A Twig Reconnects to the Family Tree

While vacationing in upstate New York this past summer, we took a side trip with my sister to Landsdowne, which is situated in eastern Ontario, Canada where the St. Lawrence River flows into Lake Ontario.

The purpose of the trip was to attend the O'Connor-Trainor Family Reunion. It was an opportunity to meet some fourth cousins and return to the North American roots of our maternal grandmother's family. This was the area where our grandmother's grandparent's first settled in North America when they emigrated from Ireland. It is also the place from where our great-grandmother, Julia O'Connor (1850 - 1914), had left (under a cloud of sorts, we learned at the reunion - but letters some shared with us showed that she did maintain contact with her cousins for the rest of her life) to come south to Western New York to start a new life.

Julia's mother, brother and sisters later followed her to Western New York leaving only her father, who lay buried in the nearby hamlet of Philipsville.

You see, our family was but a branch that broke off the larger family tree and drifted away only to be re-discovered a year ago by a descendant of Julia's uncle, Daniel O'Connor. This descendant, Margaret, while doing research, ran across the write-up in the newspaper of my grandmother's death some 20 years ago and, by lucky chance, was able to locate a cousin who referred her to my sister.

The majority of the family in attendance were the direct descendants of either Daniel O'Connor (1796 -1887) and his wife Bridget Trainor O'Connor (1815 - 1894) or Bridget's parents (and Daniel's neighbor when he arrived from Ireland) Peter Trainor (1774 - 1851) and Catherine McGuinnis Trainor (b 1776). We, on the other hand, are descended from Daniel's younger brother Charles O'Connor (1810 - 1865) who married and later decided to follow his older brother to Canada. Our great-grandmother, Julia, was born after the family had moved to Canada.

In addition to representing another branch of the family, we added a little color to the group as Julia O'Connor had married the black sheep of a local family, Patrick Ivey (who also went by the surname Iven for reasons that will be clear in a moment) in the area and then come to the U.S.

A few years after arriving in the U.S. Ivey left Julia with their two young sons, and headed west, supposedly to seek a new home for them. Shortly after he had left, a telegram arrived informing Julia that he had died. Years later, after she had re-married and given birth to my grandmother, Ivey showed up on her doorstep seeking to get back together. He had sent the telegram and had proceeded to marry a few more women, never bothering to get a divorce from any of them.

We knew this and the O'Connor's at the reunion had also discovered this in their research. What we didn't know was that Julia was supposedly a rather headstrong young woman who had married, apparently against her parent's wishes, Patrick Ivey when she was very young. Ivey had either borrowed money from Julia's father and failed to repay it or stole it with the result that they left for the U.S. as much out of necessity as desire. Of course we knew and the Canadian O'Connor's knew that Patrick Ivey eventually ended up in prison in Michigan for bigamy.

What our Canadian cousins did not know was that Julia's older brother, Patrick O'Connor, after being discharged from the Union Army following the American Civil War, joined a group of fellow Irish, known as the Fenians, who were agitating for Irish independence.

When the Irish branch of the Fenians was unable to make much progress fighting the British in Ireland, the American branch hatched a plan to hijack Canada (a British colony at the time) and hold it for ransom in exchange for Irish independence. With thousands of ex soldiers from both the Union and Confederate armies who were of Irish descent (most were immigrants from Ireland) available to join and surplus munitions from the war readily available either on the market or from the U.S. government through political connections (in addition to rifles, they also brought canon and even a former navy gunboat), these American Fenians were able to field a formidable army.

President Andrew Johnson at the time was negotiating with Great Britain over the Alabama Affair, a dispute in which the U.S. sought compensation for shipping losses during the Civil War that resulted from attacks on American shipping by Confederate forces using fighting ships (one of which they named the Alabama) that were not so secretly financed by the British government (a sort of 19th century Iran-Contra affair). Johnson used the Fenians as pawns to pressure Britain into paying.

The Fenians invaded Canada and were initially successful on the field of battle. However, being unable to get more troops from England quickly, the British government agreed to a financial settlement with President Johnson who promptly had the Army close the border with Canada thereby cutting off the Fenian's supply lines and ability to retreat back to the U.S. The Fenians failed to gain independence for Ireland, but the Canadians, upset by the inability of England to defend them, ended up achieving self government a year later in 1867 with the passage of the British North America Act by the British Parliament.

About 100 people, mostly from the area around Landsdowne attended the reunion. About half of those in attendance were from the Canadian side of the border and the other half from the American side directly across the St. Lawrence River. Then there were a few of us who traveled from more distant parts of Canada and the U.S. All in all it was a great time and a great experience meeting and getting to know these distant relatives of ours.