Posted on 03/15/2009 5:06:32 PM PDT by Congressman Billybob
On St. Patrick’s Day, everyone is Irish. Maybe just for the moment, or for the next few beers. O’Hara, O’Leary, O’Bama. But some of us have real, biological connections to the Emerald Isle.
One of the reasons I was delighted to make a trip to Ireland last year was the chance to close the circle. By a happenstance the year before, I found the oldest proof of my European ancestors. On the Internet I stumbled across the website of the Compass Inn in Ligonier, Pennsylvania.
What became the Compass Inn was built as a log building in 1799 on the crude road to the frontier town of Pittsburgh. In 1814 the Inn was bought by Robert and Rachel Armor. On the completion of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Robert built a stone addition to accommodate the many stage passengers.
By 1862, the canals took over, and the Inn was closed and became a private home. For a total of seven generations the Armors lived there. Then in 1966 they sold the Inn to the Ligonier Valley Historical Society. The Society restored the Inn to its 1920 condition as a working Museum. It is still that way.
As you might have gathered, when I contacted the Museum Director, he quickly sent me a genealogy. Robert was brought to the United States by his grandfather, when he was 8. The genealogy that the Director sent, stopped with George Frederick Armor. That was my great-grandfather, who fought in the Civil War. The Society was glad to hear from me.
It was a singular pleasure last summer to walk the land that young Robert had last walked two centuries before. But I learned not just about my family, but about the modern world.
I met a Protestant man whose family was saved by their neighbor, a Catholic policeman. I met the Catholic daughter, now a grown woman. Her boyfriend decades ago was arrested by British troops, convicted and served two years in jail. He denied being involved in the IRA.
The young man went to America. Decades later, he returned to Ireland. He admitted that he had been in the IRA, and that his parents were also members. He admitted he was going out that night to kill British soldiers. He said that his arrest had saved his life.
All these events happened in Londonderry, which has now thrown off the symbol of its British yoke, becoming simply Derry. We saw the history of “the troubles” in that city at its fine museum. It documents the seeming end of the troubles. Now, with three murders in Ireland last week by the Real IRA, the continuing murderers
That reminded me of the last thing I learned in Ireland. The murders of men, women and children for political purposes will not end until there are no more parents left (or schoolteachers) who tell their children that they have a right, or even a duty, to kill other children and their parents in cold blood..
The best way to see where the greatest threats of murder come from, is to read translations of the books used in elementary schools. That is a sad task which is almost entirely in the past for the survivors in Ireland. Elsewhere in the world, these are current events.
I shouldn’t end this piece this way. The Irish have learned. Their rich and ancient history is almost entirely at peace. So, there is hope for us all.
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About the Author: John Armor practiced law in the Supreme Court for 33 years. He now lives on the Eastern Continental Divide in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina. John_Armor@aya.yale.edu
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John / Billybob
Hope you enjoyed your visit to the lovely Laurel Highlands. I’m pleased to call it home!
My Irish name every St. Patricks day is “Patty O’Furniture.
....Bob
Cheers, y'all!
To the List, save
I'll guarentee you that O'Bama isn't!
Not quite accurate. The official name is 'Londonderry'. Though many Catholics will refer to it as 'Derry'.
The Northern Ireland Tourist Board designates the city as 'Londonderry/Derry, but the county is known only as 'Londonderry.
BTTT.
I have an Irish ancestor that came to America. Born 1752 in Ireland. I just don't know where. The thing that I thought was interesting is that he's listed in 2 census for Chippewa Ohio as being one of the men with a gun and ammo to fight Indians in 1816 and 1819. And the libs try telling us that no one owned a gun? THAT Irishman did!
Well I am just a few miles away from Ligonier (the have a festival there ‘Ligonier Days’). Small world...glad you liked your visit.
Both of my parents were first generation Irish, County Mayo and County Cork. My one wish is to go to Ireland (one still in college, two more to go...so it won’t be for some time) and visit where my family tree springs from. All four of my grandparents came over at the turn of the last century...my maternal grandmother came as a ‘housegirl’ servant for one of the Mellon households. She was a tall, strong girl...who was several years younger than her age was given to be (apparently that was done quite a bit as the girls would send money back home). She eventually worked in a ‘fine house’ on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Oakland section...there is a delightful story of the ‘girls’ in their mistress’s out of style furs/hats hand me downs walking to St. Paul’s Cathedral for Mass each Sunday.
Lovely write-up; thank you! I went on the roots trip a few years ago and solved some family mysteries. It is a magical island.
Believe it or not, Obama has as much Irish blood in him as he has black African. He's 3/8 Arab on his father's side.
No Derry has not thrown off “the symbol of its British yoke” (an idiotic phrase) its official name is still Londonderry only the local council’s name was changed. By the way with a name like Armor and settling in Pennsylvania I’ll bet a hundred to one he was a staunch Protestant and his people in Ulster today would be pro-British loyalists.
If your ancestor emigrated at that time and especially if he was an Indian fighter in Ohio it is almost certain he was an Ulster Presbyterian from the North and an “Irishman” of a very different stripe from the Catholic emigrants who emigrated from southern and western Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century famine and who settled mainly in the cities of the north and east of the United States.
I am a Scotsman, and will never be Irish!
Thank you!
If you want to know about the sort of people your ancestor was I cannot recommend highly enough Jim Webb’s “Born Fighting”.
Now a lot of people here hate Webb with a passion because of his politics but if you want to know how the Ulster Protestants/Scots Irish were the keystone in creating the modern United States and how their battles against liberal elites have never ceased then it’s a book you will enjoy and find fascinating.
The original “Irish” in America like your ancestor have largely been written out of the story of the United States in favour of the more recent “victimised” Catholic Irish of the 19th Century but Webb’s book goes a long way to redressing that imbalance and you might find a great deal to interest you in the story of that wild Irishman fighting the Indians in Ohio and how the Liberal Establishment treated him even way back then.
Thanks for the tip on the book. I'll get it.
Hutchinson eh? Yes, well he wouldn’t have been a Catholic Irishman with a name like that, he would have been descended from the English/Scottish borderers who caused so much trouble for London but whom King James I (”James VI” of Scotland; he was the Stuart king of Scotland who seized the throne of England) decided needed to be gotten away from the border region so he came up with the ingenious solution of shipping them to the north of Ireland to settle the lands there.
A century later they were superfluous to requirements as they had defeated the Irish natives and had successfully settled Ulster but now the government in London didn’t like them much for their rather individualistic, ‘democratic’, fundamentalist protestant, free born attitude to rule by English aristocrats and so a huge number of them emigrated out to the American colonies where their sharp shooting and frontier style of fighting which they had developed on the Scottish border and in Ireland proved useful. However in America they proved to be just as stubborn and resistant to London’s control as they ever had been and the rest as they say is history.
The “Scots Irish” have been largely written out of history because they don’t fit the typical “victim” status of the American immigrant story and being an “Irish-American” is always now assumed to be a descendant of the later Catholic Irish emigrants of the 19th Century. But if your people are descended from those ‘Hill Billys’ (the Ulstermen were followers of the Dutch protestant King William of Orange hence the fact that “Billy” is still to this day the favoured name of Ulster protestants) then they are descended from the people who created the modern United States no matter what the liberal media or university history departments might say.
Buy Webb’s “Born Fighting”, I guarantee you’ll be grateful you did.
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