Grandparents often have very interesting life stories. Sometimes they exaggerate a little, which is their entitlement. And since he's not here to do it himself, today I want to tell you how my paternal grandfather and namesake was a lawman in the American wild west.
I never got to ask him about it because he died, aged nearly 90, before I was born. In fact, apart from one piece of very hard evidence, the main clue I have about his exploits on the frontier was extracted from his only son, my father.
The latter is now also gone from us but, before leaving, he revealed under cross-examination that his old man had spent some time as a "deputy sheriff in Montana". Beyond that, details were sketchy.
When I visited Butte - the once-famous copper mining city to which I know my grandfather and his sisters emigrated in the 1890s - two years ago, the trail was just as hard to pick up. I tracked down the right names in the records of a lodging house in nearby Anaconda, the smelting town built and named after the all-powerful mining company. But my hopes that the local police department would provide clinching information were dashed.
The sheriffs for Deer Lodge County are indeed listed in the archive. They had to run for election, after all. But the mere deputies, who presumably were added to the ticket afterwards, remain anonymous. Unable to help, the museum curator in Anaconda at least sensed my need for something to romanticise my ancestor by. "Those were dangerous times," he said. "A lot of deputy sheriffs got shot." Having established, I hope, that my grandfather could have been a hero, I must confess here that my use of the terms "wild west" and "frontier" in the first paragraph may be stretching it slightly. Frank McNally Snr would have been only six years old when, in another corner of Montana, General Custer stood his last. Thereafter, despite that blip, the days of the untamed west were numbered. Twenty years later, in 1896, the frontier was declared officially closed.
So it's touch and go whether the west was officially wild when my grandfather got there, although Butte in its heyday gave "wild" a whole new meaning.
In any case, he returned to Ireland eventually, getting married some time before 1913 and again, to my father's mother, after his first wife died. He turns up in local papers here during the revolutionary period as a one-term Sinn Féin councillor and a magistrate in a republican court. After that he disappears into private life and fragmentary anecdote.
I'm told that he was an early member of Fianna Fáil, running his local cumann from an old railway carriage. He wore hobnailed boots with no socks, even in winter. He once fired a shotgun in the general direction of a trespasser. He was an early riser. And he went to bed religiously every night at 9pm, dropping subtle hints to any visitors by standing up at that time, stretching, and winding the clock.
His sisters Annie and Mary stayed in Montana where, by contrast with him, they left behind impeccable records, ranging from their own gravestones to living descendants. This is where the hard evidence about my grandfather comes in. When I visited my cousin Rosie, a school principal in Butte, she gave it to me as a present, having inherited from her grandmother, who had in return received it from her brother, maybe 100 years ago.
It was a deputy sheriff's truncheon, short, heavy, and well worn, left behind as a memento when, with the west successfully subdued, my granddad returned home to Monaghan.
It wasn't quite the six-gun I might have hoped for, featuring a notch on the barrel for every no-good outlaw who had crossed his path. Used a lot as it clearly was, it must have represented the march of civilisation on the former frontier. But I was thrilled to have it, anyway, and when the people in the Anaconda museum said they would be thrilled to have it too, I told them sorry. Maybe my kids will donate it after I'm gone.
Only one of my parents' parents survived long enough for me to remember her, and then only just. But between earlier marriages and better healthcare, living grandparents seem to be a lot more common than they used to be. Which is why I think the first National Grandparents Day, scheduled for September 23rd, is such a good idea.
A similar event is already huge in the US, where it has been held since the 1970s. And Dermot Kirwan of Friends of the Elderly tells me that the idea behind introducing it here is to remind people in busy, booming Ireland of the part their forebears played in making the country what it is. Our grandparents are "heroes", he says, and we should celebrate them while we can.
Events planned already range from a 5km fun run or walk in Dublin's Phoenix Park, for the more active, to a leisurely stroll in St Stephen's Green. But FOTE hopes that the day will take off all over the country, as it has in the US. And a central element of the celebrations will be photographs of all participating families, to be posted for posterity on a dedicated website.
Unfortunately, the modest lifestyles of many grandparents makes them something less than a prime target for sponsors. "Most grandparents are quite thrifty," says Dermot. "They don't aspire to 5-litre German cars or hot tubs at the end of the garden." Despite this, he hopes that someone with a good heart and a chequebook may decide to back the initiative between now and September.
Such a person, or indeed anyone interested in organising a local event to mark the day, should ring Dermot or Niamh at 01-8731855.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie