A HERITAGE centre in Clare is being inundated with calls from Ennis people trying to establish if they have links to boxing legend Muhammad Ali.
The three-time world boxing champion is due to visit his ancestral home of Ennis early next month – from which his great-grandfather, Abe Grady, left for the US in the 1860s.
Yesterday, Antoinette O’Brien, genealogist at the Clare Heritage Centre in Corofin, said: “The phone has not stopped ringing over the past couple of days from people saying that their grandmothers, their grandfathers and great-grandparents were Gradys from the Turnpike in Ennis.”
One of those is Imelda O’Grady who lives today in a house only 100m from the Turnpike. She said yesterday: “My father was Charles O’Grady from the Turnpike and his father was Pat O’Grady who also came from the Turnpike. I’m trying to go further back, but there has to be connections.
“I always knew that we were connected to Muhammad Ali. But when he said some time ago, he didn’t want any white blood in his family, we let it go,” she added.
Ennis man Brian Dinan has been trying to trace his roots to the boxing legend since his Ennis visit was confirmed. He said yesterday his 89-year-old mother Eileen’s grandmother was Bridget Grady and that Eileen’s great-grandfather was Pat Grady, from the Turnpike.
“Any O’Gradys who are in Clare today who came from the Turnpike would almost certainly be related to Abe Grady and Muhammad Ali,” Ms O’Brien said.
“There is only one Grady, John Grady, a plasterer. Abe’s father was listed as living in the Turnpike in the 1860s, but that Grady family sprung several descendants.”
At the heritage centre yesterday, Ms O’Brien showed the documents recording John Grady’s death in 1867 due to “visitation of God”: “He died suddenly is what that means”, she said.
Ms O’Brien believes Abe Grady took his name in honour of US president Abraham Lincoln, who abolished slavery in the US.
“Abe married an African-America woman who was an emancipated slave. The descendants of those people who did emigrate carry within them the desire to come back and reconnect with the lands of their ancestors,” she said.
Ms O’Brien said that 120,000 emigrants left Clare between 1850 and 1880 – 10,000 more than the number living in the county today.
She explained that Abe Grady emigrated to the US in the 1860s from Cappa harbour, near Kilrush in west Clare.
Some time after arriving, Abe settled in the state of Kentucky, where he married his African-American wife. It is understood their son also married an African-American and that one of their daughters was Ali’s mother, Odessa Lee Grady.
In the 1930s, Odessa married Cassius Clay snr and they settled in Louisville, Kentucky, before their son and future sporting icon Cassius was born in 1942.
The mixed blood on Odessa’s side of Ali’s family caused the boxing legend some uneasy moments when he converted to the Nation of Islam after winning the world boxing championship for the first time in 1964, beating Sonny Liston in Miami.
Ali claimed that any white blood in his family came through “rape and defilement”.