The Family Tree

Ethan Walsh had always known two things about his family: that his grandmother, who had died when he was six, came from Galicia, and that his grandfather, whose first name was also Ethan's middle name, came from Ireland. Beyond that, the story had always been a little blurry. His mother, who had grown up in Boston speaking English at school and Spanish at home, remembered only fragments.

The search began with a shoebox that his mother found in the attic one winter. Inside there were letters, most of which were in Spanish, a few black-and-white photos, and a ticket for a ship that had sailed from Vigo to New York in 1958.

Ethan, who was twenty-four and had just finished a degree in history, decided to build a proper family tree. He signed up for a genealogy website, where he spent whole evenings searching through old records. His grandfather's side was the easier one. Patrick Walsh, who had arrived in Boston in 1955, came from a small town in County Clare whose church had kept excellent records. Within a month, Ethan had traced the Walshes back to the 1820s.

The Galician side was much harder. His grandmother, Carmen Novo, had been born in a village near Lugo whose name Ethan could not find on any map. The letters, which he had translated with the help of a colleague, were mostly from her sister, Rosa, and they stopped suddenly in 1979. Nobody in Boston knew why.

So that summer Ethan did something that his mother called crazy and his father called brave: he flew to Santiago de Compostela. In Lugo he visited the provincial archive, where a patient archivist called Xoan showed him how to read the old parish books. The village, it turned out, had changed its official name in the 1980s, which was the reason he had never found it.

The village itself was smaller than he had imagined: a church, a dozen stone houses and a bar, where everyone stopped talking when he walked in. He showed them the photo of his grandmother and her sister. An old man who was sitting by the window put on his glasses, studied it for a long time and then said something in Galician that Ethan did not understand. Twenty minutes later, a woman of about fifty arrived on a bicycle. Her name was Ines, and she was Rosa's granddaughter.

The afternoon that followed was one that he would never forget. Ines, whose English was much better than his Spanish, took him to the house where his grandmother had grown up. Rosa had died some years earlier, but her son, Manuel, was still alive, and he explained why the letters had stopped. In 1979 Rosa had moved to a new house, and the address that Carmen had been using no longer worked. Each sister had believed that the other one had simply forgotten her.

Then Manuel brought out a box of his own. It contained Carmen's letters to Rosa, every single one of them, which Rosa had kept until the day she died. Several of them mentioned Ethan's mother as a baby. One of them described the evening Carmen had met "a tall Irishman who laughs at everything", the man she would later marry.

Two weeks later, Ethan flew to Shannon, the airport closest to the town his grandfather had come from. The Walsh relatives, of whom there turned out to be dozens, had been warned that he was coming, and a cousin he had found online picked him up. That evening there was a party in a pub that his great-great-grandfather had apparently helped to build. Someone played the fiddle, and an elderly aunt, whose memory for family gossip was remarkable, told him stories about his grandfather that even his mother had never heard.

When Ethan got back to Boston, the family tree covered an entire wall of his apartment. But the thing that he was proudest of was not the tree. It was a video call, which he organized the following Christmas, in which his mother, Ines, Manuel and a room full of Irish cousins all talked at the same time, in three languages, and nobody seemed to mind at all.