Page 29 - Always Virginia

Always Virginia 17

Alma Walsh of Murrayville, and lived in Palmyra, Hannibal, and
St. Louis with their three children: lawman and military veteran
John Terrence (Terry), Mary Janice Day Campbell, and Martha
Elizabeth Day Stuckenberg.
“Irish and Catholic, thank God,” said Mary Pearl Lawler Day.
“We’ve always been Catholic,” said her daughter Virginia Day
Fritscher.
“Except before Saint Patrick when we were all pagan Druids,”
said their grandson and son, Jack.
To which the eighty-four-year-old Mary Pearl Day replied:
“‘Bless us and save us,’ said Mrs. O’Davis.”
During a trip to Ireland in 2019, John Terrence (Terry) Day
and his wife, Kathy Pflueger Day, visited and dined with the large
and genial O’Dea family of Tipperary who, they were given to un-
derstand, were still living on the same farm where John T., Senior,
and Bartholomew, Junior, had lived with their parents and brother,
Thomas, whose descendants they are.
In this book of Irish stories about this certain Day family in
Illinois, Virginia Day Fritscher’s eyewitness diary recalls with lov-
ing heart and nostalgic voice the colorful comedy, the geneologi-
cal drama, and the moving parts of the first 150 years of several
generations of a lively Irish immigrant family putting down new
roots in Hamburg, Kampsville, and Jacksonville. The ancient his-
tory of the Days can be found at https://odeaclan.org/clan-history.
—Jack Fritscher, PhD, born 1939, a Seanachie of Clan Ó
Deághaidh, San Francisco, 2019

Author’s Note. With respect to the past, and to the future, every
effort has been made in the present by this direct descendent of
his great-great-grandparents, Bartholomew Day, Senior, and Mar-
garet Tyrrell Day, who stayed in Ireland, to write this report with
accuracy, including information from available public sources as
well as from stories the author began collecting in the 1950s from
his grandfather Bartholmew Day III, including his 1972 recording
of his grandmother Mary Pearl Lawler Day and the writings and