February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
“I went in search of a family tree and I found a forest,” he said.
The end point was a large extended family in New Haven County, Conn. It began, though, in County Wexford in 1974 when he was gathering the necessary paperwork for his marriage. He learned from his baptismal certificate that he was born in Holles Street Hospital in Dublin on Oct. 29, 1929.
Carthy always knew that he’d been formally adopted. He was raised on a family farm by two sisters, Bridie and Nell Carthy, and their brother, Bill.
Another sister, Kitty Carthy Morton, brought him home to Wexford with her husband, Joe, in early 1930. She was seriously ill at the time, and died in June.
It was clear, though, from the baptismal certificate that the Mortons were not his real parents, as he’d been told.
“I was a bit suspicious when I was confirmed,” he said.
At that time, he got a glimpse of the certificate, and the baby’s name, Michael Joseph Moore, but it was sufficiently close to Morton for him to believe it was an error.
Three decades later, he saw unmistakably that his birth mother’s name was given as Annie Moore. She was 34.
At the time, Carthy went to Delvin, Co. Westmeath, the woman’s birthplace, hoping to glean more information, but he came away with little. “I was very disappointed,” he said.
He never discussed these initial efforts to find his birth mother or the subject of his adoption with the Carthys. “They were very possessive of me,” he said of his uncle and aunts, none of whom ever married.
He added that his upbringing was loving and affectionate.
“I couldn’t have asked for better guardians,” said Carthy, who has been an independent member of Wexford County Council for 40 years. “They reared me well.”
However, by 1999 his adoptive uncle and aunts were dead, and encouraged by his three adult children, he went back to Delvin.
There, someone suggested he consult Carmel Gaffney, a local publican and undertaker.
She found a ledger entry that showed that the body of a Mary Anne Moore, who died in Portadown, Co. Armagh, in 1955 was sent back to Delvin for burial. The forename wasn’t quite the same, but the age was right. The entry revealed also that she’d been married to a man named Currie.
The parish priest showed him Moore’s baptismal certificate. “He felt most of her family had emigrated,” Carthy said. These Moores were from the townland of Ballyhealy, as was Carthy’s mother.
He was directed to a man who was a third cousin of the woman. “He was most welcoming,” Carthy said. “He could remember her coming to visit his mam, once a year from her work in Dublin.”
This evidence tied the woman who died in Portadown to Dublin, where Carthy was born.
“Roots” moment
In 2000, Gaffney sent Carthy a cutting from the Westmeath Examiner that said a Tom Gallagher, grandson of a Ballyhealy Delvin immigrant named Thomas Moore, had been named grand marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New Haven, Conn., and that he was a second cousin of the parish priest in Castlepollard, Co. Westmeath.
Carthy contacted both Gallagher and the priest.
Initially, the Rev. Paddy Moore was unsure of a link because of the discrepancy in the names, but when he learned that Carthy’s mother came from Ballyhealy, he agreed that Mary Ann was Annie.
The Connecticut man recalled: “I replied to Leo, saying that my records showed that Papa Moore [his grandfather] had a sister Mary Ann Moore, who would have been about 34 when he was born.”
Gallagher contacted his aunt, Betty Cronk, Papa Moore’s surviving daughter. “She told me to hold on, and went for something upstairs. When she returned, it was with a voice of discovery,” he recalled.
Cronk had saved four long letters from her aunt Mary Anne Moore written between 1948 and 1951. Moore was then living in Northern Ireland and mourning her husband, Joseph Currie, who’d recently been lost at sea.
“I’m amazed that I kept them, because I threw out so much when I moved in with my daughter,” she said.
“So we had our own ‘Roots’ moment,” Gallagher said.
He added that when the large extended family in Connecticut saw Carthy’s picture, they knew immediately he was kin.
“It was great to find a first cousin,” Carthy said of Cronk, who is also 75.
The two, who family members say look like brother and sister, got to know each other well through e-mails, letters and telephone calls in the early years of the 21st century.
The first Christmas, Cronk gave him his mother’s letters as a gift.
Mary Ann Moore wrote to her brother in Connecticut following the death of his eldest son in 1948. “You will no doubt wonder at a letter from me,” she began.
She showed particular tenderness and concern for her sister-in-law, a woman she had never met. There was never any hint in the letters that she herself had once given birth to a son.
