In June this year I received an email inviting me to Carlow, Ireland, to receive an award from the Nolan clan. The award was in recognition of my writing career, a little gesture of thanks for promoting the Nolan name in the world. I was dimly aware of Irish clans, largely from gift shops near tourism hotspots, where you can sometimes buy a horribly expensive sweater or scarf emblazoned with the family crest of your choice. I had no idea that they were a real-life concern.

I wasn’t living anywhere in particular. I had recently left my house in London because I couldn’t easily afford it and had tired of sharing with other people. So I answered my invitation from the clan immediately, accepting a little out of curiosity and a lot because in my transient state I would take any excuse to make my way back to Ireland, where I could loaf in my parents’ homes and not think much about money for a week.

The clan system was the primary way that Irish society was organised until the 17th century, and consisted of groups related by a common ancestor. The first modern iterations began to form in the second half of the 20th century, supported by interest both at home and from the diaspora. The clans’ current iteration is focused on using technology to unite members, though in-person meet ups, like the one I was invited to, are still pivotal.

My father, Jim Nolan, a playwright who still lives in our native Waterford, 90 minutes south of Carlow, expressed mock indignation that he hadn’t been chosen for the Nolan honour, and seemed confused that I was going at all. I was confused myself, not being able to imagine what the gathering would entail or why it occurred.

I knew from browsing the clan O’Nolan Facebook page that a large proportion of the attendees would be coming from abroad. A man named Christopher Nolan (not the film director) based in upstate New York had invited me and was responsible for organising the event, and I wondered what compelled him to do so. The question I wanted to get to the bottom of, not intended unkindly, was: why do you bother? And not just for Christopher, who invested so much effort and time into realising it, but to the people who travelled from the US and Canada and elsewhere. What were they getting from it? What made them care?

***

As a child I disliked my name and believed it not glamorous enough for the many accolades and public notices I hoped to attract in the future. I coveted a more delicate, feminine name than the solid “Nolan”, or one with attractive strangeness – like Paz De La Huerta, or the comparatively exciting Lindsay Lohan. I could not imagine a celebrity with my name – or perhaps more accurately, I could not imagine a cool celebrity with my name. There were the Nolan Sisters, after all, blandly grinning, eternally In The Mood For Dancing. They were the kind of Irish person I shuddered away from as soon as I knew how.

More recently, I have cultivated a vague but definite mistrust of attachment to the distant past. I was very curious about the lives of my parents before my birth, and almost as interested in my grandparents; but beyond that I felt nothing much for relatives I never knew.

And though I love Ireland, I am leery of nationalism – even our particular kind, which could be defended as retaliatory. I was lucky to have been born into a family of people I get along with, making it easy for me to love and privilege them. But I do not consider blood bonds to be inherently more valuable than those made in other ways. Instead, I prize openness and modernity, and abandoning tradition when it does not make personal sense.

***

The other Nolans and their spouses began to arrive in Carlow on 13 September, and I joined them the following day, feeling absurdly nervous, as though awaiting a first date. When the group arrived, a little shy of 20 (mostly older) people, they brought to mind the Americans who would wander through Trinity College Dublin when I had briefly attended it, shockingly interested in everything, shockingly enthusiastic.

A boat had been arranged to give a scenic historical tour, but the boat was not big enough to contain all the Nolans

I was struck by the physical awkwardness that had cursed me as a child, not knowing what to do with my hands, feeling obscenely aware of whether I was crossing my arms or resting them on my hips. I felt horribly compelled to foist hugs on the Nolan strangers, but resisted.

A boat had been arranged to give a scenic historical tour, but the boat was not big enough to contain all the Nolans, and so Christopher and I, and Madeline Salter (nee Nolan) abstained. I was glad of this, already anxious and socially overwhelmed and wanting to take a first pass at politely asking Christopher why he bothered.

