A couple days ago, we posted a blog based on an article found at IrishCentral.com. The article was prompted by research done by Clare genealogist, Jim O’Callaghan. After posting the blog, Jim’s son, Simon, posted a comment and then emailed me about the accuracy of the original article, basically stating that the editors of the article were a bit overzealous and their finished article came to conclusions that Jim O’Callaghan himself never came to.
There’s another article by David Monagan, published at the June 23, 2013 Forbes website that deals with the same story, but tells it much more like it really is. Following is an excerpt:
This weekend Ireland is abuzz with remembrances of John F. Kennedy as thousands gather around his ancestral village of New Ross, County Wexford to mark the 50th anniversary of the late American president’s triumphal visit to Ireland just five months before his death in Dallas in November, 1963. Daughter Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg has arrived with numerous others of the clan, including former ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith. So too has flitted forth a druidical offshoot of the “eternal flame” harvested from the one on JFK’s Arlington, Virginia grave , confirming once again that the first Catholic Irish American to become president of the United States is as sanctified in the country’s imagination of itself as, oh, St. Patrick.
But now a report surfaces in the Sunday (U.K.) Times that Jacqueline Bouvier, ala Jackie O for Onassis, was far more Irish herself – “Jackie O’?” — than her family ever let on, preferring claims to descendancy from French aristocrats. A Clare genealogist named Jim O’Callaghan has unearthed a trove of evidence indicating that Jackie was in fact only en peu and perhaps en peasant French as opposed to being at least half Irish – and maybe enough to beat the Kennedy band at its own game – because her entire maternal side came from the Ould Sod.
By the way, I pulled the original article down… No need to continue to spread bad info…
