My wife Patti’s maternal ancestry is all Irish. Her father's is a mix of English and Scottish. Her Irish ancestry estimate on Ancestry.com is 49%. 23AndMe just says she is 100% British and Irish. Her father was born in Utah, and his ancestry has been well-researched by other relatives, but her Irish was not.
Both of her maternal grandparents emigrated from Ireland to San Francisco in the early years of the 20th century, in time to witness the big San Francisco earthquake of 1906. They had emigrated as singles, Mary Frances Kennedy from County Limerick and Patrick Clifford from County Kerry, and met each other some time after the big quake.
After Patti and I married in 1983, we took our first trip together to Ireland, Patti's first trip abroad. On our last full day in the country, we managed to look up her relatives in Limerick – her mother still had first cousins alive there. We knew there was a priest named Joseph Kennedy who lived in a certain town, and priests being fairly easy to track down, we just showed up at the church there and surprised him. He was gracious enough to show us around, and we got to meet a couple of his brothers, one still living on the family farm and the other running a pub in the town.
He also showed us the family grave. There were only two headstones, one from 1791 and the other, more modern, from 1920. Father Joe explained to us that lots of other members of the Kennedy family were buried there as well, presumably on top of one another, but only these two could really afford stones.
Our life turned to family, we had three children, did the family things, and this Irish ancestry investigation lay dormant until our children were off on their own, and my interest in genealogy and family history really began. In October of 2009 we made a day trip to San Francisco to the city hall and found the marriage record for Patti's grandparents: Patrick Clifford, aged 29 years, and Mary Frances Kennedy, aged 26 years, 28 April 1912.
We knew both of them were buried in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, California, a town known for extensive graveyards covering its hills, a place to move to when you die. We had never visited their graves, so on the way home we stopped there at the cemetery office and got directions to their gravesite.
We easily found the location, but there was no marker in the spot between Hermina Asher d Aug 6, 1940 and James F. Ward d 1940, rest in peace. So we went back to the office and asked if there might be some mistake in the location. They said no, and sent us back to the spot to meet a groundskeeper who came with a shovel. I don't know, but there is something a bit strange about digging in graveyards, and so when he stuck in the shovel it was visceral.
The groundskeeper stuck the shovel in and scooped out a big bite of sod. Sure enough, he soon hit stone, and unearthed a small cement cross inscriber “Clifford.” Apparently this was the default marker option, for those with no money or perhaps no inclination to spend more.
Adding a grave marker here takes a bit of paperwork, agreement of surviving descendants, deciding what words to use. We’ll figure that out, and leave a better memorial for future visitors.
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