Annie Kate Limerick: Good news!

“Child, I’m going to tell you a story you’ve never heard, but you’re old enough to hear it now. Maybe it’ll help you decide what to do.”

Annie Kate knew she’d told Agnes this story many times, but this version had a different ending, the story how Annie Kate O’Grady, born 1852, the year the Great Famine ended, had married Andrew Limerick back in Trim on the River Boyne at the foot of Tara Hill. County Meath, Ireland. Escaping poverty and despair in the fall of ‘70 with Andrew and little Martin, sailing from Queensland to the States, Annie Kate already four months into her second pregnancy, shielding Martin from the angry waves on the six week journey to New York, Andrew determined to make a life for them in the New World.

Annie Kate found it difficult to remember that far back – more than sixty years – but she had a purpose in telling Agnes now. Secrets even Agnes’s mother didn’t know.

“When we arrived, we wandered the streets of New York for eight hours in a cold rain. I’d lost five pounds even though I was expecting your Uncle Daniel. Your grandfather thought I would collapse from fatigue, hunger, thirst, but then he met Mr. Adams coming out of the Union League. He asked, did we need help?”

Granny resumed her knitting. She’d never mentioned Mr. Adams before. “I don’t remember how we came about to stay with them. I was quite ill. Young Mrs. Adams nursed me back to health, a good Christian woman she was. They let us stay until your Uncle Daniel was born. Mr. Adams told your grandfather about his brother’s masonry, how their business on the west side of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River was booming and his brother was looking for men willing to work. That’s when we came to Philadelphia and settled at old Mrs. Toole’s house where you took piano lessons all those years.”

“Adams was a Protestant, Agnes, and he was English. He didn’t care we were Irish Catholics. He only cared that your grandfather was willing to work hard. If it hadn’t been for them, I’d have died on the streets of New York. Your grandfather wouldn’t have had the opportunity to start his own business.

“So when your mother and Uncle Collin vilify Protestants, I think about Mr. and Mrs. Adams. What I most remember about those six months in New York was how much I wanted a home for your father and my babies. That’s all I cared about. I’d have given up anything to be with them. It’s family that counts, not any church, not any job. Everything comes second to family, sweetheart.”