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EDITOR'S NOTE: A century ago this year Ireland was torn apart by the beginning of a decades-long civil war. This is the story of a young woman who found peace and family in a land far way, written by a grandson who became a prominent foreign correspondent.
By PATRICK McDOWELL
Like countless other Irish-Americans, my family has its own personal version of the immigrant story. Ours doesn't involve the Potato Famine or the East Coast centers of all things Gaelic in New York and Boston.
The central character is my grandmother, Mary "May'" McDowell, who came as a bride to the hilly dairy country of Northern California in the 1930s and became a special kind of grande dame until she "passed away," as she'd have said, on August 9, 2000.
She was born Mary Birch on October 3, 1906, in the boggy farmlands around Mountnorris in County Armagh. Her parents died when she was young -- "It was drink,'' she'd say of her father -- and she and an older sister, Bessie, and younger brother, Willie, were taken in by a mean-tempered aunt. They lived in rural poverty, and as she would tell it later, "You'd chase the crows to catch the crumbs they'd drop.''
The entire island of Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom, but before she was 10-years-old the Easter Rising had erupted to the south in Dublin. Ireland spent the next several years in a bloody civil war. She recalled killers coming in the night to murder her neighbors. She simply stopped leaving their farm to go to school because it was too dangerous.
Forty children died during the Easter Rising of 1916
Armagh then, as it was in the later Troubles in the 1970s and 1980s, was one of the places where the Protestant-majority unionists clashed most bloodily with the largely Roman Catholic nationalists. IRA men, B-special paramilitaries and British troops roamed the area.
In 1921, the border was drawn between the independent south and British-ruled north. County Armagh was in the north, on the border, and became a front line; later generations called it Bandit Country. Heightened watchfulness and anxiety were needed to survive.
She was teaching Sunday school at the Presbyterian church and was probably on her way to spinsterhood in her late 20s when my grandfather met her around 1935.
James A. McDowell was returning to the Old Country looking for a bride. He'd been born in 1899 in Point Reyes, California, son of an immigrant dairyman. The Northern Irish found something similar to home in the rocky shores, rolling hills and constant fog of the Northern California coast. Some of their descendants remain among the dairy ranches scattered in Sonoma and Marin counties west of Petaluma. It was a hard and remote life, though.
Husband James McDowell in 1935 wedding photo
The 1906 earthquake was a last straw for my great-grandfather -- the family story is that a fissure swallowed a cow and only the tail was left sticking out above ground. He moved James and his younger brother John back to Ireland for a better education, but their return to America was thwarted by World War I and the civil war. They finally re-established themselves in the area in the 1920s, though, and eventually started a dairy on Bodega Avenue that remains the center of our family universe.
James no doubt found Mary, who was always called May, charming and gracious. Most people did. She had an easy charm and quick wit and had an uncommon talent of putting strangers at their ease.
They met at a church picnic in a field, had a whirlwind courtship, married and crossed the Atlantic in a passenger ship which kept her seasick for a week. Then a cross-country train trip to San Francisco, a ferry to Marin -- the Golden Gate Bridge hadn't been finished yet -- and eventually to a farm that must have seemed to her like the end of the earth.
Petaluma as it appeared in the 1930s when May and James settled there. Go directly to May's full tribute with more photos and videos here. To submit a Life Story from your family for consideration on OurPaths and Huffington Post, go here: OurPaths.com. Sonoma Historical Society photo.
She was the resident woman there and would be for the rest of her life. James' father was a widower and his brother John never married. She always remembered her father-in-law having a full measure of what a difficult situation this was for her and quickly telling her that he'd make sure she got whatever she needed. For her, that promise was a supreme kindness.
My grandmother ran the house for three men who worked hard physical labor, cooked the meals and eventually raised three children, Jimmy, Joe and Bessie. It was very tough work. But it was also in a land at peace, with plentiful food, without sectarian bitterness.
Like so many others who came from troubled homelands, the greatest day in her life was when she became an American citizen. Pearl Harbor was a shock to her (and the rest of the country) and she never quite forgave Japan for attacking her bright shining country.
May McDowell never lost her Ulster brogue and I never heard her use the word "little'' when "wee'' would do. My father, James, who was born in 1936, had his mother's Irish accent when he began kindergarten and the teachers would start conversations with him just to hear it. The Irish connection stayed strong. Somehow, the California family managed to get care packages and mail to relatives back to Northern Ireland during the Depression and post-war years that were much appreciated.
The McDowells and their ranch near Petaluma became known among the Irish. New immigrants, visitors and friends or acquaintances of distant relatives making a trip to America would arrive at the ranch and receive endless cups of tea (favored guests might be offered something stronger, but my grandmother was a teetotaler her whole life), got a friendly chat with a view out her bay window over the ranch activity. Sometimes, they'd stay for a week or month. In the 1960s, an addition was put onto the main house to accommodate visitors and was ever-after known as the Hilton.
A family portrait from the 1940s. May and Jim with children Jimmy, Bessie and Joe.
She loved sweets -- no meal was worth having if there wasn't dessert -- and boxes of See's Candy were always on hand (usually picked over by her grandchildren beforehand) for whenever visitors dropped in.
The most anticipated guest ever, though, was when May's older sister, Bessie, flew to America and spent the summer of 1967. It was a major event and my cousin Ken Jorgensen's baptism was scheduled to coincide with her visit. Transatlantic air travel was only just becoming affordable for ordinary people. Previously, the length and difficulty of ship journeys really meant that emigrants never saw their families again. The two sisters hadn't seen each other in 25 years and the reunion was deeply emotional.
James McDowell died in 1979, a prominent and respected member of the community, and his brother John followed him in 1986. Mary McDowell survived a pair of heart attacks in the 1960s but saw the new millennium. She made a couple of trips to Ireland but her favorite vacation was one to Hawaii with her daughter, Bessie. She also loved the area of Lake Tahoe and made an annual visit.
At her funeral, a D-Day veteran, Gene Benedetti, led a round of her favorite song, "God Bless America.'' Though my grandmother was a loyal Republican, she crossed party lines. One of California's leading Democratic politicians, John Burton, left the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles to attend her funeral. She had always reminded him of his own Irish immigrant family.
In the many tributes that day, people kept recalling "the twinkle in her eye.''
It still shines.
In 2016, her descendants include her three children, six grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren and four great-great grandchildren.
-- Patrick McDowell is Southeast Asia Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Several members of the McDowell clan continue to live on a ranch in Sonoma County.
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