The Farrell story

My name is Steven Gerard Farrell, and I was born on July 31, 1954, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I was the ninth child born into a large Catholic family of ten children. We were a mixture of Irish and German ancestries. Maybe we didn't make so much of my mother's heritage because we had so many German relatives nearby in the Midwest.

Since we were the only Farrell family in Kenosha, we always identified ourselves as Irish. It helped that John F. Kennedy was the first Irish Catholic elected president in 1960. My father, Grover John Farrell, who was born in 1910, was also a lifelong native of Kenosha. Grover, an official with the American Auto Workers Union, met JFK twice. He was the son of Frank Robert Farrell, born in Wisconsin, circa 1881.

Details about my grandfather were sketchy because he was placed inside a Catholic orphanage in Milwaukee when he was about four years old. My grandfather vaguely remembered that his father, John Farrell, spoke with an Irish accent and was from County Cork, Ireland. John had lived in Canada and New York before moving to Wisconsin to work on the railway. His wife, Mary Hickey, was an Irish-American born in western New York (St. Lawrence County). Frank couldn't remember much about his mother outside of her name. He always believed that his father had died in an industrial accident in the early 1890's. We assumed that the death occurred in Wisconsin.

To compound the mystery, my grandfather ran away from Wisconsin and headed out across the Great Plains when he was twelve years old, not returning to the Midwest until he was over the age of twenty-one. He rarely spoke about his life on the road. We do know that he spent years trying to locate two older sisters that he could dimly recall. His search was unsuccessful. He died in 1958 when I was three years old.

Through extensive research conducted by my nephew, Thomas Farrell, using censuses, obituaries and DNA, we discovered that John Farrell was the son of Patrick Farrell and Mary Bran of Doneraile, Cork; and that he had died in a copper mine explosion in Butte, Montana in 1885. His wife, the mother Frank couldn't remember, died in 1894 during the time period when my grandfather Frank was somewhere on the road. He revealed that he had spent lengthy periods of time in both Oklahoma and California, maybe earning some money boxing and pitching semi-professional baseball. However, he never mentioned anything about him ever locating his mother during his rambles out west.

So many questions remain unanswered, but at least we have verified that our Farrell family were indeed Irish, and from Cork. It was a long journey that included much sorrow for my Farrell family. I'm sure many of my fellow Irish American can make the same claim. I'm now an old man, and I'm back home after a lifetime of knocking around the USA, Ireland and Japan. It gives me great comfort to know that I'll be buried next to my Farrell family here on my native soil of Kenosha, Wisconsin.