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Irish Through and Through Part 2

4/22/2017

I know the names of all sixteen of my great, great grandparents. I suspect that many people alive today cannot access this information without a fair degree of work. Looking at this family tree above, what immediately strikes you is the large number of Irish names. In other words, Irish people marrying Irish people. When my Aunt Karen conducted research on our heritage many years back, she found a very large number of Irish names, both as direct relatives of mine and those who married into the family: Mahoney; McGrath; Fouhy; Burke; O'Neill; O’Doherty; Murphy; Keating; Collins; O’Loughlin; Barry; O’Brien; Mullany; O’Keefe; Riordan; Kennedy; Driscoll; Lenihan; O’Donoghue; Power; Walsh; Ryan; O’Brien; Dowd; Heffernan; Toomey; Buckley; Vaughan; O’Meara; McFadden; McGinn; McCarthy; and O’Farrell. This is why the ethnicity estimate of 78% Irish does not at all surprise me. For the rest of this entry I will relate the Ancestry.com test results with what I already know about my family history.

Let's start with Mary Anne Cashin, pictured here, one of my great, great grandmothers on my mother's side. She lived from 1861-1901 and was from Waterford County, Ireland. To my knowledge this is the oldest known photograph of anyone in my family. Mary Anne, her husband, Maurice, and one of their sons, Michael, migrated to the United States. As the photograph below shows, Michael became an officer in the San Francisco Police Department.

The red circle in Michael Flynn's registration card for the WWI draft reveals that he was a "naturalized" citizen and not native-born.

The archetype of the Irish cop, much like the drunk and intemperate Irishman, is an old one in America. You'll find it in all of the Irish last names in the somewhat ironically named and reactionary "Blue Lives Matter" movement, as well as David Simon's The Wire, a television series in the early 2000s that took place in Baltimore. I can't say that I have expertise in this area, so others can feel free to correct me. But the basic story is this...when the Irish came over, they had few job prospects, the dominant, Anglo-Saxon majority questioned their Catholicism and "whiteness," and unlike German immigrants, few Irish had money to move out west, which is one reason why there are still so many Irish Americans in the American Northeast. The Irish found refuge in the Democratic Party political machines in urban areas. New York's Tammany Hall was perhaps the most famous, though the Daleys of Chicago surely must have relied on strong Irish support. While justifiably criticized for permitting the interlocking characteristics of trading favors, prostitution, and prodigious alcohol consumption, the party machines did provide a tangible benefit to the Irish American community in jobs and participation in the political process, which was at least nominally democratic in the small 'd' sense of the term. Closed off from other career opportunities and relegated to the bottom of the social ladder among whites, Irish Americans found in the police force a suitable career. This was a job that the political machines could dole out. And for over a hundred-year period from roughly the mid-19th century to the election of JFK, the Irish were loyal Democrats, beholden to the party machines that traded jobs for votes. I know from teaching both US and California history that the voting preferences of Irish Americans were one reason that Woodrow Wilson initially kept the US out of WWI (Irish Americans would not have supported a war fought on behalf of the British, their colonial oppressors) and unfortunately, they were also a driving force behind the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Racism seems almost synonymous with the white, working-class in America (Trump anyone?) and the Irish, perhaps at least in part because of the economic insecurity they faced, clung to traditional, exclusionary, and morally problematic positions that would theoretically elevate them above the social status of non-white peoples. Thus, the historian in me, in a valiant but fleeing attempt to be as fair as possible, realizes that no one, even one's ancestors, are immune from criticism.

In any case, the point of all of this is to say that a lot of Irish became cops. Most went to cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, but there were also sizable Irish populations in Baltimore, New Orleans, Louisville, and yes, San Francisco, my fav! I am proud to say that on my mother's side of the family, we have been in the Bay Area since the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Of all branches in my family tree, I can go back the furthest with the Flynns. The second eldest Maurice Flynn, mentioned above and to the right, and not to be confused with two others by the same name, was born before the American Revolution and thus could not have been a U.S. citizen even if he was born here, which we was not. Maurice's mother, Johanna Whelan, was born in 1739, when some of the world's first novels and newspapers were coming onto the scene.

