A genealogy or family saga written as if by the hand of the author's ancestors. 

When his mother is buried, the author discovers a treasure in the attic—his ancestors’ private journals, detailing their origins in the old country, their journeys to America, their lives, and families. If we only knew how much our grandchildren would treasure such a thing, we would all do this.

This is a family saga or genealogy—a ‘fact-based fictional account’. The tale is told in first person, as if from the pen of Cornelius Collins. In Part II, son Michael James picks up the pen. Then the other side of the family’s tale is told, stonecutter Giuseppe Ambrosini.

Cornelius’s odyssey begins with An Gorta Mór—the Irish Potato Famine, one of the worst tragedies in human history. Collins’ descriptions of his ancestors’ sufferings and the horrendous ‘coffin ships’ are harrowing.

I was moved by Cornelius’ admission that the famine was so hard on him that his mind had forgotten everything that happened in his life before it.

Though the journey on the ‘coffin ship’ is terrible, immigrants in those days were treated better than they are now. On arrival in Milford, Massachusetts, bootmaking capital of America, Cornelius is immediately given food, shelter, and a job as a cordwainer (bootmaker), a sense of pride in himself. He marries, starts a family, and becomes a US citizen.

I share the author’s passion for genealogy research. The trouble with genealogies in the bookshop or Amazon, however, is they are of little interest outside your grandchildren and your cousins. Unless someone in your family is a celebrity or a serial killer, your target readership is limited. There needs to be something in your family’s history that makes readers think ‘hey, that relates to me’. ‘These people lived here, did that and had these children’ is not enough of a story.

Collins tells the story within the bigger human history in which his ancestors were players, bringing it home to his protagonists by quoting articles from the Milford Journal and the Framingham Star of the time. We also learn in detail the processes of bootmaking and stonecutting.

The Collins and Ambrosini families go through the Civil War, the abolition of slavery, the establishment of the Irish Republic, a visit from PT Barnum’s circus, the Great Depression, the misappropriation of the West from the native Americans, the invention of the telephone, votes for women, the sinking of the Titanic and WWI. Every year at Samhain (now Halloween) they hold an Cuimhneamh—‘the Remembering’—ceremony of ‘how it was with us in our time’.

The ‘poor, tired, huddled masses’ who braved all these hardships and risks to create a better life in the New World, theirs is a big story, one for all of us. 

—Susie Helm