All In The Family 

This month, I’m talking about family, which for me means celebrating that long, illustrious line of Irish peat farmers I’m descended from. Yup, with the exception of that one French guy who walked over the border from Quebec and straight into a job as a bobbin tender in the Lowell, MA mills, the majority of my family came from Ireland to take up residence in the states. 

Including these people, my mother’s great-grandparents, Felix and Ellen. Happy couple, huh? You’d think being from a place whimsically named Limerick they could crack the tiniest of smiles.

Kidding aside, these folks had a hard life, facing famine and religious oppression. No wonder they, like immigrants today, left the peat farm behind and came to the US, looking for a better life. Also like newcomers today (especially today), it wasn’t always easy for them here. They faced “No Irish Need Apply” prejudice and a continued struggle for economic security. As I write about them in My Bicentennial, my memoir-ish, coming-of-age novel set in 1976, “[my ancestors] fled abject poverty in Ireland to come to America and be only mildly poor in Massachusetts.”

Nevertheless, they persevered.

 

And so did this woman, the intrepid Nellie Kelley (my great grandmother, from whom I borrowed half my pen name). She boarded a ship at the age of 16 and traveled alone to Boston and a new life. Like the guy from Quebec, she too worked in the Lowell mills until she married a man whose family had landed at Plymouth Rock a whole lot of years before she immigrated from the old country.

Their daughter met the son of the guy from Quebec while attending a high school on the banks of the Nashua River. They spent the next 55 years celebrating perpetual happy hour, swilling gin martinis, partying, and driving around in crappy cars that tended to break down on country roads.

 

Somehow they found a moment to bring my mother into the world. A bookish introvert as allergic to partying as my grandparents were addicted to it, she wanted to go to college but Gramps put the kibosh on that with a firm, “Girls don’t go to college, they get married.”

So she did, getting hitched to my dad, who worked in a factory and had hair that turned as white as a cotton ball when he was in his 20s. I never knew why but I had some fun with it in My Bicentennial: “I liked to imagine he got trapped in a haunted house and the ghosts scared his hair white, though there was probably a more boring explanation.” Dad was hilariously funny and immensely sociable but didn’t like to party. He preferred to drink alone.

So, now we’ve reached me. A conglomeration of the peat farmers, the guy from Quebec, the one that stepped on Plymouth Rock, the intrepid Nellie Kelley, and my shy mother and funny father. A born observer (a polite word for terminally nosy), I’ve been writing stories my whole life, but My Bicentennial is the first time I wrote my family's story, warts and all. The difficult years, the struggle of living in public housing, my brother’s disability and multiple surgeries, our ups and downs, our fights and our many laughs, and most impactful of all, my father’s slide deeper and deeper into a bottle as time went by.

I set out to write the story of a high school girl struggling to understand who she is (and score a date to the prom). Seems I was on my own journey of discovery too.

 

Author Evie Kelley scribbles angsty Young Adult Sci-Fi and stories set in the era of mood rings, platform shoes and the eternal debate of who’s cuter, Starsky or Hutch. She also writes WWII-set historical suspense and romantic time travel adventures as Janet Raye Stevens.

Find My Bicentennial Here