SCOPE Vol. 2
before colonialism. In my lifetime, our family has only moved once, and we moved to a house that is a 30-minute walk from my first house. When I went off to college, I went to the one my parents have both worked at for longer than I have been alive. Outside of a semester abroad in Edinburgh, I haven’t really lived somewhere more than an hour’s drive from my hometown. Yet at the same time, I feel like I have only superficial roots to Maryland. None of the family on my father’s side lives in America. In fact, essentially all of my family save for my parents and my brothers lives on another continent. I have one cousin on my mom’s side in the States, but she lives in San Diego, so I don’t see her ever either. My mother is from Finland and my father is from Northern Ireland. Both came to this country to work at the NIH for what they assumed would only be a short while. However, both of them ended up starting careers here. My brothers and I are first generation citizens and our parents are still on green cards.
you ask. “The Troubles” is the most avoided conversation topic that you just can’t avoid in Northern Ireland (and something else we had talked about in the past few days). Maybe that conversation or that difficult history that permeates through this country was why at this barely-there abbey I was thinking about my genealogy and musing about how religions change in a space. There will always be holes in my family history that I won’t know, just like there was a missing wall and roof of this abbey and only markers for the cloister (which is always my favorite part of abbeys). The abbey was, nonetheless, still beautiful. In America, I don’t feel very American, but in Ireland or Finland, I don’t feel very Irish or Finnish either. I think my accent and the fact that my mom never taught me Finnish has a lot to do with that, though those are only superficial markers. While in Ireland looking at a dilapidated abbey and considering myself less and less Irish, I thought maybe I’m more American. Now that I’m back in America, and answering the question of why I was in Ireland by enthusiastically sharing my experiences and the joy I had visiting family there, I’m still not sure I’m that American either. My passport says American, but my lineage says otherwise. I was baptized in Kircubbin, County Down, but was confirmed in Rockville, MD, and was raised in the predominant religion of Finland.
I know Maryland and feel like a Marylander. I think Old Bay is the perfect spice mix. I went to the Eastern Shore for vacation as a kid and have multiple Ocean City shirts to prove it. I have a tattoo of black eyed susans on my back. I constantly point to the merits and beauty of Baltimore to anyone who bad-talks it. I have a friendly disdain for Northern Virginia because of a minor rival- Each time I learn something new about my family, it’s ry between DC suburbs. And yet I don’t have anything as if my family keeps evolving. On my father’s side, I am to point to when it comes to claims for living there. the product of a policeman grandfather and traveling actress grandmother. On my mother’s side, I am the prodWhile walking around these pretty stones in the ground uct of a grandfather from a peasant background and a held up by something radically different from its original grandmother from a land-owning background. I am design, I thought I had as much a claim on Ireland and Fin- the child of two immigrants: one Celtic, one Nordic. I land as I did on Maryland. I thought about how, the eve- am the first MD (candidate) to a pair of PhDs. I am the ning before, I found out another tidbit of knowledge from product of different people coming together over time my parents about my family. Each time the family comes and lands unknown to me and lost to family history. My together like this, I learn a new part of our history. Previ- past and my present will continue to be made and reously, I had learned my mother’s father was a Communist made as time goes on and more anachronistic buttresses peasant living in the same area as my grandmother, who may be put up to keep the abbey walls from falling down. was a part of the Finnish landed gentry. This time, I learned more about my grandmother on my father’s side, who was born in the highlands in Scotland though her family came from Northern Ireland. She traveled the British Isles with her family of traveling actors, and some of her family was from England. I knew that my grandmother was born in Scotland, but I had no idea anyone in our family was English. I had always imagined a long, long line of Irish descendants going back for as long as history would allow us to remember, but in hindsight that seems more like the beginnings of a Celtic myth than the basis of a family tree. The Irish and the British both have a strong fondness for knowing their genealogy. In Northern Ireland, the terms Irish and British can either be interchangeable or the reason for years of civil unrest, depending on who or when 32
Anu Murthy, M2020 Photograph