In honor of St. Patrick's Day, the Wall Street Journal gives us a good chapter in the rich crossover history between Ireland and the U.S. I'll go ahead and splurge and paste in the whole thing:

On this St. Patrick's Day, Ireland is peaceful and prosperous. The animosities of the past will have little bearing on the great parade that travels up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The so-called Celtic Tiger, with its cubs more interested in the strength of the euro than the durability of sectarian differences, appears to have entered a new era in its history.

Perhaps then, on this day of all days, the Irish Catholics of New York should do something that would've been unthinkable even a few years ago: raise a toast to the Protestants.

I am referring to the Protestants of New York City and their actions during the winter of 1847, an unjustly forgotten episode in the Irish history of this city.

In late 1846 and early 1847, word began to reach the Manhattan docks that Ireland's potato crop, vital for the survival of millions of Irish, had failed for the second time -- initiating a food crisis unprecedented in that nation's history. Among those stunned by the onset of famine was the city's WASP establishment, which had been far from friendly to the rising numbers of Irish Catholics who had arrived here over the previous decades. The current antipathy toward illegal immigrants from Mexico pales in comparison to the vicious, nativist sentiment targeting the Irish during the 1830s and 1840s.

Yet on Monday evening, Feb. 15, 1847, a large crowd gathered at the Broadway Tabernacle, a Congregationalist church on Worth Street. They were there "for the purpose of affording relief of the Irish people," according to an account in the Freeman's Journal and Catholic Register, an Irish Catholic newspaper published in New York.

John A. King, a former state assemblyman and future governor, called the meeting to order and nominated a slate of presiding officers that represented the cream of New York society. Included were shippers, merchants, clergymen and bankers, esteemed figures with names like Astor, Livingston and Havemeyer. A former state assemblyman and senator named Myndert Van Schaick, a member of one of New York's oldest Dutch families, was nominated as president.

Van Schaick then addressed the crowd, "one of the largest assemblages" ever congregated at the Tabernacle, according to the newspaper. "The extent of the calamity that has befallen the Irish is not yet known," he said. "It may be truly said that a whole nation is in danger of starvation." He invited the public to donate to the new organization's relief fund.

After a number of resolutions were passed -- one noted that differences in "customs" or "creed" do not "absolve us from the duties of common brotherhood" -- the pulpit was opened to speakers. Rev. Jonathan Wainwright of St. John's Episcopal Chapel, a future bishop, read several passages from foreign newspapers describing the sufferings in Skibbereen, County Cork, which had become infamous for the plight of its poor. He insisted that he did not attend the meeting to "speak of modes of faith," but to urge his fellow citizens to "share our loaf" and "contribute liberally from our ample store."

Charles King, a merchant, attorney and newspaper editor who would later become president of Columbia University, asked the audience "to come forward . . . without distinction of sect or party to aid in the cause of suffering humanity." Even a few shillings, he said, "would save thousands and thousands of famishing poor."

As subsequent editions of the Freeman's Journal and Catholic Register show, the response was impressive. Within a month, the local famine relief committee reported that it had collected $68,061.49, the equivalent of more than $1.5 million in today's money. New Yorkers of all backgrounds contributed to the fund -- everyone from John Jacob Astor ($500) to "a few poor Christians in Brooklyn" ($10), from the Benevolent Society of Operative Masons ($400) to the Elm Street Synagogue ($200). But considering Ireland's scarred history, the Protestant response is perhaps most noteworthy.

It appears that every minister in town sought donations from the pulpit. The list of churches that gave is impressive: Norfolk Street Methodist, the Reformed Dutch Church at the corner of Greene and Houston, the Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue, Trinity Episcopal, the Second Wesleyan Chapel on Mulberry Street, Duane Street Presbyterian, St. Matthew's Episcopal Church on Christopher Street, Mercer Street Presbyterian, Grace Church, and on and on.

Like many other areas of the country and world, the relief donations in New York dried up as the Irish crisis dragged on for another three years, exacerbated by further crop failures as well as disastrous British relief policies. But this doesn't absolve New York's Irish from recognizing the generosity shown to them by a historical enemy. If nothing else, perhaps someone can name a pub after relief committee president Van Schaick. Call it Myndert's.

My own ancestors were part of that exodus--the foundational pair of O'Connors were small children during the famine, managed to live through it despite being from one of the remoter, tougher, most blighted areas of Western Ireland, and grew up only to find themselves unable to make ends meet in a country still ravaged by the famine's after-effects. They sailed for New York in the mid-1860s, settled upstate, raised over a dozen children, lived on the proceeds of manual labor done on the railway--and sent their kids off to better lives. My great grandfather was their eldest son. He started off in the railways, too--as a great many Irish people did. And he made his way west on them, honing a mechanical inclination into a position as a steam engineer. He stopped in Wyoming long enough to marry the Iowa-born granddaughter of another pair of famine emigrants; they had the first three of their six kids there, and then they went on to California, where they settled, had more children, and made solidly middle-class lives for themselves. The family stayed in the Bay Area for several generations--I was born there myself. And with each generation, the sense of possibility, opportunity, and freedom deepened as the distance from poverty, hunger, and dislocation increased. Censuses show that my great-great grandparents could not read, that they spoke Gaelic first and English second. Now, as my niece and nephew grow up, they will be part of the third generation of O'Connors for whom it is simply understood that a college education is part of their future.

I mention all this because I think it's important to remember what has come before--and because I know first hand how easily Americans forget the past, and with it forget vital truths about what makes this such a wonderful and special place. You might even say that forgetting about the past is part of the luxury--and the identity--of being American in some essential ways. Genealogy is a great antidote to that, as it makes the past personal and disallows a blithe disregard for history as something dry and abstract that doesn't really apply to the present.

And so it was with my own family. I only know what I have sketched above because I have reconstructed it myself--and not with old family stories or photos and letters, because for the bulk of the history I have laid out there are none. I used censuses, birth and death certificates, old newspapers and phone books, and similar archival and official documents. The facts I have been able to assemble have, in fact, blown a few holes in the few sketchy family stories that we all thought we knew to be true. But the facts speak volumes, as skeletal as they are.

I may have a pint later today, but mostly I think of St. Patrick's Day as a good day for remembering.