Jeannie Crotty

Kilrush, Ireland, 1946. When a man died in town, the wake was a communal affair — the house open, neighbors coming and going, tea and biscuits laid out for all who came to pay their respects. My mother and her sisters and their friends understood this perfectly. They were about nine years old, and they were there for the lemonade and biscuits.

They made their way to the house and went inside, looking for the room where the body lay. At the top of the stairs, a door stood open on a room with a lovely white bedspread — fresh, carefully made up. Clearly, this was it. The girls knelt around the edges of the bed and began their prayers.

The person in the bed raised her head. "What are ye doing, little girls?"

They had the life frightened out of them. Racing for the door, they hit the top of the stairs just as my mother's twin fainted — and every last one of them went over the top of her, ass over tea kettle.

The wife of the deceased, when she heard what happened, laughed until she could barely stand — even though it was her husband's wake. The woman in the bed was her mother-in-law, Mrs. Susan Crotty (O’Dea). The lovely white bedspread had been put out fresh for her, knowing there would be many visitors. Whether Mr. Crotty ever got his prayers is another matter entirely.

At the graveside, every time the widow caught the children's eyes, she broke out laughing all over again.

My mother always called her "Ginny Crotty" — but I think she meant Jeannie. Jeannie's husband John died in 1946, which puts my mother at about nine. His mother Susan survived him by a year, living to ninety-one. Jeannie herself lived until 1980 — long enough that she may well have been one of the women we were introduced to on our many trips to Kilrush as children.

It turns out our family has at least one DNA connection to John Crotty's line. Go back two generations and there are fourteen.

The widow who laughed at her husband's funeral — and kept laughing — was someone my mother knew her whole life.  I like to think we met her as children.

Fitzgerald Granduncles — County Limerick, Ireland, c. 1930

Somewhere around 1930, four men are bringing in the hay on a farm in Caherlevoy, County Limerick. I know they are my Fitzgerald granduncles — the family, the county, the approximate decade are clear enough — but the photograph is not sharp enough to say which face belongs to which name. My grandfather is not among them. He had arrived in the United States in 1924.

One stands with his back to the camera, both hands on the wheel of a loaded hay cart. The others are beside the stacked load, hats shading their faces, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. They are pausing in the way people pause mid-labor when a camera appears: long enough to be recorded, not long enough to be at rest.

Bringing in the hay was the season's central work — the cart, the load, the rolling fields stretching behind them into the Limerick distance. These men were part of its machinery, year after year. They did not know they were being preserved.

In the autumn of 1969, my sister Debbie asked a question I have never been able to improve on: “Couldn’t Jesus get anyone else to repair bicycles in heaven and let George stay here?”

To understand why it mattered, you have to know about the bicycles.

In 1968, my parents found their first house on a corner lot in Hicksville, New York. My father was a computer hardware engineer who traveled by train and by car to customer sites up and down the east coast; Hicksville put him close to the Long Island Rail Road and within reasonable driving distance of wherever he needed to be. The house was small — two bedrooms, one for my parents and one for their three little girls. It grew a little tighter in 1969 when our youngest arrived, and my father put an addition on the back.

We made our friends within the block. Among them were the Lehmann girls, whose family home was multigenerational: Mrs. Lehmann’s parents lived upstairs in what functioned as a self-contained apartment, separate and yet part of everything. The grandfather’s name was George Kunz.  We called him Grandpa Kunz.

He became our neighborhood grandpa. My mother’s mother was in Ireland. My father’s mother was forty minutes away in Lake Ronkonkoma. Grandpa Kunz was on our block, and he spent much of his time in the way that matters most to children: fixing bicycles. Bent wheels, snapped chains, cables frayed past usefulness — he took whatever came to him and returned it rideable. The whole neighborhood knew where to bring a damaged bike.

We knew too.

George Kunz died suddenly in September 1969.

Debbie was the most heartbroken of all of us. The exact words belong to memory rather than record — fifty-five years is a long time, and I will not pretend otherwise — but the spirit of what she said has never left me. When we were told about George’s death, Debbie asked why Jesus couldn’t find someone else to repair bicycles in heaven and let George stay here.

Let Jesus get his own bicycle repairman.

When I went looking for George properly — the way you go looking for someone who has stayed in your memory for half a century — I found him on Find a Grave and learned something I either hadn’t known or had once known and lost. George Arnold Kunz had served as a firefighter with the Hicksville Fire Department. He was elected its 31st Fire Chief in 1947, serving through 1948.

He was more than the man with the tools and the patience for a bent wheel.

He was a firefighter as well, just like a lot of our other neighbors and friends.

Sources

George Arnold Kunz, memorial record. Find A Grave. findagrave.com/memorial/204577625/george-arnold-kunz. Accessed May 2026.

The Plank at Ronkonkoma

On 3 July 1928, John Joseph Geary was forty-nine years old, a waiter at a Manhattan restaurant described in court testimony as one of the city's smart establishments, where his weekly earnings averaged eighty dollars — well above the wages of most working men. He had been in America for twenty-eight years by then, having crossed from Queenstown in May 1900 on the SS Teutonic, one of many Connemara emigrants moving between the Galway islands and New York in those years. He had married Bridget Lyden at Holy Cross Church on West 42nd Street in April 1906. He had four children. He had owned property at 60 11th Street in Ronkonkoma, Suffolk County, since at least 1911, keeping his Suffolk holding while his city work sustained the family. He was, at the Ronkonkoma station that July afternoon, a man in the middle of a life he had spent three decades assembling.

The train was slowing for the stop when it happened. One of the trainmen, working in the combination baggage and passenger car, picked up a wooden plank and moved to throw it from the open door. The plank was being transported to Ronkonkoma by the train's conductor, John W. Badye. As Geary was passing through the car, the plank struck him in the head. It struck a woman passenger as well.

