Note to readers: This exploration of my family history is primarily for my kids and kinfolk. I’m posting it in my blog because I’m too cheap to set up a separate website. If you are not among my relatives you probably won’t be interested in this stuff, and that’s fine with me.
My daughter the semi-famous author is researching her mother’s family history. It’s a rich heritage: My wife’s paternal grandfather was a science-fiction writer in the 1940s, and there are boxes of letters, journals and newspaper clippings spanning several generations. It’s fascinating stuff and I hope she makes a book out of it.
My side of the family didn’t leave much of a paper trail. My paternal grandfather only made it through the third grade, and my mother’s folks spoke English in bits and pieces. So my family history is a series of passed-down stories that undoubtedly evolved in the telling.
As the story goes, my father’s ancestors originated in Scotland as part of Clan McLeod. (I have a necktie in the McLeod tartan.) The British moved a bunch of Scots to Ireland beginning in 1610, in the hope that Scots Calvinists would counterbalance the troublesome Irish Catholics. But the Scots were just as unmanageable as the Irish and some made their way to America in the 1700s. There are lots of McClures, and some consider themselves Irish because their ancestors stayed in Ireland for another century or so.
English gentry had already settled the American coast, so the arriving Scots-Irish headed for the hills and pushed the frontier through western Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and so on. Jim Webb’s book Born Fighting traces this Celtic diaspora and his account matches the stories I’ve heard. Including the debatable one that my ancestors came over the mountains with Daniel Boone.
I’ve begun doing some research on Ancestry.com that supports this overall narrative. So far I’ve found a Thomas McClure who was born in Ireland and died in Kentucky, Samuel McClure who served in the War of 1812, Mathew McClure and my great-grandfather, Winfrey McClure.
My grandfather, Virgil Allan McClure, was born in Kentucky in 1884 and grew up on a farm in Sherburne. There’s a photo of my grandfather, his parents and five siblings, in their Sunday best outside a white farmhouse. He spent his career as a telegraph operator for the Illinois Central Railroad and married my grandmother, Ethel Holderman, in Covington, TN, in 1910. My grandmother was born in Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, on the Ohio River (where there actually is a cave but I’m certain Grandmother never lived in it). They moved to Corinth, Mississippi a few years later.
Meanwhile, my mother’s parents emigrated from Hungary around 1900 in the second wave of Hungarian immigrants. The first significant immigration from Hungary followed an unsuccessful revolution against the Austrian Empire in 1848-49. My grandparents were in a larger group of Hungarians who were economic migrants between 1890 and World War I.
My grandfather, Joseph Gasperik, hailed from Budapest and was born in 1874. My grandmother, Julia Nemeth, was born in 1885 in Oroshaza. Unlike the laborers and peasants who made up most of the Hungarians who came to the U.S. during that period, Grandfather was a middle-class tradesman. He was a butcher and sausage maker (and won a prize for it in Europe). I have a photo of the shop he opened on the South Side of Chicago (meat market, cigars, fancy groceries, the sign says) with several people posed in front with white aprons.
My parents met when my father came to Chicago in the 1930s on a scholarship to study opera. But that’s another story.