Family Tree

How a Quebec sugary provides a regenerative memorial ... and a reminder of Ireland's debt to Canada.

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here … a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home. — Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Address, January 11, 1989.

In the search for our ancestry, we’ll use metaphors. We’ll say we go back to our roots. Build family trees. In my family’s history, such abstractions have a corporeal element. A real tree plays a role and, moreover, acts as a kind of regenerative memorial.

This tree only exists in a fraction of the world, but it’s shared by neighboring nations that were each uplifted by great migrations of desperate people. Nations that, until recently, were unambiguously linked by a long-standing partnership of peace and prosperity, the likes of which the world had rarely seen.

In 1832, our Browns left a collapsing Ireland for Canada. Fifty-nine-year-old David Brown was accompanied by 12 family members. The contingent included eight of his ten children, plus the three grandchildren born to James and Ellen Joyce Brown, his oldest son and daughter-in-law. David’s wife, Mary Naughton Brown, did not make the voyage and may have died before the departure.

The Brown family lived in a village just outside Limerick City, a Western Ireland port on the River Shannon that had reached a state of near chaos, foreshadowing the island-wide calamity of the Great Famine, which was still some 15 years in the future. In Limerick, unsanitary, poorly-built tenements were breeding grounds for typhus, cholera and tuberculosis. Famine, due in part to failure of the potato crop, was producing frequent food riots.

There was also the question of equality. Catholics such as Brown had long been the victims of endemic discrimination in a colonial system controlled by a wealthy Protestant gentry intertwined with the British King and Parliament. Brown was also compelled to a pay a ten percent tithe to the Anglican Church, though he wasn’t a member. This taxation without representation was about to lead to violent, countrywide Tithe Wars.

In this period, Alexis de Tocqueville visited Ireland. In a letter to his father, de Tocqueville wrote, “You cannot imagine what a complexity of miseries five centuries of oppression, civil disorder, and religious hostility have piled on this poor people, such as I did not imagine existed in this world. It is a frightening thing, I assure you, to see a whole population reduced to fasting like Trappists, and not being sure of surviving the next harvest.”

Like many Irish in this era, my 13 Brown ancestors survived a dangerous and often deadly crossing of the turbulent North Atlantic, clustered inside the dark, damp hold of a sail-powered freighter that had recently been used to carry lumber from Canada. Hastily modified, these vessels had berths smaller than those required by law for slave ships. Food and water was inadequate, as was ventilation and sanitation. The combination guaranteed the spread of disease. For treating human beings little better than stacks of wood, a motto emerged, “Timber in, passengers out.” (Depiction below by Rodney Charman.)

The Browns settled in the thickly forested hills of Saint-Sylvestre, about 50 miles south of Quebec City. Before the end of the Nineteenth Century, there would be hundreds of Browns in the area, as it grew into an Irish enclave of several thousand that also included the villages of St. Agathe and St. Patrice de Beaurivage.

Today, however, all the Browns are gone from what once was a timely sanctuary from the lethal symptoms of sustained British oppression. The last of our Browns was Thomas Edgar, a devoted farmer known for a few classically Irish qualities: a deep distrust of the establishment and a lifelong resolve to conceal his emotions. These aspects of his personality were solidified by what Irish author Edna O’Brien described as a “ferocious tenacity.” In his eighties, Tom could be seen tending his goats and cattle while on crutches, required after the lower half of a leg had to be amputated. He never married, had no children, and died in 2022, at age 92. At his funeral, the St. Agathe church choir sang, “My Way.”

I provide this information as context for my most recent visit to those Canadian roots, where a tree sustains our name. Though the Browns are gone from the rural hills where they achieved respectable lives – seizing the opportunity of being judged an equal in a fledgling democracy – my family nonetheless lives on in a gift provided every spring: the luscious syrup from the sap of Quebec’s maple trees.

There is a sugary amid a lovingly-groomed maple forest on land once owned by my grandfather. That land belongs now to one of his nephews, Jimmy Noonan. The 77-year-old Jimmy has a constantly churning motor that keeps him feisty. Being in a province that has been effectively reconquered by the first colonists, the French-speaking Quebecois, has made him more chauvinistic than ever about his Irish roots, and like cousin Tom Brown, Jimmy’s Irishness is evident in his obstinately steadfast work ethic. Though the sap typically runs for only a few weeks, he maintains the sugarbush year-round. Regular clearing, digging, trimming, and felling is required to ensure that his maples have adequate soil, water, room, and sunlight. (Jimmy pictured below.)

On this visit, I was also finally, albeit briefly, a part of the syrup-making process. Participating was solely my idea – a long-held desire by a suburban New Yorker to step into the Victorian-like, pastoral world commonly depicted on Quebec’s round, 18-ounce syrup cans. Evoking the flavor of 19th-Century prints by Currier & Ives, Jimmy’s cans, for example, display a color illustration of a snowy forest where a bustling family of every age surrounds a steaming sugar shack.

Jimmy hardly needed the help. The only thing I could reasonably do was empty the two-gallon sap buckets, which hang from spiles – or spouts – drilled into the trees. But Jimmy knew how much it meant to me and how, please excuse the pun, it had also been high on my Dad’s bucket list. My Dad never got to see the sugary in action, but, as Jimmy knew, I was, by extension, getting a chance to close that circle, too.

Quebec accounts for 90 percent of Canada’s maple syrup production and Canada accounts for most of the world’s supply. Seventy percent of the maple syrup sold in the U.S. comes from Canada. I note all these facts because a visit to Canada today inevitably involves discussions with residents who, though still favorably inclined to Americans in general, are completely bewildered and profoundly saddened by Donald Trump’s various threats, like turning their nation into the 51st State and putting significant tariffs on all things made in Canada. Meanwhile, Americans have learned a lot more about the economic interdependence between the two nations.

Unlike, say, bananas, chocolate and coffee, which only flourish in the tropics around the equator, the U.S. is in fact suited for producing maple syrup. States bordering Canada, including Vermont, New York, and Maine, sell millions of gallons. But virtually all the machinery used to harvest the sap is made in Canada.

As a U.S. producer recently explained: “Our evaporator, our tubing, our reverse osmosis, our vacuum pumps … everything you can imagine in the maple industry that we own comes from Canada.” This syrup maker estimated that a “$30,000 reverse-osmosis device” could quadruple in price due to higher tariffs.

I’m also reminded of an essay about the U.S.-Canada relationship that I wrote with Tom Brokaw for NBC’s coverage of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. In the piece, we noted that Canada was America’s largest market and largest source of tourists. Fifteen year later, it’s still true. According to TD Bank, nearly $350 billion in goods and services crossed Canada’s border over the first three quarters of 2024. The bank also noted that 34 U.S. states sell more goods to Canada than any other foreign economy.

As for tourism, the U.S. Travel Association calculated that Canadians made 20.4 million visits to the U.S. in 2024, generating $20.5 billion in spending and supporting 140,000 American jobs.

The two countries also share an identity as immigrant nations. That story, too, is deeply interwoven. For example, I’m among a vast number of Irish-Americans whose descendants were welcomed first by Canada. My Browns were among the 450,000 Irish who went to Canada in the three decades prior to the 1845 start of the Great Famine – by one estimate, double the number of Irish emigrating to the United States in the same period. But, once settled, the U.S. beckoned.

The members of this Irish diaspora were people who, after surviving a perilous weeks-long ocean voyage, had to rebuild lives from scratch while confronting, for the first time, weather never seen in Ireland: blazing hot summers and long, cruel winters. They were intrepid, adaptable, and industrious people who, predictably, saw even greater possibilities in bolting to an America that was noisily, albeit often carelessly and calamitously, surging into an economic colossus.

The contingent David Brown brought to Canada in 1832 included his 23-year-old son John. Four years after arriving, John married Honora Lane in Saint-Sylvestre. They’d have nine children. The fifth, born in 1844 and named after his father, was rafting on the Mississippi by age 17. At age 26, John Brown Jr. married Hanna Kenefick in Ackley, Iowa. Like his parents, Brown also had nine children. In 1878, he headed to the largely undeveloped and often violent Dakota Territory.

Brown opened a freight business, serving Yankton, Ft. Randall and Pierre – places that would shortly become part of the new state of South Dakota. Freighters, using wagons pulled by horses or oxen, were essential for moving goods and supplies between settlements, military posts, and mining camps. Carrying food, clothing, tools, and equipment, these wagons mounted journeys in harsh weather, over rugged terrain, and regularly faced attacks by Native American tribes and bandits. The business made Brown wealthy.

Described as a man of unflinching courage, my great-granduncle also found roles in public service, as a member of the vigilance committees before a legal system had been established; as a deputy United States Marshall; and as the two-term mayor of Springfield, a commercial hub on the Missouri River with regular steamboat service. In 1905, Brown’s obituary in a local paper described his “rugged honesty and integrity, intensified by the hardships and privations of the pioneer.” The paper also assessed that Brown’s “word has always been considered as good as his note.”

I am descended from Timothy, who, at age 11 or 12, was the youngest of David Brown’s children to make the voyage from Ireland. Timothy married Mary Doyle in 1845 and they’d have ten children, among them my great grandfather James Brown. James married Anne Butler in 1884, in Saint-Patrice-de-Beaurivage. Each was 36 years old at the time, which may explain why they’d have a relatively small family of two boys. The younger would become my grandfather, Ed.

Timothy and James were farmers who endured a precarious existence of near poverty. By the time the Irish began arriving in Quebec, the first-wave of settlers, from France and Britain, had already claimed the best farmland. The Browns, meanwhile, had to make due with rock-strewn soil and steep hills. To subsist, they hustled. They grew cereals on the portions of land that were relatively flat; raised pigs, sheep and cattle; sold firewood; traveled for lumberjack jobs in winter; harvested maple syrup every spring. They made their own clothes, and the farm supplied all their food. Their daily struggle was ameliorated by a profound and restorative bond to their family, their neighbors, and their church. But such an existence barely produced enough to feed one family.

Tradition called for fathers to pass ownership to the oldest son. When this happened, due to age or death, it was often the signal for the rest of the siblings to make plans to leave home. Being the younger brother, my grandfather didn’t inherit the farm and, about 100 years ago, he left Saint-Sylvestre for a job in New York City. His relocation was tied to hearing how Patsy Noonan, the brother of girlfriend Mary, was already thriving as part of the construction force erecting new Art-Deco skyscrapers and massive bridges of audacious engineering.

Ed joined Patsy at another Irish enclave, in Bronx’s High Bridge neighborhood, where, just down the hill, there was a magnificent new ballpark of record size, Yankee Stadium, and an era-defining athlete regularly making headlines, Babe Ruth. Ed Brown’s first New York job was painting billboards. His next employer would turn out to be his last. He landed a job as a bellboy at the Ambassador Hotel, an elegant Beaux-Arts-style building on Park Avenue, conveniently located just a few blocks from Grand Central Terminal, a hub for trains traveling to and from every major city in America. Hotel guests once included Marilyn Monroe. (Photo by Ed Feingersh.)

The prime location attracted a clientele that had the means to be generous and were groomed to be served. In such a milieu, the tips were steady and they allowed my grandfather to establish a family in the Bronx, with his new wife, Patsy’s sister Mary Noonan Brown. They’d have four children, including my father, Tom. Brother-in-law Patsy joined them in a five-floor walkup, helping with the rent.