A few things should be pointed out in the blue map above, which shows Munster Irish immigration, indicated by the orange-ish dots, from 1875-1925. Some were continuing to migrate to Great Britain, especially if they could not afford the trip to the United States. Most were going to the urban Northeast and it's worth considering why. I suspect that the urban North, due to its industrial prowess, contained a lot of jobs that attracted cheap, immigrant laborers. But outside of small pockets in Louisville, St. Louis, and New Orleans, why not the South? What makes the most sense to me--and again, I pledge my non-expertise and welcome corrections--is that the South already had an abundant supply of cheap laborers in its African American population. Secondarily, Irish Catholics may not have felt welcome in a region that, compared to the North, was more ethnically and religiously homogeneous, dominated by Anglo-Saxon evangelical Protestants.

Because the Flynns came over in the 1880s, they were not potato famine Irish. While discussions of late-19th century immigration to the US are often dominated by noting the large numbers of Slavs, Russian Jews, Italians, Poles, Mexicans, and Japanese, there were still substantial numbers of English and Irish coming to America at this time. The later Johnson-Reed legislation of the 1920s established quotas that favored immigrants from northern Europe above others.

Staying with my mother's side of the family, we see her father and my grandfather, William "Bud" Smith, pictured here. I never met Bud and don't know much about him. But I do know that he was good with cars and fought in the navy in WWII. Bud's father, John James Smith, apparently born "at sea" in 1883 on the way over from Ireland, was a "hoisting engineer" who lived in South San Francisco according to his registration with the WWI draft. These examples seem to fit with the reputation of the Irish as being mostly working-class in the early-20th century. The fact that I have managed to obtain a doctoral degree, the first in my family on either side, provides some measure of social advancement, even if the money is not great.

Three generations of Campbells: Tom, me, Nate, Barbara, and baby Tessa

This brings me to the present. I could go on here and believe me, I have many more thoughts and questions...would I recommend the DNA kit to others? From the standpoint of adding to their collection and forging connections, yes, but it seems it would be most helpful if people who didn't know much about their family history took this test. You do have to be willing to dispense with some money and it seems that the more you spend, the more the website gives you.

Why have so many Irish Americans become politically conservative in recent decades despite the Catholic emphasis on social justice and the group's long history of economic disadvantages and alliance with the Democratic Party? This is a definite downer for me. Is it Catholicism's tendency toward hierarchical authoritarianism and anti-abortion politics? Is it the trend, common among many immigrant groups, that as they become more "white" and more "American" that they also become less welcoming of new immigrants, a platform more closely aligned with today's Republicans? Is it the experience of being in the police force? Is it tribalism?

Does the stereotype of the intemperate Irishman have any merit? My sense is that this has got to be more than just an urban legend. The "Fighting Irish" is the mascot of Notre Dame. Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan (bleck!), once said that one of his fellow House Republicans was "getting his Irish up" after being confrontational (for what exact reason I forget). And my parents will hate me for saying this, but irritability and argumentativeness are definitely family traits! It would be interesting to speculate about whether the fields of genetics can advance to the point of saying that so and so behaves in this way because of his/her genes. If there is a genetic component to our behavior, it certainly undermines the myth of the free and autonomous individual.

My niece, Tessa Josephine Campbell, pictured below, is the closest thing I have to a kid. I hope she reads this some day and gains some insight on her ancestral roots. She certainly has Irish DNA running through her!

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Irish Through and Through Part 1

4/20/2017

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Last Christmas, my parents gave me a thoughtful gift: a DNA kit from Ancestry.com. Readers may have seen their commercials. You spit into a vile (saliva contains DNA) and send it to a lab, which runs some tests and gives you a scientific reading of where your ancestors came from. The way it works is that the lab looks at the mutations in your DNA and compares it to population samples from around the world. If your mutations match the mutations found in certain parts of the world--in my case, Ireland--then they can say with confidence that this is where your ancestors came from.

