I’m on a heckuva roll: it was another St. Patrick’s Day without green beer for this might’ve been an Irishman. Most Howdens appear to come from the north of England – not far from York, there is a village called Howden, which has a miniature, half-ruined, poor Gothic cousin to the magnificent York Minster Cathedral. My Howden forebear, though, came to Canada from County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland.

Fermanagh: my home and (pre) native land?

My preferred fantasy is that this Howden man was a poor, dashing poet like the central character in Thomas Flanagan’s novel The Year of the French, an adventurous soul who set out for Canada spurred not only by famine but by his lusty curiosity and spirit of adventure. In my dim family memory bank, he was also a James, and I’m reluctant to puncture this thought with actual research. I rather suspect, too, that he was a comfortable man who saw a chance for cheap land in Upper Canada, now the narrow wedge of Americanized soil called Southern Ontario. Still, for reasons mainly mysterious, I have a special affection for things Irish, though I’ve never been there. Two of my sons have it, too, even more strongly than me: one of them is a real scholar of Irish history, and couch-surfed there for several months.

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