The scarcity principle being what it is, I long to know more about my family history simply because there's so little of it. Most of my great-grandparents are only names on paper, reduced from flesh and blood to the carved characters on a tombstone.
So I went about it the old-fashioned way, I went to the local library. Googling proves remarkably ineffective when you're talking about folks who have been dead for a hundred years or more.
My great-great grandfather's story is my favorite. He escaped the potato blight in Ireland and bought eighty acres in Western Ohio for $100. (That's about $2,100 today.) The land was so wild he had to mark the barks of trees when he went somewhere to avoid getting lost - which means he had to clear that land in order to farm it. He had saved the money from working for a year and a half on the Miami-Erie canal, hard labor indeed. Forty years later oil was discovered and five wells went up. From poverty to minor Jed Clampett status in one lifetime, definitely the American story.
Being a "Settler" means it was difficult to attend Mass. You had to either travel great distances or hope for a missionary priest to visit. One did, a Fr. Henneberry, who was born in Ireland in 1830. He celebrated Mass at my great-great grandfather's house on St. Patrick's Day, 1857. There's something neat about the definitive. I know definitively (more or less - I wasn't there) that the priest pictured below was at a certain place at a certain time. I don't know why it would make a difference, but somehow it does. It's like praying for someone in which you imagine where they are this instant in time, doing whatever they are doing, and asking God they receive a blessing at that moment. It makes the prayer come alive.
Fr. Henneberry was a traveling missionary. He ended up in far-flung places like South Africa and New Zealand. And he put the "zeal" in New Zealand. When politicians there voted for compulsory secular education he didn't mince words: "If you have Catholic faith and Catholic hearts within you, you will never give a vote to any of these infidels, whom Almighty God will send to hell some day for leading a whole generation away from religion."
Fr. Henneberry
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