Illustration: Struck by Railroad Tie, Long Island R.R., Lake Ronkonkoma, L.I., July 1928

The initial injury was a fracture at the base of the skull. In the months that followed, physicians determined that the fracture had produced something worse: atrophy of the brain — described in court testimony as "shrinkage or warping of the brain" — and the disease, they testified, was progressive in nature.

He could no longer work as a waiter.

On 27 December 1928, five months after the accident at Ronkonkoma, John Geary filed his petition for naturalization at the Southern District Court in Manhattan. He had taken out his Declaration of Intent two years earlier, in October 1926, and the process was already underway when the plank came through the baggage car door. The injury had not dissuaded him from continuing to pursue it.

He brought suit against the Long Island Railroad for $150,000 in damages. By November 1930 the case appeared on the December term calendar of the Suffolk County Supreme Court at Riverhead — listed as "John Geary vs. Long Island Railroad Co., negligence," brief and undifferentiated, wedged between a personal injury case and a dispute over an insurance premium. It came before Justice Lewis L. Fawcett the following spring. Stanley Fowler served as trial counsel for Geary; his attorneys of record were Robbins, Wells and Walser of Bay Shore. The railroad retained Thomas J. Brennan of Brooklyn as its counsel. Both sides summoned surgeons and X-ray experts. The jury heard testimony about encephalograms, ventriculograms, ventriculography — terms the Patchogue Advance noted, with some dryness, that the jury had "properly digested."

It was understood the railroad had offered $5,000 to settle.

Geary refused.

On 21 May 1931, the jury returned a verdict of $18,500. Brennan moved immediately to set aside the verdict on the ground that it was against the weight of the evidence. Justice Fawcett denied the motion. The Brooklyn Citizen, the Brooklyn Times Union, the Patchogue Advance, and the Port Jefferson Echo all carried the story on their front pages the following week. The Patchogue Advance identified the detail that appeared to have weighed with the jury: that Geary had been a large wage earner — eighty dollars a week at a smart restaurant — and that since the plank struck his skull, he could no longer carry on that occupation.

John died on 21 March 1959 at Brookhaven, of heart disease. He was seventy-nine years old. He is buried at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Coram — section 5, row G, plot 179 — beside his sister Sarah.

Sources

• Brooklyn Citizen, 21 May 1931, p. 1

• Brooklyn Times Union, 22 May 1931, p. 13

• Patchogue Advance, 22 May 1931, p. 1

• Port Jefferson Echo, 29 May 1931, p. 1

• Suffolk County News (Sayville), 28 November 1930, p. 1

• Individual Summary Report, John Joseph Geary (1879–1959), Family Historian 7, compiled by Terry Fitzgerald, 19 May 2026

Mweenish Island Beach — County Galway, Ireland, Summer 2023

We were in County Galway in the summer of 2023 to bury my father.

Mweenish Island is off the coast of Carna, in Connemara — the part of Ireland where his mother's family came from, a coastline he knew through her long before he ever stood on it himself. We drove out while we were there, on a day that happened to be clear and bright, and I took photographs of the beach.

The rocks in the foreground are weathered and lichen-covered, the sand pale where it catches the light, the water that turquoise-green of shallow Atlantic water on a good summer day. Whitewashed cottages sit in the background, small against the sky. It is a beautiful place. His people were from there.

When I came home from that trip, I had the photograph printed on canvas — forty by sixty inches — and fitted it into the antique frame from my grandmother's bedroom set. The set is from her second marriage to my step grandfather, Pop Pop (James Connolly of Armagh) from their marriage in 1944. I had the complete set moved from Long Island to Washington state the summer of 2009, after the death of my Uncle Tim. In 2022, I had the furniture professionally repaired and restored to its original glory. The frame that had held a mirror for years, a mirror too heavy to hang, so I never had. However, the canvas is not heavy. It went up in the mirror's place, over the other pieces of the set, and it has been there since.

His mother's coastline, in her frame.

First Communion of John and Timothy Fitzgerald — St. Peter and St. Paul, Bronx, 1939

The photograph was taken in 1939, at a portrait studio in the Bronx, arranged by Great Aunt Annie Greene, who understood that someone needed to document what the Fitzgerald boys had done. John and Tim had received their First Communions that year — together, which was not how it was supposed to go. John was the older of the two. Under ordinary circumstances he would have come to the altar a full year ahead of his brother. But 1938 had not been ordinary. Their father had died that year, slowly, after a long illness, and the family had been in no condition for a sacrament. So the two boys came together in 1939, and Aunt Annie made sure the day was preserved.

The portrait shows them flanking the frame in their dark suits, rosaries in hand, white armbands marking the occasion. Between them, seated on a stool, sits my father Maurice — four years old and wearing short pants.

His face tells you exactly what he thinks of the short pants.

My father talked about those pants until the end of his life. His brothers were in long trousers for the portrait, and here he was perched between them in short ones, and a photographer was making it permanent. He understood the injustice completely. I never heard the story without laughing.

What Maurice couldn't have understood at four is what I see now: that the portrait existed at all because his father was gone. John and Tim's composed expressions, the armbands, the formal studio backdrop meant to suggest the interior of a church — all of it marks a day that had arrived out of order, in a family still absorbing what it had lost. Aunt Annie was right to insist on the photograph.

It holds what the boys could not yet have named: two brothers at the altar together because there was no one left to separate the years.

The Fitzgerald farm in Caherlevoy was divided in 1894, when my second great grandfather died and the land passed to his two eldest sons in portions. The portion that came to my direct line left the family in 1977. The other half remains with Fitzgerald descendants to this day.

I did not see it until 2010, when a cousin drove me out to show me where it had been. We could not go in. We stood at the edge of what had once been ours and looked.