I completed my test on January 24 and received the results on April 12. It took longer than the normal span of 6-8 weeks, I'm assuming, because the testing center received a flood of submissions after the holidays. The headline number, indicated above, is that I am 78% Irish. Pretty cool, eh? One thing the Ancestry.com website emphasizes is that siblings with the same parents can often have important differences in their DNA percentages (unless they're identical twins). So if I'm 78% Irish, my brother, Nate, might be 65% Irish, or he might be 85% Irish, or somewhere in between. Although Ancestry provides a white paper with some of the scientific explanations for their tests, I found the material a bit daunting and would really need to sit down with it to figure it out. I doubt I will do this. But the gist of it, from what I've gathered, is that each child takes 1/2 of his/her chromosomes from the mother and 1/2 from the father, but you don't know what will be in that 1/2. Most of us know this already, intuitively, even if we're not familiar with the scientific explanation. There's a reason we hear about recessive traits like red hair that skip generations and pop up in some children, but not in others. Thinking about DNA from the standpoint of evolution, this makes sense. Our species, or any species for that matter, would not have evolved without significant genetic variation. If every sibling inherited roughly the same percentages of genes from their parents, you would not have the mutations and variations that make adaptations--and therefore evolution--possible.

I can't say that I was terribly surprised by, or enamored with, the results. In addition to the late response, the site didn't give me much to look at. I probably finished examining my results within a half hour. My family already has a fair bit of information regarding our Irish roots. We can trace back some of our ancestors to the late-18th century, though going back further would likely require travel to the British Isles. In 2011, when I was working on my dissertation, I did some brief work with the 1830 and 1840 federal censuses, which required a subscription to Ancestry, and along the way, I decided to fill out my family tree. My aunt, Karen Smith, had also done a lot of the hard work on this years ago.

What I was at least somewhat surprised about is that only 6% in my ethnicity estimate was from Great Britain, which includes Scotland. My last name is Scottish. It means "twisted mouth" in Gaelic, apparently because Campbells, who often allied themselves with the English and against the Highland Scots, had a reputation for double-dealing. This goes to show that you can't tell a lot about a person's ancestry just by looking at their last name. There was probably once a time when this was more true than it is today, but consider that "Campbell" is in the top 50 of most popular surnames in the United States (and yet oddly, there are quite a few people who annoyingly pronounce the 'p'), interracial mixing is a lot more common today, and families can acquire a name through marriage, adoption, or in the case of many African Americans, through slavery. I bring this up because you'll find a few examples out there of African Americans today who have the last name "Campbell," and it always takes me by surprise. But then I quickly remind myself that lots of Scots-Irish settled in Appalachia going back to the colonial era. While Pennsylvania and New York have lots of Campbells, there many families of Campbells in slave-owning states like Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee, many of which were connected through friendship, politics, and patronage with President Andrew Jackson. Chances are that if an African American today has the last name Campbell, he/she is probably descended from slaves who took the last name of their master. I am pleased to say that I am not descended from any of these Campbell slave owners, which is good because I already deal with enough guilt!

So why would I be mostly Irish with the last name Campbell? Keep in mind that a name can get passed down over decades and centuries but a Campbell living today may only have a very small percentage of DNA similar to the ancestral Campbell living in Scotland in 1800. So unless that Scotsman married a Scottish wife, and more importantly, that the same trend continued in subsequent generations, you may have a Scottish last name but have very little Scottish DNA in you. Most of my mother's side of the family is Irish and as I show in the next blog entry, my father's side also contains a significant number of Irish people. If I recall a story correctly from my late grandfather, John Campbell, nicknamed "Rusty" because of his red hair, his own grandfather was from Dublin. Although Rusty had a Scottish last name, he was not a Presbyterian, as many Scots are, but a devout Catholic--a religion typically associated with the Irish. My guess is that this is because his mother's ancestors were Irish (his middle name is O'Hara). An Irish bookseller once came to my office at Cal Poly and said that he was aware of quite a few Campbells living in Ireland. This brings up the important point about cross-migration in the British Isles. You'll find lots of people with Scottish last names in northern Ireland and England. You'll also find lots of people with Irish last names living in England today. In fact, I would wager that there has been so much intermixing between various parts of the British Isles that it is difficult to tell someone's ethnic heritage just by looking at their last name. Kennedy, typically associated with the Irish, is somewhat common in Scotland. Liverpool has a significant Irish population because during the Industrial Revolution, poor Irish crossed the Irish Sea to work as dockworkers and other laborers in the bustling port city. I recently found out that the most famous Liverpudlians in the world, the Beatles, have Irish ancestry; all four of them.

The map here shows that I am part of what is called a genetic community, with ancestors who lived in areas in which the following family names appeared quite frequently: Murphy, O'Brien, Walsh, Kelly, Barry, O'Neill, Mahoney, Shea, Fitzgerald, O'Connor. As my Aunt Karen's work showed, many of these names are already in our family tree.

One little plum, shown above, is that at 78%, I am actually not that different, genetically speaking, from a native-born Irish person. My American accent, to say nothing of my habits and mannerisms, would be an instant give-away, but I'd like to think that I could travel to Ireland and fit right in! At least that's what my DNA says!

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Some Old Ways Work For a Reason

4/14/2017

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This quarter I've been trying out something new that isn't exactly "new" at all but which has produced positive results from the standpoint of student performance. When you reach the ten-year mark in teaching in higher ed, as I've just done, you hit a groove where a lot of what you do in the classroom has been vetted through trial and error. But this quarter I made two significant changes: one, I decided to forbid all electronics in the classroom, whether they be laptops, tablets, or cell phones (which I had always outlawed). I was pleased to have the support of colleagues. I have been at institutions where I didn't have the support for doing what I believed was right. The student-as-customer mentality reigned supreme. The second thing I did was to stop giving all of my students access to my completed, annotated PowerPoint lectures, which I had previously posted on Blackboard. This means that students must actually come to class and take notes on a piece of paper (imagine that, right?) Attendance is up and there are studies suggesting that students will do better if they attend class. If they miss class, they are obligated, as I once did in college, of contacting their classmates to get lecture notes. None of this was new from the standpoint of being cutting-edge or groundbreaking--indeed some in the profession might deride this approach as regressive or reactionary--but it was new from the standpoint of me having not yet implemented it at Cal Poly.

One of the definitions of a pragmatist, I tell my students, is to take a utilitarian view of the world. You go with what works, meaning that if the evidence changes, you have to change, too. It is the opposite of being rigid and ideological. If my new approach backfired immensely, I'd have to rethink it. But so far, and admittedly we're dealing with a very small sample, the results are promising. Each one of my students took the test. All 127 of them. Typically a few people don't take the test, for any number of reasons. But the scores were also slightly higher, by about 1-2 percentage points. What do we make of this? We must be cautious because we're talking about one test during one quarter. Perhaps, just by the luck of the draw, I have brighter students this time around. The scores could have been higher for any number of reasons. I had worked over my spring break to make both my test questions and study guides as straightforward as possible. But my gut feeling is that maintaining a classroom environment relatively free from distraction, and one in which students must take notes the old-fashioned way, is working well. I heard a bit of whining and complaining from students who were not happy that I no longer posted my Powerpoints. And it's a constant struggle to get students to put away their phones. The problem was that too many students in previous quarters weren't coming to class, assuming that having the Powerpoints would save them. It never does and I told them that (some still didn't listen). And besides, if you're a student, and taking notes without laptops had resulted in a higher test score, then what exactly is the problem? This is what every student wants, right? In other words, it's for your own good! You may resent the fact that I have eliminated the possibility of you checking Facebook or texting your friend while I am in the middle of class, but if learning is the ultimate goal here, I'm convinced it will be all for the best.

I can't stand the constant barrage of assaults on higher ed, most of which come from people who have never set foot in the classroom. They mostly come from Silicon Valley types who have a vested interest in pillaging our pensions and privatizing the system of higher ed more than they already have. Your methods are obsolete, they say. You're operating on a nineteenth-century model that has no use for the "modern" or "real world." What a bunch of crap. Capitalism has reared its ugly head again, I'd say. Historians of all people should be the most critical of this pro-business, technophilic impulse; a discourse that assumes an air of inevitability and non-contingency, neglecting how policy and choice matter a great deal. I get emails all the time from publishing companies saying it's unfair for teachers to require their students to go without phones in the classroom. Such consumerist garbage. How dishonorable that you have to insult my intelligence to push a product on me. I'm sorry, but if you can't go five minutes without checking your phones, the problem is decidedly not with my teaching, but with your attitude; your energy; your ability to control yourself. To the extent that the college experience is about more than just knowledge acquisition, and is in fact, in a larger sense, also about preparation for adulthood, what could be more adult that learning to control your impulses? What about all the studies saying the constant distraction of technology has eroded our ability to focus and how we trick our minds into thinking that we're all great multitasking without realizing that multitasking itself is probably one of the worst ways to go about doing things? What about the studies saying taking notes by hand results in greater retention of knowledge than taking notes by computer? I've linked to those studies in previous blogs. I stand by them.

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