Green and Orange Irish Coming Together

By Elaine L. Orr

My four siblings and I were very aware of being Irish (our Mom's maiden name had been Rooney and her mom's Teehan). As we got older, we  learned more about the Orr family also having been in Ireland a couple of hundred years before coming to American in the 1830s. They had initially been in Scotland, so were very clear about being Scots Irish. 

You guessed it, my father was Presbyterian and my mother Catholic. In mixed Protestant-Catholic families, the children are more likely to be raised Catholic, and we lived near our Catholic Parish and were very active in it. But having a Presbyterian dad and many cousins meant we knew Catholicism was not the "only way." In fact, we had 22 first cousins on our dad's side, and only seven on our mom's -- doesn't exactly fit the stereotype.

My parents had very irreverent humor. My dad once gave my mom a plaque that had a shamrock on it and said, "May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead." 

We also had an Orr family history that was written in 1954 and no in-depth history on the Rooney side until we were adults. That very interesting history showed us how a group of brothers and sisters helped each other get to the U.S. between 1832 and  the 1890s. It also showed that the Orrs wanted to be sure everyone knew they were Scots Irish -- a.k.a. Protestant. And Presbyterian, not Church of Ireland. There was even an anecdote in the written history that one Orr descendant still in Ireland was unhappy her son married a Catholic -- but that turned out to be hearsay, not true. The line was crossed out.

A difference that would have mattered greatly had my parents lived in Ireland here was no big deal in the U.S. Of course, in the 1940s, our parents would probably not have met in Ireland. However, my dad would likely have known how to spell the name of his denomination. They married in the rectory of Mom's Catholic parish in Kansas. Mom looked at the paperwork when they were done and didn't understand why Dad had said he was Methodist rather than Presbyterian. He said he was the latter, but he couldn't spell it. The priest, of course, repeated the story.

Since moving to the Midwest in the mid-1990s, I've been to the small rural church where my dad was baptized probably 40 times; there's been an annual family reunion there until recently. The first reunion I attended in 1995 caught me up short when my cousin, reunion president, not only wore an orange tie but reminded the group that they were "orange Irish," not green.
Coming from a neighborhood outside of Washington, DC with every religion and many countries of origin, I wasn't sure how to take that. True, the Troubles in Northern Ireland (Ulster) didn't end until 1998, but why stress the differences? I quietly asked. His response was perfect -- essentially we didn't need to highlight the differences. He wore a green tie the next year.

We all equals in that ground.

Meantime, I learned a lot about my Rooney and Teehan Irish roots after coming to the Midwest and meeting the children of some of my mom's first cousin. Essentially, those families came for the same reasons as the Orr families -- there were few opportunities in Ireland, even with the pretty good education system. The Teehans came during the potato famine, so they were hungry.

And guess what? They all melded into their new country and many took great joy in owning land -- for farming, not just a home garden. Land is really scarce in Europe compared to the Americas. From what I could tell doing research, no one in any of the Irish families actually owned land.

It turns out that freedom and equal opportunities are great equalizers.

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Elaine wrote an extensive history of the Orr family and is about to start on "the other side." To learn more about Elaine's writing, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.