I started writing this post for Brigid’s Day (Imbolc), but didn’t actually get it posted due to being away. So, please read this in the context of Brigid’s Day!
My ancestor Brigid Maria Fitzgerald was born in the year 1845 into an Ireland on the brink of the Great Famine. Baptized on February 1 in Dungarvan, County Waterford, her father was a Fitzgerald and her mother was a Leamy.
Brigid Maria Fitzgerald. The Maria is pronounced “ma-RYE-ah,” the old-fashioned way. I grew up hearing her name spoken like an invocation. She was my grandmother’s grandmother, and there was so much lore around her. She came (apparently alone) to New York and married a sea captain, Matthias Nutter. He had already led an adventure-soaked life, supposedly smuggling guns into Cuba to aid a revolution, before a stray breeze blew back his greatcoat and revealed the guns strapped to his body. He was promptly imprisoned but released after a letter arrived from “the Queen.” (We haven’t found any evidence to substantiate this story, but it seems too detailed for a complete fabrication. Plus, one look at a photo of this dude and you can believe he did just about anything he wanted to.) Brigid and Matthias were married in New York, moved to the Midwest and had approximately a bazillion babies, and he died while she was pregnant with the last one.
Recently we found out that Brigid had a child out of wedlock before she got married to Matthias, apparently from a union with an Irish sailor named Charles. We don’t know what happened—maybe he died, maybe he disappeared—but Brigid gave birth as a single mother in 1871 New York City. A family Bible was later retconned to hide this illegitimate birth, but guess what, the historical record doesn’t lie.1
Ultimately our ancestors are unknowable figures who did and believed and hoped for things that we cannot truly fathom. We are all the descendants of people who could be gentle, angry, joyful, fearful, loving, unkind, generous, cruel and enlightened—everyone in a different make-up according to their nature, or the crap they were working through in that lifetime, or however you want to see it.
We project our hopes, dreams, ideals, even our explanations of who we ourselves are, back onto them. Some of this is justified, like the way trauma is passed down through generations, or the retelling of ancient stories that move our hearts and help us get our heads screwed on right; and some of it is nonsense.
And so, my ancestor Brigid is ultimately unknowable. Is she someone I would want to hang out with? I dunno. And I’m not sure that’s the right question. What I do know is that there is a potency to her name. Whoever she was, whatever wounds, loves, secrets she carried, she was complicated because she was human. We all are.
And she also carried the name Brigid, the goddess, the saint, the Mary of the Gael. Maybe it isn’t Brigid Maria Fitzgerald who calls to me as much as a sensed connection to an ancient past. Not solely to generations of complicated humans, but to generations of reverence. Much like my immigrant ancestors’ devotion to keeping the memory of their Irish land alive, land I don’t know if they wanted to leave (or perhaps they did, but went with that sickening in the stomach knowing they would almost certainly never see it again), maybe Brigid’s name keeps alive an ancient devotion to, well, Brigid.
The goddess of fire, blacksmiths, midwifery, poetry. The saint who was given her name. Legend has it that neither time nor space could limit Brigid, the saintly version, who traveled by the grace of angels back in time to assist Mary and Joseph with the birth of Jesus. Perhaps it should be no surprise then that she speaks seemingly from the past, through the name of my ancestor, to my heart.
What ancestors call to you?
There are some different perspectives on working with ancestors or as one might simply call them, the dead. Of course, they are around us, or some of them are, switching on lights and TV screens and wafting us with their love and the scent of their perfume. These helpers, these beings, with head-scratching mystery somehow still touch our lives, but how do we answer them? “If great-aunt Irma wasn’t good with money, I wouldn’t ask for her help with it,” someone told me the other day. Well, sure. But what are our lingering, loving dead good at? Why are they still with us if not to somehow help? Are they just hanging out because it’s…fun? Maybe we should, as some people suggest, recall what they were good at and give them a job! And maybe, too, as I was told, they are there to speak to us, and we need to be open to having the conversation.
Well, folks, the cat’s out of the bag now. If you didn’t already know that my wild, mystical and silly heart believes in ghosts, past lives, and whispers from ancient goddesses, now you know! And I trust if you’re here, you’re good with it. :)
Am I crazy? Do I actually have time for another Substack? Hard to say, but you can sign up for it here and start getting emails as soon as it begins!
Although actually it does! In a further twist on the mystery, good ol’ Matthias apparently used the other guy’s name when they tied the knot. Except he seemingly could not bring himself to lie about the name of his own mother, or his age, so we can extrapolate (we think) that it was him.