Christopher is an eloquent, urbane, retired architect in his late 60s. He seems to travel near-constantly with his new professional pursuit, a record label, for which he produces and promotes musicians primarily from West Africa. He has been involved with the Nolan clan since 2005; he is the incoming clan chief (a rotating role), and has for four years organised the biannual gatherings. He tells me he finds it a powerful counteraction to what he calls “societal disintegration” and “the trauma of dislocation”, as well as a way to understand pre- and post-colonial migration. “The whole idea of clan is a topic that people can learn from if they get beyond just the genealogy aspect,” he says. “Like, why did this guy leave? Why did this woman leave at this time? Or, what does it mean that they stayed?”

Genealogy is a booming business, second only to porn as an online research project in the US. There is a sub-industry of genealogy tourism packages, some of which offer tests to locate the exact origin point of your ancestor, followed by a toured vacation.

Outgoing clan chief Catherina Nolan O’Brien with the clan spear, and incoming chief Christopher Nolan with the clan staff. Photograph: Olivia Harris/The Guardian

On our Saturday in Carlow, local genealogist Bernie Walsh gave a presentation about research methodology. It was true, undoubtedly, that the international Nolans had come to the gathering as part of a holiday, but it was clear also that the genealogy was no incidental bonus. During the presentation they leaned forward, setting down pints, peering closer to the screen as Bernie projected a census. They asked politely for her to zoom in and find traces of the relatives they had already researched thoroughly enough to know were present. I concede that I probably invented, purely to entertain myself, the mild edge of competition when one woman referred to the fact that she had been able to go as far as 18 generations back. But it was certain that these were serious people who spend serious time on what it is probably patronising to call a hobby.

After the talk we retired to get ready for the dinner and awards. I had enjoyed meeting the invariably gregarious Nolans, but felt no closer to understanding their pursuits. I was exhausted and struggling to relate to what was taking place. In my B&B, I lay naked on the bed, watched three episodes of Friends and consumed the instant coffee and packaged biscotti. Give me that sweet homogenised globalisation, I thought. It’s difficult enough to understand your actual family, let alone your 18-generations-ago possible-family.

At dinner I sat next to Greg, a handsome, genial 30-year-old from Austin. I can imagine that in a different time of my life I would have proposed some drunken remotely incestuous making out with him by the end of the evening. Greg was in the UK for six months and his father, a genealogy enthusiast, had suggested he come to Ireland for the Nolan gathering. We huddled together at our table like kids at a wedding. When Greg referred to having interned at the State Capitol, I feared that an American with an interest in their Irish ancestry was likely to be rightwing, even one as young and fresh-faced as Greg, and I unsubtly asked leading questions until it emerged that he was a Democrat. We agreed that the Celtic font of the Nolan clan crest was unfortunately reminiscent of alt-right imagery, and he pointed out the potency of the word “clan” in an American context.

That was the other thing – the politics. Christopher Nolan had told me that he liked the clan meet-ups for the absence of politics. “I don’t know Pa Nolan, or Madeline’s politics, or they mine. You could assume them, but you don’t know.” I understand what he means, and yet nothing is quite without politics.

I was blinking back tears, astonished by my capacity to be moved in this brightly lit hotel room full of strangers

Ireland is used to justify a lot of American reactionism, most notably the widespread insistence on Irish singularity as immigrants (we built everything and then we assimilated; we’re the good kind, not the welfare kind), and peddling the myth of “Irish slavery” to draw false equivalence with African American chattel slavery. Genealogy itself has a racialised history, used as a tool pre-civil rights to prove one’s pristine whiteness and untouchable ancestry. Because of this, it sets my teeth on edge to hear reference to preserving Irish culture.

And yet I often privately mourn the loss of more specific Irish accents – the ones that exist outside Dublin, outside suburbs, the ones that are still localised – in favour of an anglicised and Americanised single one, which is the kind I tend toward myself. My generation is known for its teenage adoption of Friends-inflected LA intonations. While it seems fruitless to rail against a globalised culture, it also seems an unhappy fact that accents like Madeline’s or Pa Nolan’s might decline permanently.