“I often wondered why you never write or came home,” she said to her brother.
She detailed her own circumstances. After her husband’s death, she explained, she had to “break up my home and start out in the world again.”
She became a housekeeper, taking care of an elderly man and his son, with a staff of three others, which she seemed to enjoy.
Certain foods were plentiful for those living in the countryside, but they were subject to the rigors of Northern Ireland’s post-war rationing.
“The tea is the worst problem on me, as I’m very fond of it,” she wrote.
Tom Moore’s daughter took up the American end of the correspondence.
“My father wasn’t much of a letter writer. He didn’t go very far in school,” Cronk said. “But I wrote to my aunt Mary Ann and to my aunt Janie.”
Her aunt told her: “I’m a long way from our old home.” But she visited once a year and corresponded weekly with her sister Janie, who’d raised a large family in Delvin. (Most of her children emigrated, too, to England, and Carthy has found another first cousin and other relatives there.)
Graveside prayer
Most of the news Mary Ann Moore relayed to America wasn’t good.
“Ballyhealy is like another place. All the old people are dead and gone. The last of the Gibneys was buried Christmas Day,” she wrote.
“There’s no path across the bog now,” she wrote on another occasion. “I often think of your daddy even [though] he is very far away from us.”
There had been eight Moores; Janie, Larry and Paddy (the priest’s grandfather) stayed in the home place.
“Uncle Larry, tell your father, is just like my uncle Mick was long ago. He has to walk on two sticks.”
In early 1951, she congratulated Cronk on her marriage. “I would love some pictures of you and your man, if you have some to spare.”
A few weeks later, she reported Larry’s death. “He was very good and I’m sure he has little to account for.” She was, she said, “very sad and very, very lonely for him.”
She added: “Poor Auntie Janie is very upset and I’m sure your father will be sorry too.”
Mary Ann Moore died four years later at age 60.
Almost a half a century on, Carthy visited her grave for the first time with his wife, two sons and daughter. “I asked them to go away while I said a prayer and shed a tear,” he remembered. “She had a sad life.”
The penalties for a woman bearing a child out of wedlock in Ireland in those years are well known.
Carthy remembered the local case of a farmer’s daughter who was sent to a psychiatric hospital when she gave birth.
He recalled an incident, too, at a social event when he was single.
“I saw this little girl had no dance. When I asked her up, people looked at me as I had horns on me,” he said.
Someone explained to him: “That one had a baby lately.”
Because of his high-profile involvement in numerous cultural, sporting and civic organizations, Carthy was approached to run for the county council. He worked also as a farmer, a fisherman and, for 30 years, with a local bottling company.
He’s now one of the longest-serving elected officials in Ireland. In 1999, University College Dublin conferred an honorary degree on him for his life contribution to Irish culture.
Instant bond
His American relatives are delighted to have connected with their long-lost relative. “He’s the most charming and wonderful man,” said Patty Gallagher Boyne, who stayed with Carthy and his wife, Anne, in their bed and breakfast in County Wexford.
She regrets that he didn’t find the family sooner. “It’s such a shame. My parents were in Ireland and didn’t know about him,” she said.
On both sides, her family had always stayed in touch with its Irishness.
“My father was an Irish tenor; I was a step dancer,” Gallagher Boyne said.
Now the extended Moore family found an Irish nephew of its patriarch, who set out from County Westmeath at age 17 in 1906.
“This is a real connection for me,” Gallagher Boyne said.
Her brother said he formed an instant bond with his cousin. “We finish each other’s sentences,” Tom Gallagher said.
Last year, he invited Carthy to his daughter Aimee’s wedding in County Kerry. There, the Wexford politician met many of his American cousins for the first time.
“There was no shyness,” Betty Cronk said. “He just put his arms around me. I felt I knew him all my life.”
“My wife’s from a long-tailed family, but I had nobody,” Carthy said. “I’m delighted to have found all these relatives.”
His children — aged 28, 27 and 25 — are “over the moon,” he said.
On a recent car journey to County Cavan, his younger son stopped to visit Mary Ann Moore’s grave in Delvin.
“I thought that was a nice touch,” Leo Carthy said. “I don’t claim to be a saint, but I go to her grave as often as I can. And I pray for her every night.”