Ed Brown eventually became a manager on the hotel’s concierge desk. A salary based mostly on cash tips reduced his tax exposure and allowed for savings, especially with his modest lifestyle. As I recall, my grandfather’s only luxury was buying tobacco for his pipe. His speech seemed to reflect his austerity. Poppa Brown was adverse to lengthy conversation. “His advice was don’t talk too much,” said oldest son Gene. “As a result, we didn’t get a lot out of him.”

Approaching retirement, Ed envisioned returning to Canada and, with my grandmother, purchased a large, uncleared lot in Saint-Sylvestre. As a child, I was acutely aware that he was a farmer at heart because he tended an impressive, multi-row garden on the roof of his Bronx apartment. His tomatoes glowed atop the black tar. But that Canadian homecoming never occurred.

My grandfather waited until his seventies to retire, and it wasn’t out of choice. His place of employment was about to vanish. In 1966, the distinguished 23-story Ambassador Hotel was demolished and replaced by a bland 44-story office tower to be known, blandly, by the building’s address, 345 Park Avenue.

Within a few years, Poppa Brown was using a walker and, soon after, my grandparents departed what was a deteriorating Bronx neighborhood for the burgeoning suburbs, finding a comfortable senior living community in Stony Brook, on Long Island, which, not coincidentally, was a few blocks away from their middle son, my Uncle Jimmy, who, with Aunt Connie, ran herd on five rambunctious, athletic boys who adored and sometimes terrorized their grandparents. Ed Brown died in 1973.

Twenty years ago, when Ed’s nephew Jimmy took ownership of the Brown lot in Canada, in partnership with his wife, Nicole Viel Noonan, their first task was clearing the rocky, hilly land, just like the Irish settlers in the 1830s. Trees were felled, stumps uprooted, boulders extracted. Today, a lovingly-groomed dirt road winds its way past the accoutrements of a working farm. There’s a garden that will produce watermelons in late summer, a shed packed with carefully-stacked firewood, a field of evenly placed pine and maple saplings. At the back of the property, right after the noteworthy remains of a weather-darkened dry-stone wall built by one of the area’s original Irish settlers, you reach a circular opening, the location of a quaint wood cabin used for the final steps of producing maple syrup.

Nostalgia drove my father’s dream to see the sugary in action. As a child, his mother brought him and his three siblings to Canada every summer, to a farm owned by her family – Noonans who left western Ireland and reached the rural Quebec enclave of Irish immigrants just before the Browns. Released from the claustrophobic Bronx – and Catholic schools supervised by uncompromising and generally humorless priests, brothers and nuns – summer on the farm was an opposite world of unsupervised, endless days, including the titillating prospect of a near-death event with a large animal or piece of machinery.

Dad was in his early 70s when Jimmy and Nicole started harvesting the sap and canning maple syrup. But, like me, my father kept underestimating how much diligence was required to arrive in Quebec at the very time the sap was running. Timing the season would become further compromised by the often erratic new normal produced by climate change. High winds, late frost, and sudden warming are among the conditions that have conspired to produce sugar seasons in Quebec that start earlier, or end sooner, or are shorter in length.

However, even with ideal conditions, there is no such thing as a designated opening day. The sap runs at the amorphous turning point between winter and spring. The ideal forecast is a constant tightrope around the freezing mark. Producers want days just above freezing, and preferably sunny, followed by nights just below 32 degrees Fahrenheit – or, in the case of my metric Quebec family, zero degrees Celsius. Under these conditions, thawing sends the sap into the branches and the change in barometric pressure pushes it out through the taps. At night, the sap travels back into the roots. The longer the temperature tip toes around the freezing mark, the more maple syrup is produced.

As it was, I arrived as there were signs the 2025 season was nearing an end. Flies and moths could be seen floating in the metal buckets used for collection. Buds were sprouting in the upper branches of the maples, indicating that the sugar-rich sap was being diverted to make leaves. As Jimmy explained, what would soon trickle from his taps would be pinkish, stickier and produce sub-standard syrup not worth collecting,

Given the exasperating fickleness of Mother Nature’s methodology, compounded by a warming planet, landing at the sugary on the right day had required me to begin monitoring the weather in Saint-Sylvestre in early February. I kept in regular touch with Jimmy’s son, Michael, who kindly acts as the social organizer for subjects involving the Canadian side of the family. He was confident enough to suggest that the first weekend in April was worth noting in my calendar. My zeal had been intensified because my father died last year, at age 92. His death also reinforced the reality of my own mortality. I’m 66, and can no longer ignore the customary deterioration.

