“Patt Keefe” is as far as I can go in our lineage. The name is reconfigured in our mother/grandmother’s name, Patricia.

The Keefes were tenant farmers, working the land of Lord Fitzwilliam. This is his estate house.

And this is our ancestors’ village, Coolboy.

Both our ancestors and the Kennedys left Ireland during the famine from this port, in County Wexford, Cobh.

And, as figures in a nation so small, we have a kind of Kennedy connection. It’s a sad story. The Irish are not sad. Not at all.

Leaving Wicklow must’ve been hard. The place is known for the beauty of its horses. Wicklow Brave, a gelding, now 19, was the darling of the county. Watch him (the rider in the yellow helmet) humiliate the field.

And, of course, horses—and animals of all kinds— are special to all the Irish.

That welcome to the creatures of the world extends to Bray, Wicklow, on the Irish Sea.

We can even claim a rather terrifying Irish great-great aunt.


My ancestral aunt, Sister Loreto | A Work in Progress

The family worked a farm in Ontario, the oilfields in Pennsylvania, where three Keefes were born, a homestead in Minnesota, and, finally, they lived among orange trees in California. As is the case in any family, especially in a family of ten, one was bound to be a black sheep. That was our grandfather/great grandfather.



Family Secrets | A Work in Progress

Our uncle, George Kelly Jr., maintained that our grandmother never fell out of love with Edmund Keefe. Maybe that’s true. Our step-grandfather, George Kelly simply said that “he was a bad man.” That’s probably true. But, given the faith that many Irish still have, the Good Lord can grant you another generation, or two, or more, that count for redemption—even the redemption of a man like Edmund Keefe.

This is what I mean: