The Doherty Family Recordings were made by Marge Sontag (née Doherty) and other members of the Doherty Family at the family home on Selby Avenue just west of Prior Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1958. They feature the family patriarch Tony Doherty (1896–1972) on fiddle, daughter Marge on piano and accordion, daughter Mary on piano and daughter Joan on piano. Daughter Monica also sings two songs. There is some talk between performances including brief chat with Tony and his wife Margaret, some naming of tune titles and musicians, a Lawrence Welk skit and some narration of the tape itself.

The original was recorded on reel-to-reel tape and transferred to cassette tape by family members. A cassette tape version belonging to Tony’s grandson Chris Cheney was digitized by the McKiernan Library. In June, we created an online special collection providing access to all 52 tracks from this fascinating record of traditional music in St. Paul.

On June 29, an Irish pub that has been a pillar of the Irish cultural community of the Twin Cities for 18 years, Keegan’s Irish Pub in Minneapolis, closed its doors due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The pub was home to multiple popular Irish music sessions every Sunday and was active in supporting community organizations and events including the Irish Fair of Minnesota and the Center for Irish Music. 

The McKiernan Library reached out to owner Marty Neumann about the photo display that hung in the pub’s session area depicting dozens of local musicians. Marty and original owners Terry and Virginia Keegan were happy to have the photos go to an institution where they will live on as markers of the pub’s importance over the past two decades. Keegan’s also donated a collection of 150+ Irish books that for years were part of the pub’s community atmosphere. The McKiernan Library shares in the community’s sense of loss for this key gathering place and feels honored to be the new home for these items.

In early July, we boxed up and shipped the 43 master tapes for Dr. McKiernan’s 1960s television programs “Ireland Rediscovered” and “Irish Diary” to Quad Tape Transfer in Gray, Tennessee for transfer to archival digital media. We look forward to the results of this digitization project!

This publication was made possible in part by the people of Minnesota through a grant funded by an appropriation to the Minnesota Historical Society from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Any views, findings, opinions, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the State of Minnesota, the Minnesota Historical Society, or the Minnesota Historic Resources Advisory Committee.

We now have 24 videos up as part of our free online Story Hour series aimed at children! All stories are posted to the McKiernan Library Facebook page and archived on the McKiernan Library YouTube channel. Thank you to our readers Natalie O’Shea and Jim Tarbox and to Nathan Obrestad for help with the editing. 

Library Director Brian Miller also continues to add new Irish music performances (six to date) to our Water from the Well series featuring Irish tunes sourced from our collection. These are also available via our Facebook page and YouTube channel.

Thanks to help from volunteer Jim Tarbox, our Online Catalog now includes our entire collection of 275 commercially issued LPs, EPs and 78rpm records. Each catalog entry includes the wonderful cover art of each item. We have many rare Irish traditional music and Irish spoken word releases in this collection.

We continue to work on the Gael-Linn CD donation and other CDs and DVDs and we hope to have catalog records for these online and available for browsing by this fall.