When I Was in Ireland I Felt Like a King’s Spawn

Half Penny Painting for a Hay Penny Bridge 2023. Acrylic on loose canvas, 25 x 19"

And see? I got the genealogical record to prove it!
In the early 1930s, my Great Grandfather, Henry Throop, listed our patronym in connection to a Scottish King, both the Throop and Dunbar lines. His Throop line was sketchy (my research cannot confirm that I am related to the Regicide Adrian Scrope), but the Dunbar one is solid pseudoscience. The Scottish king’s roots could be traced through Ireland, to other kings, and those kings were connected to the Old Testament by a fundamentalist believer at the Utah Genealogical Society in 1928. All the way to Adam, first Caucasian man of the red earth born on the horn of Africa in 4004 B.C.E., 7,000 years after the melting of the glaciers and the green chert arrowhead technology of the West Athens Hill natives from modern day Greene County, N.Y.

It’s still cool to know. For instance, I am the 67x Great Grandson of Conaire the Great, a high king of Ireland. You know, I could just feel it when Rose and I were in Dublin. Common folks were stepping aside with a bow to my horrendous Guinness breath and the ragwort didn’t make me sneeze.

Me last October, after three beers, waiting to be ordained.