know my name and I wasn’t wearing anything that identified me as a McNally. I always tried to blend in when I went to Ireland, and I didn’t do too bad of a job until I opened my mouth and everybody figured out I was an American. But somehow this man looked at me and knew. I still can’t explain that one.
One another trip she took me into little Catholic parishes in tiny villages and helped me find the actual genealogical records of my family. She has driven all over western and eastern Ireland with me and shown me places I never would have known existed. I have sat in her home having wonderful tea and biscuits, and I mean Irish biscuits, not the big American biscuits we put gravy on. I have learned more about Ireland sitting beside her and listening to her than I ever could have learned from books.
I have seen her every single time I have returned to Ireland, and we still write to each other. She once told me that she believed she and I had been friends for many lifetimes. I know some people reading this won’t believe in fairies or Druids or strange encounters with elderly men who somehow know your family name. Some people certainly won’t believe that two people can meet for the first time and somehow feel as though they have known one another forever. That’s okay. I can only tell you what happened to me and what I felt.
I believe God sent me to her door that day in 2003. I went looking for a fairy ring and instead found someone who became the mother of my heart, the kind of mother I had always wanted. She knew my heart when I knocked on her door, and more than twenty years later she still knows it.
This picture of us was taken at St. Mullins cemetery. She was doing what she has done so many times over the years, standing beside me and explaining the history of the place, the fairies, the Druids and the people who had walked that ground long before either of us.
Maybe that is the best way I can explain what Ireland means to me. I traveled thousands of miles looking for my ancestors, stopped in a little town and asked where I could find a fairy ring, and ended up knocking on the door of someone I somehow felt I had known forever.
Of all the things I have found while researching my family history, she was the one thing I wasn't looking for.
And she may have been the most important thing I found.