An Irishman's Diary

ANTHONY PALASOTA was born in 1944 in Dallas, Texas, to a family with Sicilian ancestry. But there was an interesting twist to their story, which he remembers first discussing with his grandfather, Joseph Emmeti, some time during the 1950s.

Even with its vowel ending, the youngster thought, his grandad’s name sounded odd for an Italian. So the old man explained that his own ancestors were from Ireland. Details were sketchy, but one of them had been in trouble with the English once, and had sought help from Napoleon. As for the founder of the family’s Sicilian line, he had been only three when his mother died and left him to be brought up there by her sister.

Fans of Thomas Moore may recognise an echo here. In his ballad She is Far From the Land, the unnamed heroine is Sarah Curran, and her unnamed place of exile is Sicily, where Curran – estranged from her father after the events of 1803 and by now married to a naval captain, Robert Sturgeon – spent her last years.

But the story didn’t mean much to Anthony Palasota then. Or until one day in the 1960s when, waiting for his date, he was leafing through some of her family’s old encyclopedias and saw a picture that reminded him of his uncle and other male relatives. The picture, he was stunned to discover, was of a man called Robert Emmet. And suddenly, Grandpa Joe’s story took on a new significance.

As described by his grandson, Joseph Emmeti was a man with no formal education who, long after he moved to America, spoke English with a very heavy Sicilian accent. He had been born in the fishing town of Cefalu circa 1880, and in time joined the flow of emigrants across the Atlantic to another southern port, New Orleans, where workers were being recruited for the sugar cane fields, now bereft of slave labour.

Later he worked on the Mississippi river boats, and later still joined another migration to the Texan coal-mining town of Thurber. Half of Thurber’s 50,000 population was Sicilian. Consequently, they had an opera house and used to import grapes from California to make their own wine. Then oil discoveries put the coal mine out of business and Thurber withered away. So Joe Emmett (the name had been anglicised by now, with two Ts) bought a farm and finally, in the 1930s, moved his family to Dallas.

Palasota remembers him as a wise, generous, and honourable figure, who had once intervened with a shotgun to save some black men from an angry mob after a dispute outside a cotton mill. But he was a very proud man too.

Orphaned early, he was raised by cousins named Di Giorgio, some of whom also emigrated to the US. One of the Di Giorgios made it big in California, starting in fruit wholesale and building a company that, by the 1960s, had interests in the Bank of America. Joe Emmett could have been part of it – he had paid his cousin’s passage over and they remained close friends. But he preferred to do his own thing and, apart from regular visits to California, stayed in Texas.

FASCINATINGas the Emmetis' Irish angle is, there are of course problems with the story as related. For one thing, Sarah Curran died in 1808, and if she left a three-year-old child – something hitherto unmentioned in biographies – it could hardly have been Robert Emmet's.

After the doomed uprising in July of 1803, it was his decision to linger near her Dublin home, rather than fleeing Ireland immediately, that probably cost his life. But even if the pair had managed a romantic liaison during his final days, in Kilmainham Gaol, any love-child would have been born by mid-1804.

She married Capt Sturgeon in late 1805, and they apparently had a child who died in infancy. But if Sturgeon had conspired to cover up the existence of a baby that predated the marriage, you would expect it to have been raised under his name.

Then there is the problem that, by most accounts, Sarah died at Kent in England (her body then being brought back for burial in Co Cork), not in Sicily. And even if she had died in Sicily, there remained her husband, who if the story were true, would have to have abandoned the baby there.

A more prosaic explanation could be that, at some point in their history, one of the Emmetis heard of the Robert Emmet legend and its link with their island and adopted a romantic backstory that, for all they knew, might even have been true.

Against which, we have the supposed family likenesses, which also adds a layer of plausibility. Reporting the Emmet bicentenary ceremonies in 2003, I was struck by the similarities between the family’s descendants (via the patriot’s brother, Thomas Addis Emmet) and the 200-year-old portraits with which we are so familiar. A point further underlined by a story concerning Emmet’s statue in Washington.

So distinctive are the family’s genes that sculptor Jerome Connor is said to have been walking in New York one day when he saw somebody who resembled the portrait. He asked the stranger to pose for him and only then discovered, to his surprise, that the man was a descendant of Thomas Emmet.

Anthony Palasota is 67 now, a retiree and Vietnam vet, with 70 per cent disability. He has never been to either Sicily or Ireland and doesn’t foresee a visit any time soon. But via his e-mail address of ampalasota@verizon.net he would love to hear from anyone who can shed light on Joseph Emmeti’s story, and in the process perhaps add more footnotes for Robert Emmet’s still-unwritten epitaph.