On Thursday, April 3, Michael confirmed the sap was running. The distance from my home in Scarsdale, N.Y. to Saint-Sylvestre, Quebec is almost 500 miles. I could once drive that distance in under ten hours, possessed by a reptilian need to menace cars moving too slowly in the fast lane. But now my bladder is a bit more active and driving during daylight is greatly preferred. I split the trip in half, spending the night in Plattsburg, New York, near the Canadian border. By mid-afternoon on Friday, I had reached the Noonan sugar shack, which contains an evaporator, a nearly room-sized, stainless-steel boiler designed to remove water from sap. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup.

Entering, I was enveloped by a baking mist of palpably pure sweetness, inhaling radically condensed sap freshly harvested – perfectly organic, a completely natural source of sucrose. After being intoxicated by the smell, I got to taste the steaming product just before it was canned. Drinking from a half-filled tea cup, I found the syrup’s nuclear-level sugar content somehow tolerable, accompanied by a sense that I was drinking an ultra-healthy, plant-based, multi-vitamin, containing everything from A to zinc. As I was experiencing my bliss, Nicole was ladling the golden-brown liquid into cans and creating a vacuum seal with a simple manual tool. Nothing artificial was added at any point.

The following day, Saturday, April 5, I was again reminded of the fickleness of sugary season. After breakfast, Jimmy customarily heads out to the sugary to calculate how fast the sap is running into his nearly 400 buckets. If the time between drips is more than five seconds, he’ll decide not to gather sap that day. At around 10 a.m., he called Nicole at home to tell her the flow was too slow. But when he checked again, 30 minutes later, it was becoming constant.

Working silently and steadily, with an economy of motion you’d see from veteran teammates in sports, Jimmy and Nicole used a simple division of labor. One walked, carrying a bucket you could buy for $6.99. The other drove a $10,000 Utility Task Vehicle with tank treads.

Jimmy carries a five-gallon plastic bucket to empty the smaller, hanging sap buckets. I had to be instructed that it was best to do this in a single motion using only one hand. Showing me, Jimmy overturned the hanging bucket in a blink, forcing the lid to flap open, while his other hand firmly gripped the larger bucket as it was being filled with sap. For me, this was easier said than done and why, as a slow learner, I managed to collide with a flapping bucket lid during a sloppy pour, opening a small, thin gash on my forehead, just above the bridge of my nose. I would be the only work-place injury.

Following just behind me and Jimmy, Nicole drove the UTV, or side-by-side, outfitted with a rubber track system. The growling quasi-military vehicle pulled a trailer with a 100-gallon steel tank. The sap we were transferring to the big plastic buckets was subsequently poured into a drain atop the tank. By the way, for those curious, the sap has the clarity and weight of rainwater and the sweetness is almost ghostly. That it can be reduced by high heat to a dark, thick, exquisite liquid confection is pretty wondrous. (Below, Jimmy and Nicole.)

As I was completing my father’s unrequited dream by participating in the syrup making, Jimmy was enjoying the burning goal that eluded my grandfather. He was running a farm. Like his uncle, Ed Brown, Jimmy is a farmer in his bones, but didn’t inherit his Dad’s farm, and was compelled to leave the same Irish enclave in rural Quebec in order to make a living. He’d become a welder and travel widely, working on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline; at potash mines in Saskatchewan; on ship construction in Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. There is a synchrony to Jimmy farming the land Ed Brown bought and turning it into the farm his uncle had wanted for himself as a final chapter. Acknowledging this tie, Jimmy and Nicole label their cans of syrup: Noonan & Brown Maple Products.

