Some years ago my aunt gave me an elaborately decorated tin box containing all that remained of my Irish heritage. She had painted it black outside and red inside and dabbed it with gold. It’s got me to thinking as St. Patrick’s Day approaches of the many routes a poor Irish lad could take from Cork to the Promised Land.

I have regarded this box as an urn containing the spiritual ashes of my grandfather, Maurice F. Reilly, the first and last Irishman in my family. He was a kind of evolutionary dead end who lost his way in a declining Puritan society where he came to make his living and raise a family more than a century ago.

I assume Maurice made the box. He was a tinsmith capable of installing running water in his house at New Harbor before his neighbors had it. Sometimes people came to the door to ask him to repair their pots and pans.

Inside the tin box are religious relics that Maurice cared enough to take from his boyhood home in Nova Scotia and carry with him to the ends of the earth. But then he shut them away forever until they were given to me, one of his dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. They are a mystery to me, a poor Calvinist, but I feel obliged to preserve them and display them to whoever will pay attention, something like the Ancient Mariner.

The items consist of a well-worn “Manual of Catholic Piety,” presented to Maurice in 1885 in Halifax by his aunt, whose name I do not know. There is also a dog-eared catechism ponderously titled “The Most Reverend Doctor James Butler’s Catechism Revised, Enlarged, Improved And Recommended By The Four R. C. Archbishops of Ireland, Further Revised By His Grace Archbishop O’Brien, To Which Is Added The Scriptural Catechism By The Rt. Rev. Dr. Milner.” On the title page someone has written “Maurice Reilly, Please keep and read this” followed by an illegible name. A bookmark has been embroidered with the words “A token of affection.”

There are several much mildewed pages removed from a book, “Milton’s Poetical Works,” and used for writing paper. On the blank page in front is inscribed a list of goals such as “To hear as little as possible to the prejudice of others.” They were written in longhand on April 8, 1882, by one J.E. McD., another mysterious character.

There are two crosses, one on a loop of string to be worn around the neck; the other on a chain. Both are of lightweight metal, painted gold. There is another cross attached to what I take to be rosary beads, all made of dark wood.

There is a card portraying the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. On the back are printed five fine Irish names – Corrigan, Carroll, Healey, Meagher, O’Brien – only one of which I recognize, a niece. It is inscribed by the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Halifax on June 19, 1931, and I take it to be a token of their prayers for a dying man. Maurice died two years later.

My grandfather’s parents, Dennis and Mary Buttomer Reilly, emigrated from Ireland to Canada sometime before 1848 when their eldest daughter’s baptism appears in the church records in Halifax. They lived at the land end of a long commercial wharf where Dennis was a liquor dealer and storekeeper in the city’s Irish ghetto. They died in 1862 a few months apart, doubtlessly in some epidemic, leaving as orphans four children, one of whom was 7-year-old Maurice.

Dennis had been a successful merchant. On his deathbed, he asked for a priest to administer his estate. There was no will. A horrific donnybrook ensued over a few hundred dollars and some merchandise including a sizable quantity of liquor, much of which disappeared at the wake.

My grandfather and his brother and two sisters were sent to live with an aunt and uncle. There was a great falling out and later allegations that the children’s money was stolen. My grandfather’s younger brother ran away and was never heard from again, probably dying on his way to the gold fields of California or Australia like so many young men back then.

My grandfather took a more conservative route. I have a photograph from a Halifax advertising catalogue in 1871 showing a store at 200 Hollis St., a short distance from where Maurice lived. Reilly & Davidson were plumbers and tinsmiths and dealers in ship stoves, according to the sign over the door. I like to think that’s where Maurice, then 17, apprenticed with some relative whose identity I have yet to ascertain.

His tinsmith skills brought him from Halifax to the United States in the 1870s where he worked setting up canneries for the Baxter Canning Co. and possibly other companies in the United States and Canada. By the mid-1880s he had settled in New Harbor, married and started a family that would grow to 11 children. He became manager of the New Harbor Fish Preserving Co., which is listed in the Maine Register as a going concern between 1896 and 1917.

Around this time, I suppose, he put away his religious materials. The nearest Catholic church was 15 miles away. Even if the family had owned a horse and buggy, the roads were barely passable much of the year. But there may have been another reason. This was the rock-ribbed coast of Maine where Catholics were still looked upon with suspicion by the nativists. The KKK would be riding over the darkening landscape in just a few years.

Maurice married a local woman who could trace her ancestry if not back to the Mayflower crowd, then at least to the Bay Colony, which was nearly as good. Her forebears had fought in the Revolutionary War and then became Maine pioneers, settling in places such as Hartford and Montville. In 1830 her grandfather was living on Monhegan Island, leading the rough-and-tumble life of a fisherman.

The transition was complete, except the Canadian factor still hung in the air. My father remembered getting into a fight with a boy who accused him of being a Canadian back in those days when any foreigner was a suspicious character in rural America. If only the boy had known about the tin box and its contents.

My grandfather did a good job hiding his Irishness. Years later I can remember my mother, in a pique about something, half-angry and half-joking, telling my father, “I never would have married you if I’d known you were an Irishman.” Her family had lived just a few miles up the road from my father’s. Her mother had been a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, an organization that did not appreciate the hordes of Irish who flooded the state before the Civil War. My mother always wore orange on St. Pat’s Day in honor of her Scotch-Irish ancestors.

My parents moved to Troy, N.Y., during the Great Depression, a gritty city with classical pretensions. It turned into an Irish-American oasis on the Hudson River when the industrialists needed cheap labor. Irishmen were welcome to attend Catholic churches and schools and join Irish clubs and sit in the seedy bars that still littered the streets in the 1930s. They eventually controlled City Hall. We attended the Presbyterian Church, the closest thing to Congregationalist available.

At church, adults would call me Father Reilly for a joke, and at the public school I attended, the Catholic teachers would ask me if I was related to Father Reilly, a local priest. Because of my name, I was a puzzle in a city where your religious affiliation played a crucial role in determining where you went to school, who you socialized with and where you went to college or got a job, although these distinctions were slowly fading.

The only overt discrimination I recall came from an elderly Irish Catholic woman who refused to let her nephew, my best friend, play with me, a lapsed Irish Catholic. Things erupted one memorable day in comic hysterics when she caught him crawling down the drainpipe from his second-story bedroom window to join me in some escapade.

In an age of increasing religious intolerance, I think of how my grandfather set aside the contents of the tin box, and I wonder what was on his mind. I’m told a priest came down to the cemetery to consecrate his grave, which seems a bit after the fact to me. His was a bargain, perhaps more extreme than many others, that all immigrants make, Irish or Somali, if they wish to become members of another culture. It remains for us, the descendants, to figure out how to deal with this inheritance after we have already lost it.

Wayne E. Reilly writes a column on Maine history for the Bangor Daily News. He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.