At each side of the entrance stands a stone figure, flanking the gate. This is one of them. I photographed it from where I stood — outside, looking in. All I have is its back.

I made a watercolor rendering of the photograph when I came home. The treatment seemed right for what the visit had been: the land visible, the past just behind it, neither one reachable.

Matthew Timothy Fennell (1893-1960)

On May 2, 1957, a sixty-three-year-old shopkeeper in Kilrush, County Clare, picked up a pencil—his rheumatism-stiffened hand unable to manage a pen—and began to write to his daughter across the ocean. "I suppose you will bless yourself when you receive this scrawl," Matt Fennell wrote to Aine. "I am very badly able to write and had to write with pencil. My arm is stiff with rheumatism but I am ashamed I did not write sooner."

The letter is remarkable not for what it accomplishes—the handwriting is difficult, the thoughts tumble out in the oral cadence of spoken Clare English—but for what it reveals: a man in his declining years, struggling against physical limitations to maintain the bonds of affection across distance. Matt wrote of family members, of grandchildren, of his daughter Catherine in London who "never forgets me." He signed off with hope—"My arm may be better the next letter. Please God"—and blessing: "good bye and God bless you."

Three years later he was dead, and the question becomes: How did a farmer's son from a crowded household in rural Clare become the proprietor of a boot warehouse and grocery on Henry Street, a member of the town council, and the patriarch of a family scattered between Ireland and England? To his grandchildren, he would be known simply as Granda—but the path to that role began decades earlier, in a very different world.

The Beginning: Brisla, 1893

The story begins in Brisla, a townland near Cooraclare, where Matthew Fennell was born on June 1, 1893. His parents, Michael and Margaret, farmers working land that had sustained their families for generations. baptized their newborn son the same day he was born—a common practice when infant mortality was an ever-present threat. Matt entered a household already crowded with children, andmore would follow. By the time of the 1901 census, when Matt was seven, he was the eighth of what would eventually be fifteen children.

The Fennell farmhouse at Brisla East held thirteen people that census night. Michael, at fifty-two, headed a household where all the older children could read and write—a mark of rising educational standards in rural Ireland. The family was bilingual, with Michael and Margaret fluent in both Irish andEnglish, though the children primarily spoke English, the language of commerce and advancement in the new century.

For a boy with Matt's place in the birth order—neither the eldest son who might inherit the farm nor young enough to remain at home indefinitely—the path forward required leaving. By 1911, at eighteen, Matt had made his way to Galway city, where he lodged in a house on Dominick Street Lower. The census recorded him as "Matt Farnell" (a transcription error) and listed his occupation as Commercial Clerk. He was one of several young men boarding in the household—clerks and shop assistants seeking their fortunes in the city's commercial life rather than on the land.

Two Brothers on the Threshold

Sometime around 1922, in the years between Matt's return from Galway and his establishment in Kilrush, a camera lens captured a moment of stillness between two young men. In a formal studio portrait taken against a painted backdrop of drapery and architectural illusion, Matt Fennell sat in an ornate chair with barley-twist legs, dressed in a three-piece suit with a watch chain visible on his vest. His expression was earnest and composed—less stylized than his brother's, suggesting a more seriousor reflective temperament. His hair was still full, not yet showing the receding hairline that would mark him by the time of his marriage.

Standing beside him, one hand resting on the back of Matt's chair, was his brother Joe Fennell. Joe's arms were crossed with a hint of theatrical flair, his neatly styled moustache and confident bearing suggesting perhaps a touch more extroversion than his seated brother. His suit was smartly tailored, with a crisp pocket square visible—subtle details that spoke of personal pride.

The photograph captured the brothers side by side, not formally posed like strangers but with an ease between them that spoke of genuine connection. This was Matt before the shop, before marriage—a formative moment frozen in time. Both were dressed in their best suits, perhaps borrowed or newly tailored for the occasion, and neither could yet have known the roads that lay ahead. The partnership they would forge on Henry Street still lay in the future, as did its eventual dissolution.

Between 1911 and 1928, Matt acquired the skills and capital to establish himself as a merchant. He also survived the tumultuous decade of revolution and civil war that convulsed Ireland. West Clare saw incidents during the War of Independence and raids during the Civil War, with Kilrush experiencing its share of upheaval. The violence and instability tested the resilience of anyone trying to build a business.

A Union Rooted in Clare: June 26, 1928

By June 26, 1928, when Matt married Mary Catherine Comyns in the Cathedral at Ennis, he was thirty-five years old and established enough to list his occupation as "merchant." Catherine, known to the family as Cissy, was thirty-one, also from Kilrush, the daughter of a farmer. The marriage united twofamilies with roots in the rural economy of West Clare, but Matt and Cissy's future would be built in town, not on the land.

The wedding portrait captured them in the visual language of dignity and restraint typical of the interwar period in Ireland. Everything from posture to dress to background was deliberate, lending the image an air of permanence—a visual declaration of union. Cissy stood to the left, wearing a dark ensemble, likely a modest wedding dress or tailored suit. Decorative detailing on the collar and cuffs added quiet sophistication—understated, perfectly in line with the aesthetic values of post-independence Ireland. Her hairstyle was a fashionable bob, sleek and tucked neatly, and her expression was composed, slightly soft, with a steadiness in her eyes—a woman meeting life ahead with calm assurance.

Matt sat to the right in a three-piece dark suit, his pocket watch and chain just visible. A light-colored tie with a subtle pattern gave a gentle lift to the dark tones, and a small floral boutonnière—likely a white carnation or rosebud—was pinned to his lapel. His expression was open, proud, and warm. Helooked directly into the lens with the quiet confidence of a man who had found his partner and was beginning a new chapter.

The chair and table, likely studio props, added a slight domestic frame to the image—symbolic, perhaps, of the home they were about to build. There were no smiles in the photograph, only seriousness—but not coldness. They brought more than rings and flowers to the studio that day. They brought the quiet determination of Clare's working class—he, a shopkeeper in the making; she, apartner whose strength would show more in action than adornment. A lifetime lay ahead, and they met it together, already side by side.

Building a Life: Fennell Bros on Henry Street

The Fennell Bros businesses on Henry Street became the center of their lives. By the mid-1930s, Thom's Directory listed the enterprise—Joe and Matt ran the grocery while Cissy managed the boot shop across the street. This family operation made practical sense in a small market town. Boot repair served farmers and labourers who needed sturdy footwear for hard work, while the grocery provided daily necessities. Running such shops required long hours, especially on market days when the town filled with farmers and their families. It also required the delicate business of extending credit to reliable customers while avoiding the accumulation of too many unpaid accounts.

The 1930s were difficult years for Kilrush. The Economic War with Britain depressed farm prices, hitting the rural economy that sustained the town's trade. Labour riots erupted in 1931, and street clashes between republicans and Blueshirts in 1933 brought military intervention. Through all this instability,the Fennell family maintained their shops, building a reputation for fair dealing and establishing themselves as respected members of the business community.

During the Second World War—the Emergency, as it was known in neutral Ireland—shortages and rationing tested shopkeepers' ingenuity. Matt would have managed ration books, found substitute goods, and navigated the constraints on transport and distribution. Yet for those who adapted, there were also opportunities, and the Fennell Bros shops survived and continued.

Between 1936 and 1949, directory entries recorded the Fennell Bros presence on Henry Street—each year another testament to the family's stability and service to the community. Matt and Cissy raised at least seven children who grew up in the rhythms of small-town commerce, in the rooms above or behind the shops.

But partnerships, even among brothers, don't always last forever. Sometime after 1949, the arrangement dissolved. The boot shop closed, and Matt opened his own competing grocery on Henry Street. Joe continued operating the original Fennell Bros grocery—an establishment that would remain in business long after both brothers were gone, eventually managed by Joe's children following his death in 1969. Regardless of the separation, the brothers maintained family ties—Joe stood among the chief mourners at Matt's funeral in 1960.

Matt's involvement extended beyond his shop. He served on the Kilrush Urban Council for many years, participating in local governance during a period when councils managed housing, sanitation, and the gradual modernization of Irish towns. His political affiliation was with Fianna Fáil, the party that haddominated Irish politics since the 1930s under Éamon de Valera. Being a councillor meant navigating the practical politics of a small town—balancing interests, allocating limited resources, maintaining relationships.

A Life's Work: Mid-1950s

By the mid-1950s, a photograph captured Matt Fennell behind the counter of his own shop on Henry Street—the independent grocery he now operated apart from his brother. He stood in his white shopkeeper's coat, the uniform that signaled both tidiness and tradition, wearing a dark tie and glasses, his composed bearing speaking to a generation that valued professionalism and respectability even in the smallest of business settings.

His expression was measured but warm—this was a man who had greeted generations of customers, watched children grow up, and listened to the daily comings and goings of the town. There was pride here—not showy, but steady. Behind him, the shelves burst with goods: Bird's Custard, Tate & Lyle, OXO cubes—familiar comforts. Large glass jars of sweets, likely cherished treats for local children, perhaps even his own grandchildren. Canned and dry goods—the basics of a household pantry, all overseen by a man who likely knew every regular's preferences, every family's circumstances, every child's favorite sweet.

The shop was more than a business. In post-war Ireland, such establishments were hubs of local news, centers of a credit-based economy, even venues for matchmaking and community connection. Granda wasn't just selling groceries—he was holding a thread in the fabric of Kilrush life, a thread that connected families, seasons, celebrations, and sorrows.

But time was catching up with him. The photograph shows a man in his sixties, successful and respected, but the years of long hours and physical labor were taking their toll.

The Letter and the End

When Matt wrote that letter to Aine in May 1957, his body was failing him. The rheumatism that made writing difficult was likely part of a broader decline. He apologized for not writing sooner, for the poor quality of his penmanship, for his limitations. But through the difficulty, his affection flowed—concern for his children, delight in his grandson "called after me sure why not may God bless him," gratitude for Catherine in London who "never forgets me." The letter closed with hope: "My arm may be better the next letter. Please God."

It was not to be. Within three years, acute pulmonary edema would claim his life. He died at home on Henry Street on August 21, 1960, with his son John present. He was sixty-seven years old.

The funeral on August 26 drew a large crowd to Breaffa Cemetery. The Clare Champion obituary noted that Matt had been "a prominent member of the local business community for many years" and that "his passing was regretted over a wide area." The chief mourners included his widow Cissy, his sons and daughters, his surviving siblings including his brother Joe, and his son-in-law Laurence Blake who had come from London with Matt's daughter Catherine. Two of his children—Aine and Patrick, who had made their lives in New York—could not make the journey home. Distance and circumstance meant they mourned their father from across the Atlantic, an ocean away from the man who had struggled to write them letters with his rheumatic hand.

A Life in Three Portraits

Three photographs trace the arc of Matthew Fennell's life. In the first, a young man sits beside his brother, both dressed in their best, poised on the threshold of adulthood with their futures unwritten. In the second, that same man—now thirty-five, more settled, his hairline receding—sits beside his bride in formal studio dignity, beginning the partnership that would sustain them through decades of challenge and achievement. In the third, an aging shopkeeper stands behind his counter in a white coat, surrounded by the goods that fed his community and the shelves that represented a lifetime of work.

