The best thing to do now is to visit Ireland and tell everyone in the village that an Irishman came near your great great great great grandmother once and how you feel spiritually connected to the land. Then ask where the Blarney stone is - they love that.
Order a black and tan before you leave!
No no an Irish Carbomb, the national drink!
Because they could get a job and afford a house in Missouri. They were escaping serfdom.
And famine.
Maybe they went there the same day I did.
Still pretty cool. The mist gives it “we could dump a body here” vibes
My thoughts exactly.
Got the same view last week, haha!
Breathtaking
The fog gives it ambience, I don’t want all my hikes to look like shutterstock images
Perhaps they grew tired of the Brits starving and killing them?
Yeah, my ancestors are from Ireland and Italy. The Irish half escaped the famine and came here and procreated like it was going out of style. My family from Italy came over to escape the fascism (jokes on them). They brought with them the gabagool.
My ancestors were criminals. One was a horse thief in Norway and the other was a counterfeiter in Germany in the early 1800s. Both skipping their homelands around the 1850s, just ahead of the law. At least that’s what the family histories say that we can actually trace with reasonable accuracy.
I suppose we brought the lutefisk and lefsa from the Norwegian side and beer and sausages on the German side.
Hey, mine were criminals too, and they brought some of that classic Italian criminality to Scranton, Pittston, and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, enough to have a lengthy Wikipedia article about it. Funny, because it’s not something you recognize at the family parties as a kid.
Simpler times.
Not simpler, just a lot more concerned about family dirty laundry. There were a general attitude about the “old country” that they didn’t talk about. It was strong enough that my one Grandfather refused to teach me to speak Norwegian even though he and all the older community spoke it everyday. And you would go to church on Christmas or Easter day and the service was done all in Norwegian and you sang Norwegian hymns.
My family immigrants went farther west. The western prairies and northern forests of Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Canada. We bounced around a lot before the 1900s.
Ha, very similar story for me, I don’t speak a lick of Italian. My grandmother wasn’t exactly into the affairs of her brothers and uncles and so I think she chose to insulate the grandkids. Fortunately she didn’t insulate us from fantastic cooking.
We mainly stayed in the NY/NJ/PA area, just like everybody else around here.
His attitude about teaching me the language was strange. He refused to teach even my mother. He was all “Your 'Murican, so you speak 'Murican.” And not Norwegian.
It wasn’t until I was in my early 20’s that I discovered that the Norge my grandfather spoke was essentially a dead language from the early 1800s. Soon after my family showed up here, the Norwegian language changed. It changed a couple of times. Not that he knew that.
But on the German side, my Great Grandmother was all about teaching me German as a little kid. She always kept a bowl of the cheap cheap pressed pastel sugar mints that little old ladies are fond of. It was a decorative milk glass hen and nest covered bowl. I could have a candy anytime I wanted as long as I asked in German. And it had better be in Low German! Or I got a light whack with a little bamboo cane every time I mispronounced a word. I learned quickly!
It can be hard to live in places where there’s little wood for heating, only a few crops for food that are subject to random blights, and an oppressive power next door stepping on your neck and trying to divide you from opportunity or independence.
Ireland is a beautiful place with a harsh history.
only a few crops for food that are subject to random blights
Not-so-fun-fact: Ireland always had plenty of crops. It’s just that the English stole them all and only let them keep the potatoes. The scarcity was manufactured, and the blight wouldn’t have been as devastating if the rest of the crops weren’t being extracted.
The Ottomans tried sending food but the English rejected it because they thought it would make them look bad if a foreign government was helping and not them.
there’s little wood for heating
Plenty of sheep’s manure for that. Or peat.
and an oppressive power next door stepping on your neck
Got no argument there, but it does result in some kickass folk tunes.
Ireland is a beautiful place with a harsh history.
Yes, yes indeed.
places where there’s little wood for heating
I wonder how that happened.
I don’t know how true it is, but my understanding is that Ireland used to be quite well off for forests. But the English happened to them, and bit by bit, we successfully deforested 98% of the island.
My Norwegian great-great-great-grandparents saw this and said, “Let’s move to North Dakota and live in a sod hut.”
This was widely considered a bad move.
I mean, it saved them from famine at the time. But today I’m thinking it’s about time to change direction and return to the old homeland.
Hey now, that’s a nice view
After the 5th year of eating maggotty potatoes they went somewhere to give their great-grandkids a future.
In springfield Missouri
If you’re starving you’ll move to anywhere that has food.
Yeah. They didn’t move for the scenery – they moved to get away from the man-made famine put upon them by the English.
You can’t eat the scenery.
Well, you can, but it doesn’t taste as good as it looks.
I wanna be a maelstrom in 1714 C.E.
I don’t get the title, please someone help and explain, it’s going to bug me.
He wants to sink the ship on which his grandparents left Ireland.
Ah! thank you, that makes sense :)
Wild guess here, and I’m not super clear what a maelstrom even is but I know it involves the sea, and those are the Cliffs of Moher in West Ireland. Perhaps the maelstrom has something to do with their origins?
EDIT: well silly me, those cliffs are millions of years old so the date here wouldn’t line up. Idk then, perhaps that’s when the family immigrated and the hypothetical maelstrom is intended to mess with the timeline, meaning OP is saved from Missouri.
EDIT2: Fatal mistake, OP - the maelstrom did not deal an effective enough blow, but you did fuck with the timeline just enough that you are now sentenced to life in Louisiana! Better luck next time!
All depends on how the potatoes were doing that year.
Not having eaten in a week will do crazy things to you
Probably more to life than grass, rock, and water.
Nah that’s just what capitalism wants you to think. Shrek is love. Shrek is life.
Maybe they were big fans of meth.
I know a couple Irish people in 2026 CE that very gladly saw that and left for America.
