Page 203 - WDT MAGAZINE IRELAND ISSUE WINTER 2018

limited interaction, so this was a rare moment. My
father and grandmother were complete unknowns in
Josephine’s world, and the Irish family Ned Swift left
behind were equally unknown to us. But now here I
was in her kitchen bouncing on my knee a baby boy
who looked remarkably like my dad. I was swept up in
the moment and felt a flush of emotions – joy, surprise
and confusion, touched with wonder.
We shared family stories and began to piece to-
gether genealogical traces. Josephine had a copy of
the will by which our great-great-grandfather, James
Swift, had distributed his assets at his death. Ned
Swift, one of his sons, was not mentioned, meaning he
was cut out of the will. The reason for that was left for
us to guess. Maybe he had been given his share of the
inheritance to help resettle in America; maybe he had
overstayed his welcome on his return to Drumharvey
and burnt a family bridge; maybe he left debts when
he went back to America for good. That information is
buried with my great- and great-great-grandfathers.
After catching up on a century and a half of family
history, Kathie and I went to the cemetery at Sacred
Heart Church in nearby Irvinestown, where some of
my distant relatives are buried. Here on a Swift family
monument was a list of names of people I never knew,
and whom I’m certain my father never heard of. It was
sobering to think that if Ned Swift had never put his
family on that boat in 1891, his name, my grandmoth-
er’s name, and even my father’s name might be on that
monument.
We said our goodbyes and drove to Omagh, where
we stayed in a bed & breakfast – Mullaghmore House,
an 18th-century Georgian mansion that gushed an-
tique fixtures, figurines and furnishings in every nook
and cranny. In the lobby, on prominent display, was
a photo of our host, Louis Kelly, with Sam Neill, the
New Zealand actor who starred in “Jurassic Park” and
many other movies. Neill, it turns out, was born on
Mullaghmore House’s kitchen table on September 14,
1947.
Outside the walls of this charming manor house is
Omagh, a wonderful city that bears an indelible mark
of being the site of the grisliest moment in Ulster’s long
Troubles. Omagh is not a big city – population 80,000
– and like many Irish towns it has a beautiful avenue,

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