Reuniting with Family

I spent five days back in Western Massachusetts for the Cherry Hill Seminary Summer Intensive, followed by a meeting of most of the Administrative Committee. Upon my mother's recent death, I had phoned several relatives who don't have email. One was my cousin Blake S. I knew he lived in Maine and found a phone number for a Blake S. in Maine, so I called it. Blake himself answered. We talked for a long time, and when he learned I'd be coming to New England the weekend following Mother's memorial, he said he wanted to drive down to visit me if I could carve out a few hours.

I did the carving and he the driving. I left New Jersey in June of 1959, when he was only 8 years old. It had been nearly half a century since we'd seen each other. I'm not even sure we saw each other before my family left the area, so it may have been a full half century. In any case, both of us are orphans now. Further, he has no siblings nor paternal cousins. His mother Catherine was my mother Elizabeth's younger sister. He and I are both Van Tines. Here we are together in middle age in Marin and Adair's kitchen at AzureGreen:


Photo by Holli Emore

Mom at 97

Elizabeth V. O'Brien, January 19, 2008
Photo by Catherine O'Brien

Life is flying by too fast for me to take a breath and blog. Last Saturday afternoon Corby and I visited my mother to celebrate her 97th birthday. My sister Catherine took this photo earlier in the day. She's not happy. We are caught in the middle of the nightmare of US health care and insurance limitations. We don't know what more we can do to make her life more pleasant. Below is her photo at her 90th birthday party.

My Irish Grandparents

This is a photo of my paternal Irish grandparents. I never knew my grandfather, Edward Joseph O'Brien, because he died before I was born. He was born into an Irish immigrant farm family in Moorestown, New Jersey.

My grandmother, whom we called Mom-Mom, was Kate Reilly from Ballinasloe, Co. Galway, Ireland. An orphan taken in with her siblings after her parents' deaths by her mother's sister Una, who already had a houseful of kids to feed, Mom-Mom came to Moorestown when she was about 19 or 20 under the sponsorship of a loving Quaker family. She served in their household until she worked off the cost of her passage.

Her sisters and brothers went to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, PA, and to Australia. Kate married Ed and together they had nine children, six girls and three boys. My father was the second boy, but one of the youngest children, just before John and Catherine, both of whom had bright red hair and freckles. My dad took after the black Irish side, with that light creamy skin and dark hair and eyes.

Although Mom--Mom was old and wrinkly and frail when I knew her, I always felt close to her and felt I resembled her a bit. She grew up speaking Gaelic. I often asked her to teach me, but she never did. They were nice Roman Catholics who probably preferred to assimilate.

What is remembered lives!