Hochul Visits an Ancestral Home, 3,000 Miles From the Governor’s Mansion

For much of her whirlwind tour in Europe, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York focused on looking forward for solutions to worldwide crises like global warming and a lack of affordable housing.

But as she visited County Kerry, Ireland, Ms. Hochul paused to linger in the past.

Here in Kilshannig, a small fishing village on a remote stretch of sandy beach, the governor is still known as Kathleen Courtney, the granddaughter of John Courtney and Mary Browne, who emigrated separately to the United States as teenagers over a century ago in search of greater opportunity.

They would later meet in Chicago, where they married before moving to Buffalo, the governor’s hometown, to work at the steel mill there. Every so often, as money and time allowed, the family would make the trip back to the Maharees, a peninsula that juts off Ireland’s west coast and contains three small towns: Fahamore, Kilshannig and Candeehy.

On Sunday, around 100 local residents, county council members and relatives gathered in Spillane’s Bar in Fahamore for a civic reception to honor Ms. Hochul.

Almost everyone who crowded into the low-ceilinged pub looking for a selfie or a handshake with their distinguished American guest claimed to share ancestry with the governor through her grandparents.

“My mother and her grandmother were first cousins,” said Mary Harrington-McKenna, 75, who lives in the town. “It’s very exciting to have our cousin, the governor of New York, visit where her grandparents came from.”

As Ms. Hochul smiled for photos, hugged and shook hands with the people and descendants of the people who used to call her grandparents neighbors, she tried to keep everyone’s stories straight, she said.

“It meant something to me,” Ms. Hochul said. “It’s humbling for me to know that I could be in a position like this, despite two generations ago where we started from.”

Ms. Hochul stayed with her (confirmed) second cousin, Vincent Browne, 55, a fisherman, and his wife, Suzie, in the house where her grandmother grew up: a two-story cottage surrounded by a stone wall atop a small hill overlooking Candeehy Bay. It was the first time in two years as governor that she spent the night without her security detail.

The last time Ms. Hochul was in County Kerry was 25 years ago, she said, but she picked up with her cousins as if no time had passed, looking through photographs of herself as a young girl in Ireland, faded images of her grandmother as a child and her grandparents’ wedding photos.

“I think that’s what’s so beautiful about the Irish people, that they’re not thinking about the present or the future as much as they understand that they have to be the keepers of the past,” she said.

Séamus Cosaí Fitzgerald, 62, a member of the Kerry County Council, said that because the area is so small, most families are interrelated if you trace back their lineages far enough. Still, having an American politician in town is exceedingly rare, he said, which added extra motivation for locals to scrutinize their genealogy.

“We don’t come across a governor of New York too often — or any other state — that their parents or their grandparents or their great-grandparents originated from here,” Mr. Cosaí Fitzgerald said. “I think there will be a lot of new family trees created here after this visit today.”

Just down the road from the family cottage, on a bluff looking out to sea, is the graveyard where many of Ms. Hochul’s relatives, including her great-grandmother, are buried. The old stone grave markers hold many of the surnames of Ms. Hochul’s extended family — Spillanes, Brownes, Courtneys — as well as the far-flung locations where some of them died, like Chicago and Brooklyn.

The graves tell the story of a town decimated by the potato famine in the mid-19th century that was forced to send many of its own overseas in search of jobs more lucrative than the fishing and farming that Kilshannig relied on.

“They were driven to leaving here because there was no future here,” said Jim Finucane, the mayor of County Kerry, adding that there had always been opportunity in the United States for people who worked hard. “That’s why America is a nation of immigrants. That magic, that opportunity, it still resonates with people. And I think sometimes Americans have to be reminded of that.”

Ms. Hochul said that maintaining that opportunity was one of the primary focuses of her trip. In the past week, the governor has met with the mayors of Rome, London and Dublin. She said the one topic each leader brought up was the dearth of affordable housing in major cities, which will be a subject of discussion at the Global Economic Summit, a conference she is set to attend in Kerry on Monday.

“That’s what’s holding New York back. People want to live in New York City, live in New York State,” she said. “But if you can’t afford the housing or there’s just nothing, there’s no supply, then we’re not going to have the opportunity to attract all the talent that wants to come.”

But before another day of forward-looking conversations, Ms. Hochul took some time to immerse herself in the distant past. On Saturday, her second cousins brought her on a dinghy out to the Magharee Islands, known locally as “the Seven Hogs,” just off the coast of Kilshannig.

She walked through the stone ruins of a sixth-century monastery where Catholics surreptitiously held Mass while under occupation by the British. For the governor, an ardent Catholic who recently met the pope, the much more modest trip to a remote island’s monastery proved equally powerful.

“The connections of seeing that little monastery, the ruins, and how that religion is still passed on forward today,” she said, “just makes you feel connected back some time to people that you’ll never meet, but are part of my story.”