David Raymond York, known as Ray, was born the second son of Genevieve Daly and Frank B York, Sr. Ray and Durry York and her uncle him personally. He was a very extra special person. He became a Jesuit priest and taught most of his career at St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City, NJ. He was very devout and took his vow of poverty serious. If anyone gave him new shoes, next time they would see him he would have the ones with the holes in the soles back on and if you asked he said he gave them to someone else who needed them more than himself.

Durry’s mother Helen, Ray’s sister-in-law, always said it was a shame she did not know him before he became ill as he was brilliant. Durry does, though, recall as a very young child her dad, Frank, Ray and a few other Jesuits sitting around the kitchen table discussing politics and using some choice language when my Dad kicked Ray under the table to say “SSHHH Durry’s listening”. Durry imagined her eyes were probably like saucers hearing the priests swear!

The best way to read his works, Father York has advised, is with an onion sandwich and a beer if you are celibate; with your red-haired or blue-eyed spouse in one arm and the book in the other if you are married. Best of all to read this book on some Central Park bench in your own city where, looking out from time to time across the greenwood, you will see Reality turn to face you, and see things you have never seen before.

They had met one summer during vacation in Elizabethtown, New York, whe he was standing on the scales weighing himself and she caming walking around the corner of the porch and he looked up and said, “Oh”. Literally what was being weighed in the balance that day was myself with my two brothers. This is the mystery of life, and when one ponders it, the more mysterious becomes the depth of God who loves the whole thing into unity, drawing the man and woman into one, through the participated energy of His own gigantic love….

The name of my mother was Genevieve – a name of feminine glory, and really the very name that Adam called Eve in the beginning, because “Genevieve” means the mother of living. Mother was the daughter of clan Daly whose ancestral home was Castle Daly in Westmeath, Ireland. Michael T. “Grandpa” Daly had left the castle in 1845 as a four-year-old and established residence at 188 Lexington Avenue, a three-story brick affair that today is the shantiest facade on the one time happy boulevard of little Old New York. At the time of mother’s wedding in 1909, Michael T. Daly was Commissioner of Public Works, and you will find his name etched in stone on old armories and such things as the Williamsburg Bridge that marries Brooklyn and New York.

As things are finally coming together for the Daly clan, we’ve started a blog. I will post as I hear new things both stories about recent stuff and old. If you have anything you would like to have posted email me at: dalyfamily2008@hotmail.com