by Cynthia Wands

Betty and Charlie Dolan, my paternal grandparents, around 1918

I recently traveled to Ireland and England, my first international travel in many years, and returned as a different person. I suspected that this journey would change me, but I was surprised at my intense internal struggle as I tried to adapt between me and my (travel sized) demons.

Thanks to the generosity of a dear friend, I was able to travel the Irish countryside, drink beer and listen to Irish music in pubs, and investigate leads to my mother’s family. “The Lost Dolans”, my grandfather’s family from Ireland, have always been a missing link in our ancestry, with many stories and wild claims that could never be tracked down. Now I was actually in the country of my mother’s family for the first time, and I hoped to find some connections.

Ancestry can be such an emotionally charged arena; there were hopes to find dissolved family ties, names that would refocus our Dolan legacy, and also, a discovery of a few fine country mansions and discretely wealthy family members. Dear Reader, I did not find these.

Instead I found that thousands of Dolans fled the island during The Great Hunger, a famine that decimated the island between1845-1852. The migration of over 2 million people by 1855 changed Ireland – and my grandfather’s family seems to have immigrated sometime, in phases, during the late 1800’s. I already knew that Charlie Dolan, my grandfather, was one of 13 children, had a twin sister, and was actually born in New York, not Ireland, and served in the United States Navy in WWI.

There was an evening in the Brazen Head Pub in Dublin, (I know, those Irish pub names!) where I was moaning about the fact that I was at a loss of finding my Dolan family roots.

Suddenly the fellow at the table right next us, overheard me, leans back and says to me, “I’m a Dolan.”

Yes, he was. Shaun Dolan is from Australia and he was in Ireland looking for his Dolan roots, and had researched a “Dolan’s Bar” in Clara, up in County Offaly. He had just been there, and suggested we asked for Dessie, Dessie Dolan, who owned the place. That’s the thing about Ireland: you can find a part of your family who went to Australia, and they’ll tell you the bar to go to so you can get more family information. So the next day we went to Dolan’s Bar in Clara.

So I did meet with Dessie Dolan and his beautiful wife, and I can tell you that they were wonderful people, and after a good 30 minutes of besieging them with questions about their Dolan family legacy, we agreed that a Charlie Dolan, an ancestor of his, could have been a distant ancestor of my grandfather. I’d like to go back to Dolan’s Bar in Clara; they have live music at night, and it seemed like a wonderful place. Dessie suggested we look for his brother’s place in Blacklion, County Cavan, at the Dugout, a pub where we could find more information about the Dolans. So we drove over to Blacklion and the Dugouot and- well. Here’s where we realized that we were playing whack-a-mole pub style. We could probably go to every pub in the midlands and find a connection to a Dolan family member.

And that was the end of my Dolan research. There are no church records, or civil register records of my branch of Dolan family that came from County Cork to Upstate New York. So we went on to have more adventures in Ireland, and I know I’ll meet up with more Dolans in my future travels.

And even though I didn’t find more of my Dolan family history, I did find some surprising lessons in adapting strategies. I found that having the courage of my curiosities to pursue the unknown, that I had to trust that sometimes, you just don’t find the answers you’re looking for, but you might find some different questions.

The next week, I was in London and I had a chance to see the Irish play “Juno and the Paycock”, by Sean O’Casey at the Gielgud Theatre. The production had mixed reviews, with the actor Mark Rylance portraying a “drunken fantasist” in a tragicomedy that features a tortured Irish family caught up in poverty and war. It was brutally funny, tragically bleak, fascinating and hard to watch.

Watching a play about an impoverished Irish family, having just attempted to find more information on my own impoverished Irish family, made for a strange dissonance. I could appreciate the performances and I was also far away, thinking of my Irish ancestors, and their struggle for survival.

In my writing I often think about molecular memory – the body memory – the platform in which our DNA dances to the tune of their biochemistry. The documented history of my Irish family remains beyond my grasp, but I carry them with me.