From Commercial Clerk in Galway to merchant and councillor in Kilrush, from the eighth child of a farmer to the father of seven, Matthew Fennell's life traced an arc of modest but real achievement. The photographs document the external journey—youth to marriage to establishment. But the letter he struggled to write in 1957, with its affectionate concern for scattered children and grandchildren,captures something more essential: despite physical decline and the dispersion of his family, he maintained the bonds of love and duty that had shaped his life.

The shop on Henry Street is long gone, as is the generation that knew him as neighbor, councillor, and friend. But his grandchildren remember him still, and the photographs remain—three windows into the life of a man who built something lasting not through grand gestures but through steady presence, fair dealing, and enduring love. To those who never met him, he is history. To his descendants, he will always be Granda.

About the Author

Terry grew up in the United States knowing her maternal grandfather, Matt, only through fragments—his name, his place in the family, and the quiet absence he left behind. Born and raised in County Clare, Ireland, Matt died two years before Terry was born, and as a result, he has always remained something of a mystery. Family stories have long centered on his wife, whose life was extraordinary, while Matt's story lingered at the edges. This work brings her grandfather to life in his own right, offering her family a deeper understanding of the man they never had the chance to meet.

Sources

Vital Records

Irish Genealogy birth or baptism records. Birth record for Matthew Fennell:https://www.irishgenealogy.ie/files/civil/birth_returns/births_1893/02289/1859156.pdf

Marriage registration of Matthew Fennell and Mary Catherine Comyns, 26 June 1928, Roman Catholic Cathedral, Ennis, County Clare.

Death record for Matthew Fennell, 21 August 1960, Henry Street, Kilrush, County Clare. Cause of death: acute pulmonary edema.

Census Records

Ireland Census 1901. Residents of a house 10 in Brisla East (Cooraclare, Clare):http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Clare/Cooraclare/Brisla_East/1080576/

Ireland Census 1911. Residents of a house 12 in Dominick Street Lower (Galway West Urban, Galway).

Business Directories

Thom's Directory, various years 1936–1949. Entries for Fennell Bros, bootmaker, boot warehouse, and grocer, Henry Street, Kilrush, County Clare.

Private Documents

Matt Fennell to Auna Fennell, letter dated 2 May 1957, Henry Street, Kilrush, County Clare; private family collection, transcription by Terry Fitzgerald.

Photographs

Studio portrait of Matt Fennell and Joe Fennell, circa 1920-1922; private family collection.

Wedding portrait of Matt Fennell and Mary Catherine (Cissy) Comyns, 26 June 1928, Ennis, County Clare; private family collection.

Portrait of Matt Fennell in his shop, Henry Street, Kilrush, mid-1950s; private family collection.

Newspapers

Obituary for Matthew Fennell, Clare Champion, 26 August 1960.

Burial record, Breaffa Cemetery, Ballykett, County Clare, after 21 August 1960.

In 1968, thirty-one years after my mother first came home to Henry Street, I walked through its door for the first time. I was 6 and on our first trip home to Ireland. We stayed at the Fennell home for our whole trip — the house where our mother and her twin Mags were raised as the youngest of the family, though a little baby boy came after them, unnamed, as he died at birth. On the trip was my mother and my siblings Geraldine and Deborah. I am the eldest, named Terry after my mother's best friend Terry Rush. It was my mother's first trip home with her young family. Dad had to stay in New York for work. He bundled us off to JFK airport and off we went.

My whole six week experience was wonderous, scary and magical all at the same time. Scary because we were meeting family for the first time and they all had strong Irish brogues. While our own mother spoke with a soft Irish brogue, her siblings and mother were very different. And the food was so odd! Definitely not what we were used to. My aunts were quite disgusted with the jar of peanut butter that my mother carted across the ocean so that we had one familiar thing! Uncle Jack developed a game he called Mouses In The Houses to trick us into eating. That’s such a special memory, it deserves its own chronicle later!

As we entered through the main door, it was unlike any of our houses in New York. It was a long hallway, with a long closed shop on the left. As a child, the hallway seemed so long, it was like a city block! In reality, it was probably 50 feet or so? Half way down the long walk towards the kitchen, the heart of the home, was the staircase to the upper levels. The whole journey down it seemed dark with the only light coming from the front door, now closed, and the light in the kitchen.

Entering the kitchen, the first thing I remember is where Granny sat. Her chair was on the far left, close to the old-fashioned stove, as if that spot had been chosen long ago and never reconsidered. Sitting there, in her corner, was Granny—my mother’s mother. She would have been in her early seventies, though to my young mind she seemed very old. Her long, thin hair was pulled back into a bun, always neat, always the same.

I remember that we couldn’t really understand her. The brogue was very strong. My own mother spoke with a brogue softened by years of living in New York, so Granny’s voice felt familiar but not quite clear. My cousin used to laugh and say it was because she didn’t have her teeth in, but I don’t think that was it. I think it was simply the strength of the brogue, thick and steady, like something that had never needed to change.

That kitchen was also the first place I smelled a peat fire, slowly burning in the stove. Just like music that grounds you to a space and time, that peat smell grounds me to Henry Street.

Along the wall beside her ran the sink and the old washing machine, both worn but still in use. Above, stretching across the ceiling, was a series of hangers for drying clothes. As a child, I noticed them often, the way they cut across the space overhead. They made the room feel full, even when it was quiet.

I loved that kitchen. It was small, but it held everything. A large table sat in the center, taking up most of the space, making it feel like a place meant for gathering. Around the walls were cupboards filled with teacups and saucers, more than seemed necessary, set close together as if there was no room left but still no reason to take any away. Near the window was a more modern stovetop and a small desk or work area, added later, as needs changed.

At the far end of the room stood the large press, solid and heavy, opposite the stove. It held clothes, and like everything else in the room, it felt permanent. The whole kitchen was a mixture of things—a bit of everything gathered over time. It wasn’t arranged so much as it had grown that way, piece by piece.

