Beech Tree News Network

Recently, while I was following behind Garey and his tractor and plow, picking up potatoes, I was reminded of the Irish Potato Famine, 1845 – 1847, the worst year, 1847, is known as Black ’47.

If the DNA traces are to be trusted, I am mostly British, with some Irish and Scottish thrown in for good measure, and a miniscule percent of Native American Indian.  Garey often teases me about my love of all things British.  I had this bent and he teased me about it long before I took the DNA test.  There is a part of me, however—probably the twenty-seven percent shown on the DNA chart—that identifies with the Irish.  

My mother’s family were sharecroppers, and though I was just four years old when my Dad and stepmom received custody of my three sisters and me, I remember that life and the longing I felt in the adults around me to have something of their own, something they could call “mine.”

When I was twenty-two years old and reunited with my biological mother, she told me the thing she remembered most about me was that when someone gave me something, I would ask if I could keep it or would I have to give it back.  If the answer was I had to give it back, I wouldn’t take it.  The wanting to have something of my own was a trait I had either inherited or developed by the time I was four years old.

Although the current fields of psychology believe genetic memory to be a false idea, in the late 1800s, psychologists believed genetic memory existed, and it explained phobias and fears that couldn’t be explained by a person’s experiences or lack thereof.  I personally believe that genetic memory exists.  I am a descendant of Irish immigrants, and as such, my ancestors experienced, either directly or indirectly, the Potato Famine.

Nearly one million people died by either starvation or disease during that dreadful time.  One million more left for other countries, causing the population of Ireland to decrease by an estimated 20 to 25 percent, and taking nearly a century to rebuild that population.  

Because the Irish depended on a one-crop subsistence, a potato blight was the immediate cause of the duress.  Add to that a political system stacked against the Irish citizenship, and you have a recipe for disaster.  From 1801 – 1922, Ireland was ruled directly by a government based in London, England.  Many of the Irish people lived on lands owned by absentee British landlords.  As such, they had few rights, and were subject to eviction in the event that they were unable to pay rent.  That’s exactly what happened during the famine, and it is understandable that many of the Irish, left with nothing, fled to the US and other countries.  It is also understandable that years later, there would be an uprising of the Irish people, who simply wanted to rule themselves and own land that couldn’t be taken from them.

Before she passed away, my Grandma Mattingly told me that her son, Thomas (killed in WWII at the age of 18) always said to her, “You let everybody take everything away from you.  I don’t understand that.”  I do.  It is a believing that you don’t deserve what you have, a believing that your efforts don’t measure up to other people’s efforts, that yours are somehow smaller.  I used to believe that way, and now I wonder how much was conditioning and how much was genetic memory.  I made a concerted effort to change my way of thinking.  

I will continue to plant my potatoes on land that I own, and when I dig my crop, I will continue to remember the ancestors who planted potatoes on land they didn’t own, and dug into the earth to find only rottenness and despair.  (Information on the Potato Famine was gathered from History.com.  Information on genetic memory was gathered from neurosciencenews.com.)