At the gracious invitation of my cousin Kevin and my sister Libby, I drove up to Providence last week for the wake and funeral of my Aunt Jane’s husband, Uncle Charlie. (Chah-lee, as they pronounce it in Rhode Island.)
I met Charlie Donoghue only once, at Libby’s house to celebrate Aunt Jane’s late January birthday maybe three years ago. He already was living in an extended-care facility, and he was quiet. Not the Charlie of old times, my family said.
The Charlie of old--the ever-smiling working-class son of Irish immigrant parents --had movie-star good looks and the charisma of a Kennedy. He was a Providence firefighter and a Navy veteran who served on the battleship U.S.S. Boston in World War II. He was also a member of the Jewish Brotherhood: He had done maintenance work for a local synagogue, and, true to form, became part of their social scene.
Everyone knew him as “Charmin’ Charlie.” (Chah-min Chah-lee.)
His sons Kevin (also a Providence firefighter) and Michael eulogized Charlie as the kind of guy who, when he went out to eat in a restaurant, would head into the kitchen to meet and greet the kitchen staff.
“He loved people who worked with their hands,” said Michael, a college professor. “Cooks and carpenters, roofers and repairmen. He wanted to see how the work was done.”
Michael recalled that, in the middle of a storm that caused a power outage in Providence, Charlie went out to the utility workers getting ready to climb a pole. He carried a bottle of Seagram’s V.O. Canadian whiskey and a stack of plastic cups. He gave them each a shot before they went up the pole.
“When I was small, I asked him once what VO meant,” Michael said. “He told me, ‘Very often.’ ”
Michael said Charlie was motivated by three principles:Loyalty, equality and fraternity.
“Today, a lot of parents tell their kids they are special,” said Michael. “My father drilled into us that we were NOT special, that we were no better than – and just as good as— everyone else. He believed to his core that everybody was equal.”
Although I met him only once, I felt a connection to Uncle Charlie. When my unmarried 21-year-old mother Ann found out she was pregnant in the spring of 1952, the first person she told was Charlie’s mother, (Ann’s sister’s mother-in-law) Sarah. They called her “Saintly Sarah” because she was kind and comforting.
“My mother was really a social worker without the certification,” said Charlie’s sister Alice. “She fed homeless people passing through Providence during the Great Depression. I think they left a mark on the house to let others know they could get fed if they knocked on the door. My mother and father lived on a main road, and I think her fantasy was that a Greyhound Bus would break down, and she would usher all the passengers into her kitchen and put the tea on.”
I also felt a connection to Charlie because he and my Aunt Jane visited my mother at the unwed mothers’ home in Massachusetts after their wedding. Charlie was one of the few people who knew my mother’s secret. He kept the secret for a half-century, even after my mother Ann died in 2000.
My mother’s son Peter found me on the Internet in 2004, and the lost offspring was out of the bag.
Charlie’s funeral repast was held at Ladder 133 Bar & Grill, the building which, in 1946, housed the ladder company at which Charlie had begun his fire-fighting career. A couple of my sisters said that Charlie’s sister Alice might know something about who my biological father was. So my brother Terry, my brother-in-law Donnie and I headed to the room behind the bar to ask Alice what she knew.
Alice said she didn’t know much. My mother’s official story had been that a stranger at a house party in Boston put a mickey in her drink and took advantage of her when she was unconscious.
Alice told us:“Once, Charlie let slip that Ann might have known him. But later Charlie said that wasn’t so.”
My sister Margaret’s husband, Donnie, a marriage and family therapist, chimed in.
“I also have adoption in my family,” said Don. “My grandmother was adopted. Her name was Mulvey, and one of Jim’s aunts married a Mulvey. A lot of coincidences.”
Soon, it was just Alice and I chatting. I asked her where in Ireland her parents had come from.
“My father was from Cavan,” said Alice. “My mother was from a small town in Leitrim, Ballinamore.”
As she was saying Leitrim, I was thinking, “Couldn’t be Ballinamore.”
My husband’s father James McAweeny (as the family name was spelled in the 1901 and 1911 Irish Census) was from Ballinamore.
My third connection to Charlie:We both had close relatives from Ballinamore. His mother. My father-in-law.
“That is spooky,” I told Alice. “My husband Jim’s father was born and grew up in Ballinamore. My husband’s first cousins still live there.”
When I got back home to New Jersey, I went looking for “Saintly Sarah” on ancestry.com. I found Sarah Wynne (her age listed as 18) on the passenger list of the ship “Arabic” which departed from Queenstown, Ireland on April 24, 1912 and arrived in Boston on May 2, 1912. Her neighborhood or village was listed as Drumaney or Drumraine in Ballinamore; her closest relative was listed as her father John. Her ultimate destination was listed as Providence. Charlie’s sister Alice had said Sarah was going to go on the Titanic, but the ticket agent told her father she would be better off going on this ship because there was another girl from the next village going on the Arabic and it would give Sarah company on the voyage.
There were actually three other girls from Ballinamore heading to Providence on the boat: Sisters Mary Kate(21) and Lizzie Agnes (17) Smyth from the Drumaney neighborhood of Ballinamore . Their father was listed as Thomas Smyth. And then there was Mary Anne Mulvey, whose closest relative was her mother, Mrs. Mulvey and who was from Corrabeher in Ballinamore. (The 1911 Irish Census says Mary Anne lived in Corrabeegher with her widowed mother and two younger brothers.) Yet another Mulvey heard from.
As Donnie said, a lot of coincidences.
The next day, I woke up and recognized my fourth connection to Uncle Charlie. Aunt Jane said that when my mother revealed her pregnancy to her and their mother, Aunt Jane –who was set to be married two months before my birth – offered to adopt me. My mother chose to have me adopted out of family and out of state.
But, had Aunt Jane adopted me, I would have been a Donoghue, and Charlie would have been my father.
