An unexpected invite to a 50th birthday party in Ireland led Joanna Moorhead to the discovery of a whole new branch of her family, and the laying to rest of a century-old schism

Almost a century ago, a 20-year-old medical student walked out on his studies and his family, took a ship to Australia, via Canada, and never saw his brother, who was his arch-rival, again. Earlier this summer, in the town where those men were raised, two of their grandchildren gave one another a hug. My second cousin Michael and I had never met before, and we may never meet again: but our embrace felt like the healing of a schism, the nuances of which play out in our family to this day.

Michael’s grandfather was Arthur Moorhead. He was the sixth child of our great-grandparents, an Irish doctor, Henry, and his wife, Mary Monica, who lived in Moate in County Westmeath, Ireland. Their house was opposite the church where Arthur and my grandfather George, seven years his junior, were baptised.

Henry and Mary Monica’s eldest child, another Henry, followed his father to medical school. Arthur enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, a few years later, also to read medicine, but in 1920 took a holiday job on a ship to Canada. The family fully expected him to return, but in Canada he bought a one-way passage to Australia.

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According to his son Garry, now 88, Arthur hated medicine. In Melbourne, where he settled, he became a journalist, and met his journalist wife, Leslie. The two were married in 1929, and went on to have six children, two of whom are still alive.

My great-uncle Arthur went home to Ireland once after Garry’s birth. Times were hard in Australia, and Arthur came home to ask for assistance. His parents said they would help him, but only if he returned to Ireland with his family and went back to medical school. Arthur refused, and never returned to Ireland again.

What must have rankled on his visit was the news that his brother George, my grandfather, who he’d always had a difficult relationship with, had found a well-off bride, my grandmother Miriam, and was now running a successful business in Manchester.

During my childhood several decades later, I don’t remember Arthur’s name being mentioned; my grandfather never spoke of him, nor did my father. But a few months ago, I received an invitation to the 50th birthday party of a man called Michael Moorhead. By email, Michael told me there would be about 40 people gathering in Moate to celebrate his birthday, most from Australia and about half of them relatives. No one in my branch of the Moorhead family had met any of them. I booked my flight. Which is how I came to bowl up in the cowboy town of Moate with the celebrations in full swing.

It felt like every Moorhead gathering I have ever attended, except that I had no idea which revellers were relations. There were clues: Garry, Michael’s father, was eerily reminiscent of my late father, the cousin he had never known. Michael, the second cousin celebrating his half century, was unmistakably a Moorhead. And it was clear it wasn’t just a physical resemblance. Like my father and so many Moorhead men I have known, Michael is a laid-back bon viveur, an eternal optimist and – as demonstrated by his decision to tempt 40 people across the world to a little town in Ireland for three days of festivities – a risk-taker.

So what had led him to celebrate his 50th birthday in the town on which his grandfather had turned his back?

“I didn’t know my grandpa,” he told me, “but what I did know was his reputation as a colourful character. Growing up in Melbourne, one of six children, I very much occupied the same sort of role: I was seen as a bit of a rascal, rather eccentric, and that gave me an affinity with my grandfather.”

A few years ago, on a trip to the UK, Michael took a detour to Ireland, and called in on Moate. What he found there changed everything for him. “Growing up in Australia, of European descent, there’s an indigenousness missing. I was part of a community that had invaded that country, and I didn’t have any roots there. But walking down the main street of Moate, I felt a wonderful sense of belonging that up to that stage of my life I hadn’t even been aware was missing.”

Serendipitously, Moate has a heritage centre, Dún na Sí, which incorporates the genealogical centre for Westmeath. We were able to do some research there into our forebears, and Michael managed to meet an elderly man in the town who remembered our great-grandparents, who died in the 1950s. Visitors like us aren’t unusual in Ireland: genealogy, according to Bernie Norris of Dún na Sí, is the country’s fastest-growing industry. “It’s huge,” says Norris. “We’re inundated, especially in the summer. They want to learn about their roots, they want to find a sense of belonging. And it’s an endless cycle: over the last few years we’ve had another wave of emigration, so a few decades down the line all those people will be coming back to try to reconnect with the family they left.”

Michael and I sat in the pews where our great-grandparents and grandparents sat a century ago

On the musical evening that formed part of Michael’s birthday celebrations, I was struck by how much our family character has been shaped by Irish history, and how pertinently it plays out in my own life. The improvisation that’s central to one strand of Irish dancing; the richness of the storytelling tradition. This is my heritage in a living way; it has played out in my own life to help make me who I am.

It’s mysterious, this weaving of historical nurture into the other strands that make up our personalities, but it’s there. On the final morning in Moate we gathered for mass at St Patrick’s. We sat in the pews where our great-grandparents and grandparents sat a century ago; we received communion at the altar rails where they once knelt.

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If I had a prayer that morning, it was for Arthur, the great-uncle I never knew I had. Whatever family ructions had torn him from Ireland and sent him across the world to Australia, his greatest ambition must have been to start again and to put his demons behind him. And for a while, he did. Marriage to Leslie; four children. But we never do quite put the past behind us; eventually it seeks us out, overtakes us once more.

Thirty years after leaving Ireland, when Garry was about 21, Arthur disappeared again. He’d left one family. Now he left another. Just as before, he walked out without explanation and left no trace. It was only chance that led Garry and his mother and siblings to find out a few years later that he’d died, in his 50s, in slightly mysterious circumstances on Thursday Island, off Queensland.

He’s buried in a grave without a headstone. One day, the family would like to erect one there. Like the journey to Moate, it would symbolise an understanding and an empathy; a sense of caring that reaches out from the living to embrace a generation gone, offering healing and forgiveness to people we would have recognised but never met; people whose choices shaped our lives, and whose pain, even a century on, we can still feel.