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Cobh (AKA "Queenstown" under the Brits) at last, here I am waiting for the ferry at Passage West to take me over the river.

My sister says I look like a garden gnome



I had two street addresses, one was my great grandfather's house where my grandfather was born and from whence he left for America both times and the other was the house where my great grandmother was living at the time she married my great grandpa.

The cathedral where they married in 1884 and where my grandad was baptized in 1889 was easy to find. And indeed there was a wedding taking place there that very day, maybe in the year 2148 their great grandchildren will come looking for that place.



The street addresses I had brought good-natured smiles from the locals, they knew right where they were, just around the corner from each other.

Back when Cobh was Queenstown and a major port, the old east end of Queenstown was called "The Holy Ground", a notorious sailors' dive.

Go there and you'll find this marker bearing this photo...





Great Grandpa (born in Queenstown 1854) was 30 and living in that front row of houses by the dock when he married Mary, 18, who lived on the diagonal hill immediately behind those houses.

Both their houses are gone now, demolished in the 1960's and the lots sold off. A few of the original row houses still remain on the dead-end waterfront street where the family lived. On the right of the seawall in the foreground you can see the ramp going down to the wharf, the same one visible in the old photo.




On the hill where Mary lived, right behind those houses, nothing remains but overgrown foundations and rubble. Some of the locals, old as me or older, remembered the old houses and even where the house numbers had been.



We knew the O'Birdy's were from Queenstown, and we knew they were mariners, we just didn't realize how much.

Great Grandpa Birdy and his wife emigrated to Brooklyn in 1900, shortly thereafter he died on a construction site, family history has it that he was murdered by an Italian, and indeed there was an inquest into the suspicious death of himself and three others, killed as a result of the collapse of a construction scaffold.

The following year Great Grandma brought the three children, two boys and a girl, back to The Holy Ground where "several aunts and uncles lived". Great Uncle Patrick joined the Merchant Marine when he came of age before enlisting in the Royal Munster Fusilliers and was KIA at Gallipoli.

Grandpa O'Birdy, who despised the Brits and their wars, also went to sea as a teenager and ended up working as a salvage diver around the Panama Canal, a crippling attack of the bends ended that career and he moved to Brooklyn where he met his wife, likewise an Irish immigrant. He went on to father nine kids, so at least some parts escaped permanent damage.

There it is, two generations at least of the O'Birdy's were from The Holy Ground, front and center, a neighborhood so notorious they wrote a song about it




Next up: Birdwatcher goes to France.