Go West, Young Man

My great-grandfather came from Ireland to New York City when he was a young man. He married and eventually fathered eight children — four boys and four girls. A country man at heart, he hated the big city and persuaded his wife to let him visit the West. The rural beauty of the southwest Oregon coast hooked him. He went back to New York and begged his wife to move west with him, but she refused. She and her children were not about to move away from civilization. She further told him she would have him declared dead if he stayed away too long. He went anyway, taking a ship to Panama, disembarking and walking across the isthmus, and catching a different ship up the west coast of the continent to Oregon. He returned to Oregon for good in 1855.