Two Smiths~Owen Joseph & Thomas Henry

Market Day, Main St., Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, Ireland. Circa: 1860

[The National Library of Ireland]

Main St., Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, Ireland. 2013 [Owen Smith]

My great-grandfather Patrick Smith emigrated to Melbourne from Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, Ireland, in the mid 1850s. Another Smith, Thomas Henry (no relation), also emigrated to Melbourne from Carrick just four years later. Patrick soon became a blacksmith (his family’s profession) in Kilmore just north of Melbourne. Thomas was a teacher, cricketer and footballer who, just a year after his arrival, helped to write the original rules of Australian Rules Football. He became a key player in the game’s formative years.

But how was this co-incidence discovered?

It’s March 2013 and I’m visiting Carrickmacross. I’d been invited by my ‘cousin’ Mary to The Gathering - a Tourism Ireland initiative to bring ‘emigrants’ like me ‘back home’ to their ancestral land. Hundreds of thousands have arrived from overseas. From as near as England they’ve come, and as far away as Barbados and Sydney. I myself, having travelled from Wodonga, Australia, make a discovery in Carrick will change my life.

That change is made by my introduction to this Thomas Henry Smith and, as I discover soon after, his introduction to me. Yes, it soon becomes evident that I’ve been imposed upon by the enigmatic Thomas, that he has somehow ingratiated himself upon me (I’m not even sure if that’s a thing). He, the lost soul, would henceforth and heretofore, be my guide, my spur, the thorn in my side, in the re-discovery and dissemination of his life’s journey. And all this in his quest for what? For his soul to finally be able to rest in peace? For recognition, reconciliation, freedom?