Blog #2

My suggested plans to add our family stories to the O’Sullivans from Bantry Bay

September 25, 2016

The goal of what will become our contribution to the family history is to have something to pass on to the next generation. We want them to be able to trace family roots if and when that might be of interest to them. Maybe someday they will drive through CT and wonder where in heck the family used to call home or where might be this or that cemetery. Maybe someone in another generation of elementary school kids will have an assignment to find out a little bit about their families and where they come from.  This volume can be our contribution to answers to those questions.

We  will celebrate the contributions that women have made to the O’Sullivan clan. Remembering “Gimba” and all she did gives us the incentive to understand and include the story of Rita, Anita, Karen as they joined the journey of the O’Sullivans of this generation. Adriana and Ginney are already part of the next generation.

By the same token the stories of female O’Sullivans and their families are part of the record we wish to keep. From my sister Kathy to my grand daughter Marjorie Grace and all in between and beyond, I hope you see this as a shared story. It certainly has been shared lives.

I will be loading a digital version of the original O’Sullivans of Bantry Bay. I also have made PDF version of the History of Orange (CT) and will load that.

I have constructed a family tree on my Mac with software by the name of Reunion software. I do not know yet how to share that.

 I also have many pictures that I have digitized to my computer. I transferred many slides over into the new mode of computer memory and also have taken pictures of things with my Iphone and stored them as well. I will try to learn how to up load and share all of them if that what we need to do.

When Dad died in 1996, I seem to have been selected to be the family historian following Dad’s footsteps. Since I retired two years ago, I have been going through the boxes of odds and ends that I inherited from the house at 954 Orange Center Road.  From them I have garnered a number of short stories to add to the record of the previous two generations. I will post them in the near future.

I also worked with my brothers, Jeff, Patrick and David to work up some ideas of what they will want to contribute to this record. Those are in various stages of finish. I will post them as we get them in better shape and I have the thumbs up to do so.

 I have worked with Peggy Ann to bring a history of the Hessions to the list as well.  For the past eighty years the history of the O’Sullivans of Orange CT and the Hessions of Derby have been intimately connected. The connection was cemented by the wedding of Thomas and Marjorie in 1939. It did not end with the death of Marjorie in February 1986. In the years, Peggy Ann Obidinski (nee Hession), daughter of Marjorie’s brother Evey has been a stalwart member of the family. She and her husband Ed have made their house at 4 Wedgewood Drive, Woodbridge, CT the gathering place for parties and hanging out especially for summer poolside picnics- with the barbeque smoking and the bar always open. We add that to the story as well.

I have typed up an electronic version of reflections Uncle Robert wrote in May of this year. He died in early June. He was planning on giving me the pages he wrote when he came to our August 2016 “90/70 Birthday Party for Sis and Kathy” at Racebrook in mid August. His daughter Nancy was kind enough to give a copy to me and I transcribed it and will share it.

All of this is to encourage each and everyone who is part of the blog and part of the family to write the memories they want to share. Send them along and with your permission I will post them.

Certainly I would welcome any  corrections and improvements offered. Are there suggestions of how to do this better or any other process or content ideas? My thought is that what we can create a wonderful and useful memory dialogue together.

Introduction---Volume II
The O’Sullivans of Clark’s Corner, Orange CT, USA
Dad, Thomas J. O’Sullivan II, completed his work on Volume I on April 23, 1982. Dad gave his work the title: the O’Sullivans from Bantry Bay (1795-1982). Dad’s story ends in the area of Connecticut of Orange, Derby and New Haven as the place to which a branch of the O’Sullivans from Bantry Bay, Cork, Ireland had emigrated. The story told by Dad gives the origns in Derrycreeven, Bere Island (just opposite Castletownbere) and arriving in Connecticut.
He and our mother, Marjorie E. Hession O’Sullivan, were born, lived and died- all within less than five miles of where they had started. Our family house where we grew up was at 954 Orange Center Rd. This is probably 250 feet from the house where Dad grew up into which Dad had moved as a lad of eleven in 1925. The place where all this happened is known locally as Clark’s Corner. It is at the southwest corner of Orange Center Road and Derby Ave facing land owned by Racebrook Country Club.
Dad died on June 3, 1996, having lived eighty-two years. Mother died February 5, 1989 when she almost seventy-five years old. They both were born in 1914 and married June 21, 1939.
His brother, Jim passed away on April 10, 2012. He had retired to Stratford CT following his retirement from the faculty at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. He lived on the west bank of the Housatonic River. As you come down the hill from what was his house along the golf course you can see his boyhood town of Orange on the other bank of the river. Dad’s sister, Aunt Sis (Pat) lives in Orange, as she has done for most of her life. So aside from his younger brother, Uncle Robert, whose career was mapping the rock formations of western Colorado, the O’Sullivans of that generation were homebodies. They were very much traveling homebodies to be sure, but anchored in Orange and the immediate environs of Orange.
Our task is to add the next generation’s story to the one he has given us. I am in awe of the work he did. He did serious detective work in the parish baptism books to track the start of the journey by great-great grandfather Patrick from Ireland in 1839. He assembled photos and the family tree without any computer programs or electronic storage. His work was fundamentally “cut and paste” since it was with pen and scissors and cellophane tape that he put things 


together.

For us, the use of the computer and internet ease our tasks. We now have an electronic version of his work. We can assemble and share texts, pictures and other records that way. A family tree is a breeze- with the Reunion software program and data base programs that store and keep track of our family growth and dispersal.
During the era we will be highlighting- 1982 to the present, we will be telling of the continued spread of the present generation of O’Sullivans in CT and beyond (and the various families of which we are members). Presently we have family members living in Connecticut, Colorado, Idaho, Florida, Washington State, North Carolina and back in Ireland not far from Dublin, Ireland.