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My front porch story [1]
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Date: 2025-07-13
My wife and I live in a 140-year-old house situated in a small town within the San Francisco Bay Area.
One of the things that I like about our house is the broad, flat porch that faces the street.
It’s ten feet deep, and thirty feet wide with posts that hold up a slant roof, and, while unscreened, is well-covered from the noonday sun.
Our porch reminds me, especially it its narrow floor boards and blue-painted wood, of the porch on my grandparent’s farm house.
It is a fine place to sip an iced tea, or a cold lemonade, or, as I’ve taken to lately, a place to occasionally enjoy a glass of California red wine in the evening.
More on my front porch a little later…
::
140 years may be old for a house, but it is not all that old. It’s still within the lifespan of my grandfather, who was born, believe it or not, in 1877. And, of course, our country is much older than that.
Now, personally, my family has been in this country since my first Irish relative arrived in 1836.
His name was Timothy, he was from County Roscommon. Timothy worked as a tanner, and he settled, at first, in Providence, Rhode Island. Providence at the time was home to a little under 20,000 people.
Timothy moved South for awhile, working in the tanning industry for two years in Atlanta, Georgia before moving North again and settling in Western Massachusetts in a town called Conway. There Timothy worked, still as a tanner, for a long-established Massachusetts family.
It was during this time that Timothy met his future wife, Ellen who was part of the massive wave of Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the Irish Famine of 1845-52.
I’ve searched for Ellen’s records in the immigration records of the time. There’s something humbling about looking for the records of an “Ellen Renehan,” a young woman who would have been between the ages of 15 and 25 during this period.
There are so MANY of them, and, as Ellen and Renehan are common names, I mean so many with the exact same name: Ellen Renehan. Young women, fresh from Ireland, working as maids, servants, cooks, seamstresses, and quite often, living alone, or with other young women. One of these countless Ellen Renehans I found, though I will likely never know which one, is likely my grandmother.
You can imagine that life was quite hard, and quite vulnerable for these young women. They were the lucky ones. One million Irish died in the Great Famine, and one million more fled the country.
It’s funny, but understandable, that Irish Americans tend to hone in on a single town in Ireland as “where their family is from.” Often it’s a name directly from family lore, and pride of place. Maybe there is a shop or a merchant with one’s same paternal family surname in bold letters that a relative discovered on a trip to Ireland.
My family’s town is called Kilkenny, in Southeastern Ireland. Yes, there is a shop with our surname over the door in Kilkenny.
When I took a genealogy test, however, and saw the results mapped over a map of Ireland, something else became absolutely clear.
Like most American Irish from the famine years, my genealogical map shows that my ancestors are predominantly from Western Ireland. You could overlay my genealogical map with the counties hardest hit by the famine in Ireland and it would match almost one to one.
It’s not going too far out on a limb to say that if your ancestors are famine Irish, they came from parts of Ireland where people were starving, and there was no choice but to leave. Thousands of thousands of desperate immigrants, including women like Ellen Renehan, came to the United States in those years and never saw Ireland again.
That is what life is like for refugees.
Now, eventually, Timothy and Ellen moved to the Wisconsin Territory meeting up with Timothy’s brothers and built what became of their lives in Minnesota.
When Timothy died in what was now the State of Minnesota, his obituary listed him, per the custom, as a “Minnesota Pioneer.”
::
My Czech ancestors have a similar story.
They emigrated to Baltimore in the 1850’s as part of a huge wave of Bohemian-speaking immigrants.
They settled in Central Minnesota, eventually building Bohemian language schools, and, via working in forestry or, as some of my own ancestors, working on the river boats moving goods up and down the Mississippi, acquired the money to purchase land to make a living in farming.
Like many Czech-Americans, my Czech family spoke Bohemian for well over 100 years in the United States. In fact, even in the 1980’s, my grandparents would speak Bohemian with each other, especially if they didn’t want us to understand what they were saying.
I speak little to no Czech, but my grandfather taught me how to say: To bylo dobré jídlo, babi, which translates to “That was a good meal, Grandma” in English.
Like my Irish ancestors, my Czech family settled in what was called Wisconsin Territory, but has since become Minnesota.
During the Civil War, my mom’s Czech great-grandfather served in the Wisconsin 22nd, based out of Racine, called the Abolitionist Regiment, and participated in the arc of battles waged under General Sherman called the March to the Sea and, later, after Lincoln’s assassination, the Grand Review of the Armies in Washington D.C.
That’s not the only connection we have to 19th Century American history.
If you were to stand on the farm that my Czech grandparents farmed in Central Minnesota (sadly the front porch, as well as the entirety of that farm house, has long been torn down) you’d be at the center of a triangle touching three significant events in American History.
Sixty miles to the East stands Fort Snelling, where for a period of years beginning in 1836, Dred, and his wife Harriet, Scott, were held in slavery. Dred Scott later sued for his family’s freedom based in part on the laws governing Wisconsin Territory at the time, and his lawsuit was rejected in the infamous Dred Scott Decision of the Supreme Court in 1857.
Fifty-six miles to the South, lies the town of Mankato, Minnesota where in 1862 the largest mass execution in US History was conducted under the orders of Abraham Lincoln, and with 4,000 Minnesotans in attendance. After the Dakota War of 1862, 303 Dakota men were sentenced to death after rushed trials by a military commission. President Lincoln commuted 264 of the sentences, but 38 executions of Dakota men took place by hanging on December 26th, 1862 in Mankato.
