back to Family Stories, Fall 2021

by Emmett Greenwood

As a child, I had always been told I was Irish, and there was nothing for me to believe
anything other than that. My maternal grandfather has always been the lead of this effort to
conserve our Irish heritage and culture, as he always believed in the importance of keeping that
and celebrating it. This manifested its way in the spread of celtic crosses, Irish sweaters, and
other little treats and trinkets that are representative of the small island nation. Until this class, I
believed that anything that wasn’t Irish was from my paternal line as opposed to my maternal
one.

Upon receiving my Ancestry DNA test results, my results showed that I am 64% Irish,
27% Scottish, and 9% England and Northwestern Europe. My father, privately, has done his own
genealogical research in the past and has always alluded to a sense of Scottish ancestry. So when
I received my results, I automatically thought that the percentage of Scottish ancestry in my
results was from him. However, after concluding my research of my family history, much of my
Scottish ancestry can be traced back to the one my maternal grandparents, the one who we
thought was the farthest from Scottish.

Philip Carbury Haughey (1935-present), my maternal grandfather, was the son of
Elizabeth O’Leary (1895-1992), who was born in Boston. O’Leary (1895-1992), was the
daughter of a Boston raised father and a Scottish immigrant mother. The ancestral line from there
is where a significant portion of the Scottish history I found came from. The line from Elizabeth
O’Leary’s (1895-1992) mother, Elizabeth Martin (1862-1914), became the longest line of all of
my research.

The research that I completed for that line reached all the way back to 1501, to Sir
Thomas Dingwall (1501-roughly 1530). The inquiry and investigation into this line gathered
information from many sources. For a line that went so far back, information was taken from
both documents provided by Ancestry but also from the creation of family trees from other
Ancestry users. The evidence that I found in this line led me to believe that they were located in
Dingwall, Scotland, a small inland village in the northern part of the nation. Subsequent
ancestors lived in Montrose and Kincardineshire, two small coastal regions of the nation. The
line eventually went to my ancestors who lived in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, for four generations.
Then, George Martin (1835-1905, father of Elizabeth Martin) moved to Boston with his wife,
Elizabeth McKay (1840-1895), and started a roofing company. Their daughter, Elizabeth Martin
(1862-1914), was also born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. However, she died in Boston.

This means that my 2nd great grandmother, the grandmother of my maternal grandfather,
was born in Scotland. After all of these years of believing that my grandfather was Irish through
and through, he is just as Scottish as he is Irish. As for his four grandparents, one was born in
Ireland, one was born in Scotland, and the other two were born in the United States. In
discussing these results with my mother, she exclaimed that though she had always known of her
families Scottish roots, our Irish roots were the ones she was always taught to prioritize.

This class and the research I have conducted changed the viewpoint of my ethnicity and
my culture. As I previously thought of my family and our ethnic standpoint to be almost entirely
Irish, I can now conclude that there are deep Scottish roots in my tree. Traditional genealogy
efforts allowed me to find these details and find the value in my heritage. Through this
exploration and examination of my identity, I was able to find a newfound appreciation for the
culture and ethnicity that I have, even if it is both Scottish and Irish.