At the time, I didn’t think of it as unusual. It was simply how Granny’s kitchen was.

Off the back door of the kitchen was the outhouse, yet another adventure we were not prepared for! We had only one toilet and bathroom in our New York house, but it was inside.

Going back out into the long hallway, we made our way upstairs to the rest of the house. The second floor was mostly taken up by the sitting room. I can still picture it clearly, with Granny’s things set out where they could be seen. There were photographs on nearly every surface, along with a piano and the fireplace that seemed to anchor the room.

The sitting room didn’t change much, at least not in any way I noticed then. The furniture stayed where it was, as if it had been decided long before I ever came along. There was a large wooden cabinet against the wall, dark and polished, with a mirror that reflected the window across the room. I remember the way the light came through the curtains and landed there, making the glass dishes on the cabinet shine more than anything else in the room.

Some of them were pink, a color I didn’t see often anywhere else in the house. They were set out carefully, close together, as if they belonged in those exact spots. There were also a few photographs, though I didn’t always know who the people were. I understood they were important because they were kept there.

The fireplace was across from it, and that’s where my attention usually went. The mantel held a row of small things, but I always looked at the two matching vases first as my anchor into that space. Because this was the fanciest of rooms, we never spent much time there, but I loved everything about it. Most of our time was anchored in the kitchen space.

There were bedrooms on that second floor, one or two. The third floor was where the children slept including us. One distinct memory is the chamber pots under the beds, to avoid late night toilet situations and having to go all the way downstairs to the outhouse!

Back downstairs was the wonderfully mysterious and now closed shop. I can remember peeking through the curtained windows, longing to go inside. I now know that that shop functioned as both a boot shop and a family grocer in its existence from about 1928 after my grandparents married until my granda’s death in 1960.

When the end of our six week adventure came to a close, we gathered in the kitchen to say our goodbyes. Much of my Irish family was there; granny, Jack, Mags, some of my cousins. It was terribly hard and I did not want to go back to New York. I had fallen in love with my second home. I remember starting to cry and dashing back down that long hallway to the stairs at about mid point and hiding to cry my eyes out. Mom followed me quickly, trying to give me comfort about the need to leave. I was so focused on my own distress, it’s only with this writing that I realize how hard it would have been on her to leave her mother one more time. Everything else is really a blur about that day. What stands clearly is the emotion of my pain on having to fly home and leave this new place that I loved so well.

We did not return to Ireland for another 6 years, this time bringing my youngest sister Laura and our father with us for their first visit to Ireland. But that first memory is always with me. In 2013, on a later trip home, Laura snuck up the stairs to grab some photos while I kept Uncle Jack busy in the kitchen. The stairs were quite unsafe at this point in the life of the house, and no one really went upstairs. But I wanted something tangible in photo form to remember the sitting room. Those photos are now a treasured item in my collection. With Jack’s passing in 2015, the house was sold.

It’s been more than 58 years since that first visit and the memories still bring me to tears. Happy memory tears. That six week visit was foundational for me. I can still picture everything in my mind. And that’s a good thing…

About the Author

I'm Terry Fitzgerald, raised in New York with deep family roots in County Clare, Ireland. I was six years old when I first walked through the door of the house on Henry Street in Kilrush — my mother's birthplace — and fell in love with a country I immediately knew was also home. That first trip in 1968 shaped everything that followed. I wrote this to preserve what memory holds of that house, that kitchen, and the grandmother my own children's generation never knew. The smell of a peat fire still brings me straight back.

On a Thursday afternoon in July 1936, Bishop Thomas E. Molloy of Brooklyn stood before more than 1,200 people on the grounds of the Cenacle retreat house in Lake Ronkonkoma, New York, and dedicated a new grotto — a stone structure fashioned after the famous shrine at Lourdes, France, where, in 1858, a young shepherdess named Bernadette Soubirous had reported visions of the Virgin Mary. (*16) Several monsignori were present. The Patchogue Advance covered the event the following day, noting the gift of the late George Duval of Brooklyn, the contract firms responsible for the cement and the excavating, the readiness of the Sisters of the Cenacle to welcome all who came. What the newspaper did not note — what no document would record — was the presence, somewhere among those twelve hundred, of one of the men who had built the thing.

His name was Maurice Joseph Fitzgerald. He had crossed the Atlantic a dozen years earlier with forty dollars in his pocket. He had spent the intervening years on these same grounds, shaping them — first as gardener, then as one of the men who helped raise this shrine from hollow earth to consecrated stone.

Maurice had been born on 11 July 1901 in Caherlevoy, Mountcollins, County Limerick, Ireland, the eldest son of Timothy Fitzgerald, a farmer, and Elizabeth Sheehy. (*1) The 1911 census recorded him there as a nine-year-old scholar — known to family and neighbors as Mossie — one of seven children in a household that also employed a sixteen-year-old domestic servant: a working farmhouse, full and close, at the edge of rural Limerick. (*2) Timothy Fitzgerald died in 1915, when Maurice was thirteen. In 1922, in the aftermath of Irish independence, Maurice served in the military. (*3) He was the first of his immediate family to leave for America.

The night before he departed, his neighbors and family gathered to see him off. Among them was his second cousin Jackie Lenihan — Jack Tom — then a boy of about thirteen. Before Maurice left Caherlevoy for the last time, he gave Jackie a bird in a cage. Jackie Lenihan was still carrying that memory in 2010, at the age of ninety-nine, when he recounted it to Terry Fitzgerald on a visit to Ireland. He called him Mossie. (*OA1)

In 1924, Maurice joined the wave of young Irish men and women crossing the Atlantic in those years, and boarded the SS Cedric at Cobh for the crossing to America.

