Human life is often one of the most under appreciated things ever. We take our lives for granted without even realizing. There were many things that had to have fell into place for you to be alive and reading this right now. Many centuries ago, your oldest ancestors had children who had children and eventually after many generations, you were born. This phenomenon is true for every human’s life. We are all products of people from thousands of years ago.
In order to keep track of who is an ancestor of whom, many different forms of information is kept. There are census reports, birth and death certificates, cemetery plots, municipal employment records, news articles, and original research conducted that all help develop family trees. Despite all of the forms of information, it is still a very tough task to search for someone’s earliest roots. As you go further back in time, there is less and less information that is kept, as it is often lost or was never recorded. Genealogists are people who take time to study families and trace their lineages.
One of the more well known genealogists is Jim McNiff. McNiff has found the roots of many people, with the most famous person’s roots he has traced being Tom Brady. Brady has an interesting family tree to say the least, which has gotten traced all the way back to the early nineteenth century.
Tom Brady is well aware of his roots and has made it known that he is honored by them. Tom has/has had very good relationships with his relatives and is extremely close with them. He often visits them while they are at their homes, invites them to games where he puts them in luxury hotels, and attends all kinds of different events for them. In an interview that took place in November of 2016, Brady discussed his roots publicly for the first time.
“My father is 100 percent Irish. We took a trip over there together and visited some of the places where my family came from. That was a great experience for me and obviously I am very proud of my Irish roots. I've really enjoyed my time over there.”
While his father is Irish, his mother is not. Galynn Brady is from Minnesota, where she was born and raised. Galynn’s history was a lot harder to track for whatever reason, so her side of the family tree is much less detailed compared to the father’s side.
Father’s Side
With it being known that Brady is of Irish descent, McNiff took a look in that area. The oldest ancestor that McNiff traced back to Tom Brady was his great-great grandfather, John Brady. Nearly two centuries ago, John Brady witnessed his countrymen die, his land dry up, and almost all of Ireland go into starvation. John, along with many other Irish, emigrated Ireland during the Great Hunger. For those unfamiliar with the Great Hunger, it was an event in which the people of Ireland underwent starvation and disease. These people emigrated on coffin ships, and it was a miracle that John even survived this part. The coffin ships were crowded with people, meaning sicknesses traveled in a heartbeat.
John landed safely in the capital of Massachusetts and became a laborer. On top of this, he met another Irish refugee named Bridget Bailey. The two would eventually get married at the young age of twenty two, and they would raise a family together in southern Boston on First Street. John and Bridget would go on to have two kids, Henry and Philip.
Bridget had a sister named Ann, who was also an Ireland native and was married to one as well. Her husband, Lawrence Meegan, was a skilled harness worker, and was offered a job in California. At the time, there was a draft going on in preparation for the Civil War, and many of the new Irish emigres were being selected. So, Ann, Lawrence, and their son Pete moved west. The Brady’s tagged along, as the way of life was much better in California than in Boston at the time.
The two families were next door neighbors in San Francisco’s Mission District. After Lawrence and Bridget died, John and Ann would end up living together, along with all three kids. Back then, it was very common for kids to play outside together. It would not be a bad assumption to assume that Philip F. Brady (who would go on to be Tom Brady’s great grandfather) and Pete Meegan (who would go on to be Tom Brady’s great-great uncle) played out in the yard together.
Pete Meegan would end up playing professional baseball for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He was a pitcher who was said to have a mean curveball, and any team back then would have done anything to have him on their team. Meegan died at the beginning of the twentieth century, and he would be the first athlete of the Brady ancestry that made it big.
Tom Brady’s great-grandfather, Philip F. Brady, was a San Francisco firefighter for nearly three decades and was a respondent to one of the most devastating earthquakes California ever encounteredq in 1906. It killed nearly three thousand people, and also destroyed nearly the entire city. Unfortunately, the tragedies for the firefighter do not stop here. He had to cope through the murder of one of his son’s, Philip J. Brady.
Philip J. Brady was a former police sergeant who found work as a newspaper reporter. While working on a report in Oakland 1922, he was shot in the stomach and eventually bleed to death at the age of thirty four. Fortunately, Philip J. was not an only child and had a brother named Harry.
Harry Brady would live a successful life. However, Harry’s cousin, Michael Buckley Jr., faced much harder events than Harry did. He was a West Point graduate who was the first American taken prisoner by the Nazis in World War II.
Buckley had a tremendously bright future. He graduated from West Point and lettered in three sports - baseball, boxing, and soccer. He was stationed to Egypt where he would help the British forces and observe the Germans war tactics. Unfortunately, he was captured two weeks before the infamous Pearl Harbor and became America’s first prisoner of war. It wasn't until six months that he ended up getting released. He would go on to be a professor at Santa Clara University, and he would have six children, three of which became priests.
Now, back to Harry. Harry was the owner of a suburban pharmacy, had a beautiful wife, and had four kids with her. One of these four kids would end up being a lot more well known than his siblings. This kid’s name was Tom, now known as Tom Brady Sr. and he would go on to be the quarterback’s father.
Harry’s son Tom would grow up in the middle of the World Wars.
