Daniel J. Clifford was born on May 6, 1877 to John J. and Margaret (Sullivan) Clifford in Tynnahally, County Kerry, a small crossroads roughly half way between Miltown and Killorglin.  Tynnahally is nestled in rich farm land between Callinafercy East and West on Dingle Bay where the Cliffords and the Sullivans lie thick on the ground.  Daniel was one of 11 children and spent his childhood working on the farm and tending sheep.  Although the Irish Famine had ended some 40 years previously in 1851, times in the West of Ireland in the 1890s were still extremely tough.  The Irish Diaspora, the great emigration of Irish people to places around the world, was in full swing and Dan's siblings Patrick, Jeremiah and Julia had left for Australia.  Nora soon left for Boston in 1896 and Dan followed a year later. 

Coming ashore off the S.S. Gallia in Boston on the improbable date of July 4, 1897,  Dan Clifford had $10 in his pocket, a wicked huge mustache on his lip, an appetite for hard work and a burning desire to live life.  Nora put him up (and perhaps put up with him) on Knox Street but Boston, however familiar with teeming Irish relatives and cousins of cousins and friends of friends all hailing from Kerry, proved just a temporary stop.

Australia at the turn of the 20th century was sparsely populated and desperate to develop its potential.  The British Government offered free passage on a slow boat, a few dollars and a homestead in the wild outback to adventurous young men in exchange for several years of their lives and that was an offer Dan decided not to refuse.  Ten weeks and four days out of San Francisco, he landed in Australia in early 1901 and found his brother Pat on a ranch and became a boundary rider, looking for holes in fences and stray cattle.  He settled in to the romantic life of a modern day cowboy in the sweet deep Outback tending sheep and fragrant eucalyptus campfires under the diamond stars of the Southern Cross. 

 Dan didn't like it.  At all.   In fact he hated it.

It was lonely work, few neighbors to talk with and lift a pint or two and recall the green glory of Eire and in Dan's own words "Pat's wife was an Australian and a matchmaker."  It's unknown which factor proved to be the ultimate deal-breaker for the man just in his twenties but he headed back for San Francisco, thanks to a ticket from his brother Michael in Boston, with one thin dime to his name (and that name itself was assumed  so that he could dodge the British Authorities who'd rather he stay a little longer than a year.) Transcontinental travel in 1903 meant steel wheels all the way and not the Friendly Skies with a change of gate in Chicago but it was only $25- one way, meals extra.  He found a kind and generous bricklayer who hired him and he worked off the railroad  ticket cost in a few months stacking brick and lugging mortar.

Fin de siècle Boston was a hotbed of immigration and ethnic enclaves. They took root in places like the Italian North End, Chinatown,  Polish/Lithuanian South Boston while the Irish gravitated towards Dorchester, Roxbury and Jamaica Plain.  Horse-drawn street cars clanged down Dot Ave and Center   Street in JP past triple-deckers where hung laundry waved like flags from back porches as residents skirted steaming piles of droppings, pungent in the coal smoke air.  The first-ever World Series in major league baseball was played that October on Huntington Avenue, just around the corner where Dan had finally met his match and married Hannah Johnston, the Reverend John J. Fitzgerald officiating, on August 23, 1903.  Boston, by the way, won.

Daniel Clifford settled into married life with the beauty he had known in Miltown so long ago and began his life-long vocation of bricklaying, earning his nickname "Iron Claw" for the ferocious grip he developed and liberally used on unsuspecting younger relatives.

Their first-born, Mary Margaret, known as "May", graced them on a frigid December morning in 1904, just a month after Teddy Roosevelt won the White House.  Margaret or "Peg" followed in 1906 while Dorothy was born in 1908.  Victorine Aloise, universally known as "Rene" and whose booming personality brightened countless lives, came to them in late Spring of 1909.  The boys began their unbroken streak with John in '10, Daniel P. in '12, James in '13, Andrew or "Wan", so named because one of the kids had repeatedly mispronounced "Andy", in '15 and the baby Phillip almost exactly on their 13th wedding anniversary in August, 1916.

Dan's beloved Hannah had been ill for some time and no effective cure or treatment was available in the thirties.  Hannah succumbed to complications in 1935 and was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Boston on a cold November day.  Dan never remarried and remained faithful to her memory all his life.

When WWII ended in 1945, all the boys had come home unscathed (John had died in infancy in 1910) and began their own family lives.  In gratitude for surviving the carnage of the war and returning with the same number of limbs, eyes and teeth they had began with (though perhaps with slightly less hair), they started the Annual Christmas Party with Daniel as the patriarch and honored guest.  He held forth on a variety of topics and slipped into the comfortable shoes of a sage who had led a full life and was glad.  Grandkids and their kids pestered him for stories and the occasional nickel, later raised to a dime to reflect inflation and to compensate for the awful cost of living.

He became a US citizen in 1916 but Ireland was always in his blood.  He went back to Ireland for a visit some forty years later in 1957 and walked the lush green fields of his cousin Patrick Sullivan's farm in Callinafercy where his mother Margaret was born.  The Sullivans still own and work farmland in the area.  

He roamed the Puck Fair in Killorglin, the oldest continuous fair in Ireland held every year in August since at least 1603, and caught up with distant relatives and mutual friends, a memory that stayed with him all his life.  He was able to visit the farmhouse that was the birthplace of his Hannah.

He came home to work, church and the love of his family as he watched them grow and prosper, a story told countless times by other immigrants from around the world.

 The Crossroads at Tynnahaly

Daniel J. Clifford, of Tynnahaly, Miltown, Co. Kerry, Republic of Ireland; very briefly of Brisbane, Australia; late of Boston, Massachusetts and environs, USA, died peacefully as the Easter lilies bloomed under the cold steel skies of April in New England, 1966.  Two days later, as he was laid to faithful lasting rest next to his beloved, the sun broke through and the first warm air of the year kissed the roses- laser red and perfect- arranged around the casket, as if to whisper "Godspeed."