My mother's favorite piece of jewelry is a gold charm bracelet. From it dangles a precious memento-a gold sovereign minted about a century ago.

    When I was a child, Mom told me simply that her father's mother had given it to her father before he left for America. Today, I can imagine her weeping grandmother pressing this coin into the hand of her son as he leaves his homeland and she bids him farewell for perhaps the last time. They were probably both weeping. There’s a lot of emotion symbolized by this coin, and in the reasons why he came to America.

    My mother's father, Edmond Liston, emigrated from Ireland to New York in the 1920s. There he married my grandmother, another Irish emigre, and they built a family of five children, two boys and three girls. He opened a corner grocery store and lived a quiet and dignified life in Westchester County until he died in 1960, the year before I was born.

      They brought their children up to be hard workers and honorable, decent human beings. School came first, and although one son was athletically inclined, Ned insisted that the boy put aside sports to concentrate on his studies. That son is now a university president, and traveling back to Ireland thirty years after his father's death, he learned for the first time that his father was a soccer star in County Limerick as a young man.

  From all accounts he never spoke about the past, although when the children were young, he did take them back across the Atlantic to introduce them to his homeland. He was from a large family (he was the seventh of nine brothers), but he was the only one to leave Ireland. Why?

    His past is beginning to come to light.  remembers teasing her father as a young girl and being reprimanded by her mother-"you don't know what it was like", when the British Black and Tans would come into a village and break down doors and take people away.

My grandfather was born in 1898 and that would make him an idealistic 18 year old at the time of the Easter Rising in 1916. From a paperback history on my grandmother's bookshelf (of the role of County Limerick in the war for independence)  we learn that a young man named Liston is a resistance fighter traveling undercover on a train with British soldiers , signaling to his compatriots that the enemy is aboard and the train should be ambushed. His middle daughter, who became a nun in the 1960s, returned to Ireland with her mother before entering the convent and was surprised when a shopkeeper recognized her immediately as Ned Liston's daughter. The shopkeeper then proceeded to tell her (with a chuckle now) about how he was taken away by the British authorities for "interrogation" (read: a sound beating) because with his red hair, they had mistaken him for Ned Liston.. The university president has heard stories that his father escaped from the jail cell and the firing squad and was off to America. True? We don't really know yet. He just didn't talk about it. The paperback history was printed after his death.

      I remember my mother, who adored her father, telling me as a young kid about how her dad disliked Winston Churchill immensely. For years that struck me as odd, because I knew from my studies that Churchill had led Britain through World War II by defiantly standing up against the Nazis. As an American I had never really learned of Churchill's role in the partitioning of Ireland some twenty years earlier. Ned Liston must have known a lot of  people, his friends, who died  fighting against partition, fighting against something other than complete independence for their homeland.

I wonder what Ned thought about Michael Collins and of course about of Provisional Irish Republican Army of the more recent Troubles, and where Ireland is now today that it looks like peace is finally at hand, though Ireland may never be united.

In 1998, my wife and I had our second child, a boy, exactly 100 years after Ned Liston was born in Ireland. It is our hope that young Ned will grow up to emulate his great grandfather, in spirit and in deed.

Someday I will meet my grandfather and get the answers to my questions. Until  then, we have my mother's bracelet as our tangible link to the past.