He arrived in Boston on 31 August 1924. The passenger manifest recorded him: single, fair complexion, blue eyes, dark hair, five feet nine, carrying forty dollars. His destination was Lowell, Massachusetts, where his first cousin once-removed Thomas Lenihan had settled. His stated intention was to remain permanently. (*4)

The documentary record falls quiet for the years between Boston and Long Island, but by 1928 Maurice had found his way to Lake Ronkonkoma and to the Cenacle — a large retreat house and convent on forty-two acres of wooded ground overlooking a pond, run by the Sisters of the Cenacle. The property had originally been donated by the retired actress Maude Adams, and the sisters had maintained it for retreatants since the 1920s. (*H2) Brief notices in the Suffolk County News in 1928 place Maurice at the Cenacle, spending weekends with friends in Brooklyn and New York: "Morris Fitzgerald, of the Cenacle," the column called him — attending a friend's wedding in October, visiting friends in February, a man quietly building a life in his adopted county. (*6) (*7)

The Depression that arrived in 1929 tightened circumstances across Long Island, but the Cenacle's grounds provided the measure of stability that steady institutional work could offer. The 1930 census recorded Maurice as a twenty-eight-year-old laborer at the Cenacle, still single at the time the enumerator called. (*5)

The woman he would marry was already in New York. Mary Bridget Geary had been born in 1908 in Carna, County Galway, to John Geary and Bridget Lyden, known as Delia. In October 1923, when Mary was fifteen, her father brought her to New York — to his sisters, her aunts, who were already established there. She left behind, among other things, her baby sister Sarah, born that January. Sarah was nine months old when Mary sailed. It would be many years before the two sisters stood in the same room again. (*OA2)

Two months after the 1930 census, on 26 November 1930, Maurice and Mary married at the Church of St. Albert — a Belgian national parish established in 1916, at 433 West 47th Street in Manhattan — with his sister Mary and Mary's brother James Geary as witnesses. (*12) (*13) The bouquet Mary carried was borrowed from the photographer; there was no money for flowers in 1930.

Maurice had declared his intention to become a citizen of the United States on 11 January 1929. By the time he filed his formal petition on 12 January 1934, he and Mary had three sons: John, Timothy, and Maurice Jr. The petition listed his continuous residence at the Cenacle since his arrival in 1924 and named two witnesses — Henry F. Verwilghen, a priest, and Patrick Rafferty, a laborer, both of the Cenacle — who could attest to his character and his presence. (*8) Rafferty had arrived from Maphoner, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, around 1922, two years ahead of Maurice. By 1930 the two men were living and working on the same grounds, sharing the same census page. Rafferty had married Frances Madeline Fish in Lake Ronkonkoma in April 1933. In their early family lives, the two households shared the same grounds. On 7 July 1934, the Supreme Court of Suffolk County made Maurice's citizenship official: Petition No. 2811. (*15)

Around 1935, the grotto project began.

The shrine was designed by architect Lucien Gaudreau of Baltimore and featured sculpture by John Early; the cement contract went to John Wild of Holbrook, and the excavating and landscape work to Charles Beck of Ronkonkoma. (*16) (*H1) But family oral tradition, preserved by Mary Bridget Geary Fitzgerald, places Maurice and Pat Rafferty among the men who performed the hands-on construction at the site: clearing brush, hauling stone, sand, and cement from road to worksite, and shaping the masonry core into cave-like forms — the arch, the niche for the statue of Our Lady, the steps and low walls where retreatants would one day kneel. (*16) The man who had sworn for Maurice's citizenship now worked alongside him in the mud and cement. For months, the future grotto was a worksite: digging, mixing, hauling, setting. Then the scaffolding came down.

On 23 July 1936, it was dedicated. The bishop blessed the stone. Twelve hundred people gathered. And Maurice Fitzgerald — who had mixed the concrete and set the approach paths and helped fashion the cave that faces heaven — was there, not as a named contributor, not as anyone whose presence the newspaper would mark, but as a man who had made what the bishop was blessing. (*16)

He had less than two years left.

By January 1938, a newspaper notice reported him confined to a hospital in New York, "formerly employed at the Cenacle" — the past tense marking the close of his working years on those grounds. (*17) The illness was actinomycosis of the sigmoid, a slow bacterial infection, compounded by cachexia. Family understanding held that it was connected to his work on the grounds — possibly to managing cattle, an exposure consistent with the disease: actinomycosis is well documented in cattle, and abdominal infection in humans from such contact or from contaminated soil was a recognized route. He lay at Misericordia Hospital at 531 East 86th Street in Manhattan. Mary and the three boys — John, six; Timothy, four; Maurice Jr., two — remained at the Cenacle property in Brookhaven, sixty-five miles from the man in the hospital bed.

While he was still hospitalized, on 21 September 1938, the Long Island Express came ashore at Bellport, approximately two miles from the Fitzgerald home — one of the most powerful hurricanes to strike the northeastern United States in the twentieth century. Maurice Sr. was in Manhattan, beyond reach of the storm and beyond reach of his family. Family memory holds that Mary searched for her eldest son John in the wind and rain; that Maurice Jr., barely two years old, would carry the terror of that day for the rest of his life — even in his early eighties, he could still recall it clearly. (*34)

Eight days later, on 29 September 1938, Maurice Joseph Fitzgerald died at Misericordia Hospital. He was thirty-seven years old, fourteen months into his illness. (*18) The requiem mass was said at St. Jerome's R.C. church in New York. The Mid-Island Mail's obituary on 5 October described him as a native of County Limerick who had come to America thirteen years before and spent the last eleven years on the Cenacle grounds — a member of St. Joseph's Holy Name Society at the Lake, survived by his wife, his three sons, his brother Timothy of Lake Ronkonkoma, his sister Mrs. Mary Gilligan of the Bronx, and his mother, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, still living in County Limerick. (*23) He was buried at St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx on 1 October 1938, section 15, range 16, grave 65. (*22)

The grotto stood for decades after him. By the 1950s it appeared on postcards: "Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto, Lake Ronkonkoma, L.I., N.Y." — thousands of retreatants kneeling at the stone cave near the water, leaving flowers and candles, unaware of the men who had made it. Of Maurice's siblings, roughly half had made it to America before the Depression tightened the immigration rules and closed the door for any interested in emigrating — his youngest brother Jim among those left on the Irish side of that line. Elizabeth Fitzgerald outlived her son by almost ten years, dying in Limerick in 1947. On a family trip to Ireland in 1977, some of Maurice's siblings were still there to be met.