That label, advertising this rather precious product, represents the last tie to Canada for my Browns. But for virtually all the other families who joined mine in that Irish diaspora, compressed into those rocky, rural hills, all that remains are the dead. The steady exodus wasn’t unwelcome. A determined, decades-long cultural overhaul has both prioritized Quebec’s French roots and diminished centuries of contributions by English, Scottish and Irish settlers. In 1974, as part of an ongoing “Quiet Revolution,” francophones – comprising a clear majority – made French the province’s official language.

All of Quebec’s road signs are in French – ARRÊT is STOP – and all the fast food chains serve poutine – french fries smothered in cheese curds and brown gravy. In the villages where my predecessors created a little Ireland in spirit, story and song, very few speak English. Most of those who do only know a few basic phrases.

In 2000, responding to the fast vanishing history of Irish heritage, a Celtic Cross was placed in the Quebec enclave where the Browns and Noonans first resettled. The organization that erected it, Coirneal Cealteach – Irish for “Celtic Corner” – is the passion project of local resident Steve Cameron. After senior management positions in multiple provinces, he has become a historian of “our hills” and is striving to assure that the Irish footprint is not forgotten.

The inscription on the cross reads, “Dedicated to the memory of our Irish ancestors and the brave journey that brought them to this land.” At the base of the cross, each of the four faces – or sides – identifies the surnames of families who were known to have lived in the area of Saint-Agathe, Saint-Sylvestre, and Saint-Patrice-de-Beaurivage, the three villages established by those intrepid Irish voyagers in the 19^th Century. There are 195 family names in total. On one of the faces, Brown comes after Britton and before Brynan. On another side, Noonan comes after Nultey and before O’Donnell.

When Limerick’s David Brown died in Saint-Sylvestre in 1863, at either age 89 or 90, grandson John Brown was about to leave Iowa for the Dakota Territory. Others from David’s line had already resettled in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and California. Many of these Irish immigrants would dutifully serve in America’s wars. The Browns and Noonans of my era have included New York City nurses, cops and firemen. Among the aunts, uncles and cousins, moonlighting has always been routine.

The value and importance of work and doing a job right has been an engrained aspect of my inheritance. Unforgettably, on the day I received the sacrament of Confirmation, Dad gave me a bracelet engraved with three words taken from a Virgil poem: Labor Omnia Vincit. Work conquers all.

This ethos is hardly exclusive to members of the Irish diaspora. Generations and generations of immigrant families from across the world have come to North America prepared to shed their last ounce of sweat in order to justly earn their place. I think it’s fair to say that in finding a refuge of liberty, a debt of gratitude was born. In turn, people given even a slice of opportunity have found a universe of ways to soar – a return on investment massive and incalculable.

A 2008 document calculated 616 descendants of David and wife Mary Naughton Brown. But this genealogical tally only tracked, in full, five generations. Being sixth generation, I was excluded, as were my eight siblings. Further, just our little corner of the lineage – the nine of us – would produce a seventh generation of 25.

However, my existence – and that of the gaggle of nieces and nephews – was noted on a more comprehensive document created in 2009 for the Noonans, my grandmother’s family. With the sixth and seventh generations included, there are at least 1,195 descendants of John Noonan and Mary Cusick Noonan, who left Ireland for Quebec around 1830.

Now think of how there are 195 names on the Celtic Cross memorializing the Irish immigration to a cluster of villages in just one area of Quebec. Those 195 families, the lucky ones able to escape a collapsing society, would become the foundation of ancestral trees with branches that now represent tens of thousands of lives. “The struggle of man against power,” Milan Kundera wrote, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” In this ahistorical Trump Era, as faithful allies are being fantasized as foes and refugees are instantly criminalized, it should not be forgotten that many of us owe a debt to Canada, and a significant one, for giving our fleeing Irish forebears a necessary second chance at life.