One of the games I like to play with history is to imagine myself present at an historical event of hundreds of years ago or in the presence of a noted figure from the past, such as William Shakespeare or Abraham Lincoln. The fantasy doesn’t last long and it is not unique to me. I wouldn’t mind being a time traveller, I suppose, providing a stray bullet didn’t find me during a real Civil War battle I was attending.
So when I think of my ancestral farm cottage in Ireland, it gives me a guilty pleasure to imagine myself entering that long, low stone house in County Cork in the early 1840s when all ten members of my kin, the Hegartys, were living there. I wonder what sights I would see. Would I be welcome, would I be run off?
Growing up, I always believed that my Irish ancestors were perfectly fluent in the English language. Where I was raised in Canada, we were surrounded by immigrants and I often heard the German and Dutch languages spoken, maybe others. Those languages sounded so strange to me and because I couldn’t understand a word that was being said, I clearly identified those neighbours as foreign.
But my family spoke English for hundred of years, I believed. Actually, I never even thought much about it. I took it for granted.
However, in doing the research I did for my family history book Home Again, I was assured by not one, but two men in Ireland, one of them a historian, that English would have been a second language for my ancestors. They would have known enough to get by in the business world, but would have conversed with each other and their neighbours in Irish. This astonished me, and the only indication I have that this was the case, was the story handed down about how the children of Bridget Hegarty and Timothy Regan would giggle at night to hear their parents on their knees saying their bedtime prayers in what to them were the funny sounding words of Gaelic.
So if I knocked on the door of the cottage in Coolbaun Townland near Conna in 1842, and was invited in, would I even be able to understand what my family were saying to each other and to me? Having not yet left for North America, they might wonder why this time traveller couldn’t speak their language.
I would hope for a warm welcome. I wonder if that is what I would get. What food would I eat, what drink would I drink? Would they play games I am unfamiliar with? Maybe the scene would be such a culture shock for me that I would want to get back home as soon as I could.
I wonder.
©2019 Jim Hagarty