In 2011, Terry Fitzgerald reached out to Pat Rafferty's granddaughter Kathleen. Her reply was this: "Thank you for sending me a message about our grandfathers, just like you I never got to meet my grandfather — he died when my mother was only five. I would love it if you could send me anything about my grandfather's accomplishments." (*OA3) Two men built the grotto. Neither of their grandchildren knew them.

In 2009, Terry Fitzgerald returned to Long Island for the death of Timothy — Maurice's middle son, her father's brother. Timothy was interred at St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx, section 15, range 16, grave 65, beside his father. Somewhere in that same period, going through the house, Terry found a cache of documents in the bottom of the linen closet. Those documents sent her to the Cenacle grounds — to the grotto Maurice and Pat Rafferty had built more than seventy years before. The original retreat house was eventually demolished in the early 2000s; the grotto's memory persisted in local histories and family stories long after. The bishop who dedicated it named the donor. The newspaper named the contractors. No one named Maurice Fitzgerald. But the stone held — and in the hands that shaped it, so did he.

Sources

1. Vital Records — Civil Registration of Births, Abbeyfeale District, Limerick; entry no. 31, Maurice Fitzgerald, born 11 July 1901; IrishGenealogy.ie.

2. Census Records — Ireland Census 1911, house 22, Caherlevoy, Mountcollins, Limerick; census.nationalarchives.ie.

3. Military Records — Irish Military Archives; records referencing Maurice Fitzgerald; militaryarchives.ie.

4. Passenger Records — Massachusetts Passenger and Crew Lists, 1820–1963; NARA RG 85, Series T843, Roll 292; Ancestry.com.

5. Census Records — United States Federal Census 1930; Brookhaven, Suffolk, New York; FHL microfilm 2341384; Ancestry.com.

6. Newspaper Records — Suffolk County News, 24 Feb 1928, Lake Ronkonkoma column.

7. Newspaper Records — Suffolk County News (Sayville), 19 Oct 1928, p. 13.

8. Naturalization Records — New York County Naturalization Records, 1791–1980; FamilySearch ark:/61903/1:1:7D1Z-JHT2. Note: Witness name confirmed as Patrick Rafferty upon review of original document image; earlier transcription in error.

12. Vital Records — New York, New York, Extracted Marriage Index, 1866–1937; Ancestry.com.

13. Vital Records — NYC Municipal Archives Historical Vital Records; entry for Maurice Fitzgerald and Mary Geary marriage 1930.

15. Naturalization Records — Suffolk County, Court Orders Dec 1929–Dec 1949; FamilySearch.

16. Newspaper Records — Patchogue Advance, 24 Jul 1936, p. 7. Note: Family oral tradition, passed down by Mary Bridget Geary Fitzgerald, holds that Maurice Fitzgerald and his colleague Pat Rafferty were among the team of workers who built the grotto. Maurice's specific contribution is attested through family memory rather than documentary record.

17. Newspaper Records — The County Review, 27 Jan 1938, p. 14.

18. Vital Records — New York City Municipal Deaths, 1795–1949; FamilySearch ark:/61903/1:1:2W23-FZC.

22. Vital Records — New York, New York, Index to Death Certificates, 1862–1948; NYC Dept. of Records; Ancestry.com.

23. Newspaper Records — "Maurice Fitzgerald," obituary, Mid-Island Mail, 5 Oct 1938, p. 15; NYS Historic Newspapers.

34. Newspaper Records — Daily News, 23 Sep 1938; Long Island Express Hurricane; newspapers.com.

H1. Historical Research — "The Grotto at the Ronkonkoma Cenacle," Lake Ronkonkoma History, Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/LakeRonkonkomaHistory/posts/the-grotto-at-the-ronkonkoma-cenaclethe-grotto-at-the-cenacle-was-modeled-after-/2345508715492228/; cited in research documents compiled by Terry Fitzgerald, April 2026.

H2. Historical Research — "Sisters of the Cenacle," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_of_the_Cenacle; and New York Times, 27 March 2011; cited in research documents compiled by Terry Fitzgerald, April 2026.

OA1. Oral Account — Jack (Jackie) Lenihan, age 99, to Terry Fitzgerald, Ireland, 2010. Lenihan was Maurice Fitzgerald's second cousin and was present at his going-away party the night before his departure for America in 1924.

OA2. Family Knowledge — Background on Mary Bridget Geary Fitzgerald, as known to Terry Fitzgerald.

OA3. Personal Correspondence — Kathleen [Rafferty], to Terry Fitzgerald, 2011, regarding their grandfathers' shared history at the Cenacle.

About the Author

I'm Terry Fitzgerald, raised in the United States with deep family roots in Ireland and a lifelong pull toward understanding where I come from. My paternal grandfather, Maurice Fitzgerald, died when my father was only two, leaving his story largely untold. I wrote this to preserve his memory and to give voice to a man known mostly through absence. The grotto he built nearly a century ago still stands today, a quiet but enduring reminder of the legacy he left behind.