Bridget Keane

I’m releasing a brand new song, Bridget Keane—the first one in four years. This is also the first blog post in four years…

Last June, I embarked on an ancestral journey. I was going through old emails and found one that had our family history from my Dad’s side attached to it. I took a look at it, and discovered that we had relatives that lived in Newtown, CT, which is not very far from where I live now. (Most of my family from my Dad’s side lived in the Chicago area.) I thought it would be neat to see if I could find them in Newtown. Bridget Keane was born in Ennis, County Clare in 1831. She emigrated from Ireland somewhere between 1847 and the early 1850s. She married Michael Collins and had five children here in Connecticut. Through Ancestry.com, I was able to see the Collins family on the 1860 census. I thought perhaps I could find where she was buried, as the information we have says she died in Newtown in 1862.

The C.H. Booth Library in Newtown has a large room devoted to genealogy, so that was my first stop. There were books that held records of all the burials at cemeteries in town, so I looked at those, but found no records of her burial. I went to the Newtown Town Hall next. In the Town Clerk’s office, there is a vault where all the vital records are stored. The Births, Marriages and Deaths records go all the way back to the 1700s. I searched for over an hour, but didn’t find any clues. It was extremely disappointing.

I knew from the family history we have that Michael Collins worked at a rubber factory—this was also noted on the census. We took a drive to Sandy Hook to what once was the New York Belting and Packing Company. It is now an office building, but it still looks pretty much like it did back in the 1850s. In my mind, it was the closest I could get to be where my ancestors were. The family history also provided a plot number for Michael Collins in Oakwood Cemetery in Geneseo, Illinois, so I called the cemetery, hoping they would take a picture of the Collins plot. It was really nice of them to take the time to do this, and they also sent a picture of the listing in their records book. Unfortunately, the graves and the plot are unmarked, so there’s no way of knowing if Bridget is buried there. It was the second disappointment of the day.

Michael Collins moved to Illinois and remarried not long after Bridget’s death. He had four children in his second marriage, for a total of 9 children. One of the four was my grandmother’s Dad, James Leo Collins.

This story has never left my head. I had really hoped to find something tangible from my search in Newtown. I know that Bridget Keane Collins is not actually a relative, but if it weren’t for her the rest of us wouldn’t exist. Back in November I was compelled to write the story down as a song. It went through a couple of revisions until I found the right one. The bridge in the song expresses what I felt about making a connection:

I wanted to stand where you once stood

And to cross the lines of time

Send a ripple through the lineage

That somehow connects with mine.

This song is dedicated to my Dad. It’s available on CDBaby: http://store.cdbaby.com/cd/shannonmcmahon5 and will be available on Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, iHeart Radio, and other outlets soon.

Thanks so much for reading this. I hope you enjoy the song.