My Trip to NYC

I used to be a New Yawka through and through.  Lived for years in Park Slope in Brooklyn, then years more in a loft in SoHo.  That was back when I knew I was gonna be famous, when I knew it was only a matter of time before all the world was gonna recognize my genius.  You live in New York and you're brushing shoulders with greatness every day, and you wait for your time to come.  For most, like me, it never comes, other than brief Warholian fame that vanishes in an instant.  When I left New York, I went to Moscow, Russia, and lived there for nine years,  I never looked back.

Now my ancestral search was leading me back to The City.  The old death certificates I was now looking for were only viewable on microfilm in the New York City Archives.  Since I live up in the Boston area now, I needed to manufacture an excuse for a visit to NYC, because I couldn't justify a trip just for a visit to the Archives.  Then, out of the blue, two things happened to make the trip a reality.

I have a little game I play at work when I get bored.  I think of a name of someone from my past that I haven't seen or heard from for a long time, then I Google the name to see if I can find any recent information.  I've done this with childhood friends, high school buddies, even adulthood friends that I had lost contact with.  I've actually located a few people this way.  I remembered the name of a guy I met in the Army.  We were in the same Officer Candidate School company down at Fort Benning, Georgia.  A couple of the guys in the company, including me, decided to publish a company newsletter.  In one of the issues I published a poem (an embarrassing piece of work when I read it today), and shortly thereafter, another guy in the company came up to me, told me he enjoyed my poem, said he wrote poetry too, and showed me some of his stuff.  It was an immediate and solid connection between the two of us, an intertwining of spirits that I had seldom felt before or since, two aspiring poets caught up in the macho militarized swirl of the Vietnamized sixties.  We hung out a bit, then he dropped out of OCS, and got assigned to dog handler school.  I went on to graduate as an infantry second lieutenant, and we lost contact after that brief intense connection.  I decided to Google his name to see if there was anything there.  I figured I had a decent shot at finding something, since he had a rather distinctive name -- Lamont B Steptoe.  This is what I found:

Lamont Steptoe is a poet, photographer, journalist, and activist based in Philadelphia, PA. His most recent collection of poems, A Long Movie of Shadows, was just awarded a 2005 American Book Award.

Lamont is the founder/publisher of Whirlwind Press. He was a Combat Army Sergeant in Vietnam and was decorated with the Bronze Star. Among other awards and grants, Lamont has won:

• The 1999 Literary Fellow for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts
• The 2002 Kuntu Writers Workshop Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry from founders Rob Penny and August Wilson
• Discipline Winner in the Literature Category of the Pen Fellowship Program in Philadelphia
• Twice nominated for the Pushcart Award.

He has read his poetry in Paris, France, Den Haag, Holland, Managua, and Nicaragua. In the United States he has read at the Etheridge Knight Festival, the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival, the Schomburg Center for Black Literature, and the Annual Black Writers Conferences in Philadelphia, PA.

Of his many, many books and other works, the most well known are Mad Minute, In the Kitchens of Masters, Catfish and Neckbone Jazz. Lamont Steptoe is widely considered to be one of the most accomplished and important poets in the U.S.

Whoa! My Army buddy from 43 years ago actually BECAME a poet, as opposed to me who only aspired.

Now, I don't consider myself a poet.  I've written some inconsequential bits of rhyme over the years, but nothing there to brag about.  I did have one brief poetic outburst in the middle seventies, which serendipitously coincided with the publication of an anthology of poetry called "Demilitarized Zones: Veterans After Vietnam", so I actually got a couple of my poems published. I wrote seven poems in a matter of  about three weeks.  I just went out into the woods with a pencil and notebook, smoked a J, contemplated the trees, and the poems just arrived.  It was like the poems existed outside of me, and I was merely a conduit rather than a creator.  I've never had that feeling before or since.  I've never written any real poetry since that outburst.  For those of you interested in The Complete Poetic Works of Peter P. Mahoney (all seven of them) you can find them here.

What all this has to do with my trip to NYC is that one of the editors of that poetry anthology was organizing a forty year anniversary reading in New Jersey to benefit an organization called Warrior Writers, and I was invited to participate in the reading.  Boom! I now had my excuse to visit NYC.  I found Lamont on Facebook, and made contact with him, and he agreed to come up to NYC from Philly to meet me.  I met him outside of Penn Station, and the old connection was as immediate and as intense as it had been forty-three years ago.  We are both inveterate storytellers, and we each now had a rapt audience who had never heard any of our oft-repeated yarns and was eager to hear them all.  We spent a magical afternoon together. We sat for about six hours in Fanelli's Cafe in SoHo, totally oblivious to the artsy crowd around us.  We made sure to tip the waitress well, since we monopolized one of her tables for her entire shift.  My sense was she didn't seem to mind, and enjoyed overhearing bits and pieces of our conversation.

The next day, I was off to the archives.  It took a little while for me familiarize myself with the search setup there.  They had a computer search engine where you could search for names, but once you found a name and a reference number, you had to go to the microfim library to locate the actual documents.  I plugged away at it, and soon found what I was looking for:  the death certificate of my great-grandfather Jeremiah J. Mahoney:

And there it was. Jeremiah J. Mahoney, living at 313 Clinton Street, died on September 24 1919.  Jeremiah J. Mahoney, son of Cornelius Mahoney and Catherine Dugan, both born in Ireland.  I had found the names of my ancestors who had actually left Ireland to resettle in the US.  It was all I could do to keep from shouting out in exhilaration in the staid halls of the NYC Archives.  I didn't want to stop there.  Now, if I could only find a death certificate for my great great grandfather Cornelius, it should give me the names of his parents and I would have the information to take my search to Ireland.

I found several possible Cornelius Mahoneys who died between 1880 and 1900, but I didn't have enough data to determine which one was my relative.  I did find the death certificate for a Cornelius Mahoney who died in 1908:

So, this was Cornelius Junior, a brother of Jeremiah.  Then, I found the death certificate for Catharine (Dugan) Mahoney, who died in 1888:

Alas, the older death certificates didn't list the parents' names.  Still, there was some interesting information to be gleaned from the document.  It said that Catherine had been in the US for fifty years, and resident in NYC for forty years.  That would put her crossing in 1838, much earlier than I had thought.  I had always assumed that my ancestors came over during the time of the Great Potato Famine in the late 1840s.  Now the fact that these were two round numbers not from Catharine herself would lead me to believe that they are estimates, but I figured they were probably in the ballpark.  There was also information on the back of the death certificate:

Catharine was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn. If I could find her gravesite, then chances were Cornelius should be close by.  If the gravestones had birth dates on them, then I would have the data to continue the search in Ireland.

There was one small piece of curious information that I noticed.  Catharine died on the evening of 16 August, and was buried on 18 August.  Wasn't there a wake or a funeral mass?  Seemed rather quick.  I would learn later the significance of that information.

For now, I was ecstatic at all the information I had uncovered, and at the reunion I had with Lamont.  The only downer from the trip was that a big snowstorm came up and the poetry reading was postponed.  Actually, it wasn't a downer at all.  It meant that I now had an excuse to return to NY and find what Holy Cross Cemetery might have in store for me.