I would hate to lose the particular lyricism of Irish everyday parlance, demonstrated recently by Irish author Mark O’Connell when he tweeted: “My dad described a person as ‘low-sized’ today, a term I’d never heard in my life, and whose strangeness and rightness has been haunting me... The fact that Ireland has produced more than its fair share of great writers has to be connected with the fact that normal people just come out with amazing shit almost constantly.” Who’d want to lose colloquialisms such as, “He wasn’t two hands higher than a duck” (small), or “He was only weak for himself” (vain), or “The cut ah’yer wan!” (she was a bit too into herself, that girl).

Attendees examine a branch of the Nolan family tree during the gathering. Photograph: Olivia Harris/The Guardian

I spoke to Madeline, whose father John Nolan was involved with the 90s Nolans revival. A newspaper article she found recently shows their first meeting in 1997. John was chief of the clan at one stage, and after he died, some of the other members asked Madeline if she might help out. She’d like her own children to take an interest at some stage, she says, because she wants the values of kindness and decency passed on to them as they were to her. “Daddy was a good man,” she says. “He never did anything wrong to anybody, and he had morals, but he didn’t force them on anyone. He tried to sort of give you them if you wanted them.”

Apart from me, the other award recipient was Des Nolan, an 83-year-old Galway man and retired teacher, who once successfully lobbied the government to get a restrictive angling law changed “so that any boy or girl could wander down to the river and catch a fish”. He made a beautiful speech that made me think of those ephemeral Irish things that are difficult to describe, to do with lyricism and nature and freedom.

When Des had finished his speech, and my own award was being given, I found I was blinking back tears, astonished by my own capacity to be moved by anything in this brightly lit regional hotel room full of strangers. Ancestry is not a method of understanding one’s self that I relate to personally, but the idea of using a place as a prism is familiar. I understand how countries and borders mean more than what they literally are. It’s just that the past seems less relevant to me than it does to the other Nolans. The way the past stretched back unendingly was a comfort to me when I used to fear the future, but now I find it doesn’t console me. Instead it makes me feel guilty, because it feels so much like the world is ending. All that, I think about the past, for nothing?

But of course, even if the world does end, all that came before wouldn’t have been for nothing. Goodness (and badness) exists for its own sake, not in relation to an end goal. Maybe there was no good answer that would satisfy me about why the Nolans bothered to come; maybe the ambivalence was perfectly fine; maybe it was enough that they’d come at all.

Desmond Nolan tries to remember the lyrics of an Irish folk song. Photograph: Olivia Harris/The Guardian

I spent the rest of the night drinking with the hardcore Nolans willing to take advantage of the infinite opening hours of Irish hotel bars. The Nolan name still didn’t feel like it meant anything to me beyond my own family, but I was enjoying myself anyway. That nice Irish trait of genuinely wanting to chat to any stranger you meet in the pub was taking hold, and there was suddenly nothing more interesting than how Kathy Nolan, a radiantly charming maths lecturer from Canada, had ended up here (“I learned that my name meant ‘nobility’ a long time ago and I always said I would come to Ireland some day and claim my castle”).

It wasn’t that I understood better why the name mattered, or why people feel as they do about their DNA and their ancestry. It was that our meeting each other had become good in spite of the meaninglessness. As Christopher said, it was all these people with nothing really in common, and even though the one thing they did have in common did not awaken anything in me, it was good to be there with them anyway. I would not pore over census records or search out sites of mass war burial, but I would happily talk to the living people around me and drink with them until it was light out. Sometimes it feels good to do things that mean nothing until they begin to mean something. Like prayer, the meaning arrives slowly, surprisingly, and through the doing, not the believing.

• Megan Nolan’s debut novel, Acts Of Desperation, will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2021.

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