Achill Island, Galway, Aran Islands, Ireland in 2003

Keel Strand, Achill Island, 2003.

I had some vacation time to burn in 2003 and wanted to visit Ireland for the first time to follow up on some genealogical research. Our mother, Ruth Hausser, was German on her father's side and Irish on her mother's side -- Anna (also called Nan) Lavelle.

My mother's mother, Anna, was the fourth of the 10 Lavelle kids. They lived on the West Side of Cleveland, W. 111th St., in St. Rose's parish. Their parents, John Patrick Lavelle and Bridget Gallagher, both had roots on Achill Island, which in the 19th century was the poorest part of the poorest county in Ireland, County Mayo.

The book “Irish Americans and Their Communities of Cleveland” (Cleveland State University, 1978) explained how many Clevelanders could trace their roots back to Achill. The author, Plain Dealer writer William Hickey, told how Achill men tended to find their way to Cleveland. Many of them, like my great-grandfather, John Patrick Lavelle, who immigrated to Cleveland at age 17 in 1875, found a kind of work that uneducated men were qualified for -- they unloaded coal, iron ore, lumber, and grain from the Great Lakes ships that docked on the Cuyahoga River.

Daughter Christine on Achill, 2003

Many of the women who immigrated from Achill worked in the hotels. Most of the Irish laborers lived nearby in what was known as the Angle, around what today is West 25th Street and Detroit Avenue, and they attended St. Malachi’s Church nearby. In fact, that is where John and Bridget got married in 1880. Bridget was pregnant with their 10th child when John died at age 42. For my grandmother, who was 15 at that time, and her siblings, it meant they had to go to work to help support the family. She became a telephone operator. But that is another story.

Achill is on the Atlantic Coast in northwestern Ireland.