Divided City, Divided Blood:

How DNA Triggered the Discovery of My and Baltimore's Forgotten Civil War History

Growing up in Baltimore, I walked the same streets where Confederate sympathizers had once plotted against the Union my Irish ancestors died defending. But I had no idea of this family legacy—or of the complex, often violent political history that had shaped my hometown long before I was born.

The irony runs deeper than I initially realized. My father was a Baltimore native, born and raised in a city that had harbored Confederate sympathies during the Civil War. My mother came from Providence, Rhode Island, descended from Irish immigrants who had sacrificed everything for the Union cause. They met when my father was stationed in New England during World War II. When they married, my mother left her family's New England legacy behind to make her home in what had once been enemy territory, embracing everything her ancestors had believed in.

It wasn't until I took a DNA test late in life that I discovered this profound irony of my existence: through my mother's line, I was descended from Union heroes. Yet, I had been born and raised in my mother's adopted city—a place that had once sympathized with the very forces my great-great-grandfather Timothy Corkery had died fighting against.

This book tells three interconnected stories that helped me understand both my family's sacrifice and my mother's adopted city's complicated relationship with American democracy. From DNA discovery to political murder to constitutional crisis, these are the stories that revealed how personal history and national history intersect in ways we never expect.