To this day, there are observations memorializing this event, some of them well outside the public eye. Once when I was home in Minnesota for Christmas hiking in the snow at Fort Snelling, I came upon a circle with 38 memorial names, ribbons, and wooden markers placed in the new fallen snow in the woods just below the Fort. This silent moment of witness in the woods is one I will never forget.
And, finally, six miles to the North lies the site where Taoyiateduta, known as Little Crow, who led a faction of the Dakota in the above mentioned war against the United States in 1862, was killed by two settlers in 1863, while picking berries with his son. I remember reading this history in Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in high school and realizing with a pang that my grandparent’s farm was so close to this spot. We long knew that Native People had lived on the land that my grandparent’s farmed. My grandfather told us that he frequently found arrowheads and shards while plowing in the early days, and I remember, as a young boy, coming upon two burial mounds near the Crow River in the woods. Reading Dee Brown’s book was one of the first times I consciously directly connected what we were taught as Native American history with the history of my own family.
::
Like I said, I love to step out on our front porch.
The wooden screen door, as most oldie-time doors do, slams shut with a bang if you let it.
Out back, a three-hundred-year-old Oak tree peeks over to the street.
Sociable Acorn Woodpeckers loudly come and go, like they have for thousands of years.
This house has seen a lot of history.
More than me.
::
But, here’s the thing.
At a time when our Vice President is opining that Some Americans are More American Than Others and Trump-sponsored censors are trying to erase accurate history from our National Parks, it’s time for all of us who know better to stand up and object to this attempt to railroad our rights, our history, and our way of life.
We all have our front porch stories, no matter how long we’ve been here, or where we’re from. It does not matter if we crossed the border, or if the border crossed us, all of our stories, collectively, are essential to what it means to be an American.
I know that I’m not the only American of Irish descent who knows full well that there are millions of Ellen Renehan’s out there, just like my grandmother, to this day. You don’t have to be Irish to be a refugee, to need to leave someplace, to desperately need to make a new home. That’s why we have an asylum program; that’s why we should have passed comprehensive immigration reform in this country decades ago.
My family is not the only family that spoke a language other than English for generations living here in the USA, while both serving in its wars and working to feed our people. That was part of being an American in 1860; and it’s still deeply true today.
Unlike JD Vance, I’m not the only white man who has come to realize that learning the fullness and contradictions of my own family history makes me a stronger person and citizen, not a weaker one.
While Vance posits that family experience of the Civil War makes one a more valid American; I think it’s little more than an empty history that Trump is feeding us. No such claim is needed .
My own family experienced the pre- and post- Civil War years. My ancestors worked in the pre-Civil War South and its slave economy. My grandfather fought in a Wisconsin Regiment that abhorred slavery, and helped win the war for the Union, but came back from that war to farm land that had belonged to the Dakota people. None of that makes me more or less an American than the next person. It does make me more acutely aware of the history of African Americans and Native American peoples, and how that history impacts my own story.
Telling our stories, in all their complexity, is the only way we can understand our present, and move forward together.
Unless, of course, we are building a society where, permanently, some people win, and other people lose.
That’s not the America most of us aspire to, though, that’s something else; and this new something else is rapidly becoming the vision of the Trump Administration.
::
I chose to call this my front porch story because our society is founded on the notion that when ANY of us leaves the security of our own home and steps outside, that we are equals in the eyes of the law.
Politically, we each have an equal right to argue for our position, to advocate for our views, and to expect due process from our courts and government.
In our society we also have the right and expectation to be treated as equals by our peers.
We have no second class citizens.
We should have no first and second class votes.
And all of us should have the full right to express our views without fear of mistreatment or reprisal; including disagreement with the President and his political party.
When I look around today, however, I see a ruling political party engaged in delegitimizing the rights and identities of anybody who dares to disagree with them.
Last I checked, that runs counter to our history, and our very reason for being the United States.
Gay people pay taxes. Liberals pay taxes. Black people pay taxes. Immigrants pay taxes. We all elect representatives to Congress and govern our states. There’s nothing illegitimate about that.
We don’t have to agree on everything. That’s always been the point.
But none of us, no single faction, has the right to impose itself on the rest of us.
No minority of states or viewpoints should have the right to impose, in exclusivity, its views on every single last one of us.
That’s at the core of our democracy.
The only overriding law is our Constitution, and especially, the values inherent in that Constitution as an expression of the reaffirmed will of the American people and the many millions who have fought and died for those values and those laws.
That’s what we honor when we salute our flag and when we do the work of being a citizen.
Those values are what, to this day, millions of us Americans, including aspiring citizens, get up every day to defend and to perfect and to promote.
Wanting to be an American should be something that we honor.
Learning to be a citizen should be something that we teach along with our history.
We should not be yanking documentation from people who have followed all the rules and who, simply by the distance of decades, may be in the exact same boat as many of our own families were at one time.
There should be no place in America for internment camps.
But here they are.
Again.
::
After I click publish on this post I will open the front door and go sit in the heat of my front porch underneath the 4th of July bunting and next to the “Everybody is Welcome Here” sign with its gay pride banners.
The people passing by will be, as always, a beautiful panoply of people from all over this planet.
Each one of us should have the same rights. Equal rights.
Including, I’ll admit freely, people that I don’t agree with.
I’m fine with that.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
We are Americans.
That’s what it means.
Freedom.
Equality.
And, for today, that’s my front porch story.
[END]
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