From the Archives: Emily's Journey
This is a revised and expanded version of a blog post from ten years ago.
As you might expect from my name, I'm considerably Irish in ancestry. More than half Irish, in fact, when you add it all up, but it doesn't all come from the paternal side—as I've put together my family tree I've discovered a strain of Irish in practically every line. They're often the hardest lines to trace, given the predominance of the same surnames and common given names being used over and over in Irish families! But at the same time, one of the few stories from my family history that has actually been passed down directly to me through the few intervening generations also comes from an Irish line—the story of one of my maternal great-grandmothers.
Her name was Emily, and she was born in 1891 in a brick row house in South Dublin, the third of four children and the second to live past infancy. Her father, the son of a farmer from Limerick, was a police constable; her mother was the daughter of a Tipperary groom; and her maternal grandmother lived with the family. I discovered for the first time when I located the family on the Irish census that Emily's full name was actually Mary Emily, though she went by her middle name for most of her life, and by the end of it was using the "M" as a middle initial. (She had also trimmed a few years off her age by the end of her life, so that her tombstone gives her birth date as 1894!)
And in 1908, when she was seventeen years old, she and her fifteen-year-old brother Joseph set out across the Atlantic together, bound for America, to join their older brother John who had emigrated three years earlier. They sailed from Liverpool on the RMS Celtic, traveling second-class, and arrived at Ellis Island on November 14th, 1908, after an eight-day voyage. Their final destination was further up the Hudson in Troy, then a thriving industrial city of steel and textile mills, where John had settled with American-born cousins. Emily lived with a female cousin and worked as a stitcher in one of Troy's famous collar shops, and in 1919, she married a first-generation American, the son of a German father and Irish mother, newly returned from serving in World War I. She would become the mother of eight children, five of whom would outlive her, and one of whom would be my grandfather.
Emily’s father never made it to the New World, but twelve years later, in 1920, her now widowed mother Margaret emigrated to join her children, her passage across the Atlantic paid by her eldest son. Possibly the onset of World War I in the same year her husband died prevented her traveling sooner.
(An interesting footnote that I only uncovered in recent years is that Emily's grandmother Maria died in the infirmary of the South Dublin workhouse in 1913—though likely not because of poverty, since the record of her death lists her home address as with her son-in-law's family. The likely reason was that Irish hospitals of this period would not take patients suffering from chronic illnesses, such as tuberculosis, and so those who could not afford other treatment were sent to a workhouse infirmary. Since chronic nephritis (a kidney disease) was listed as Maria's cause of death, this explanation makes sense. Just three years later, the South Dublin workhouse was one of the buildings occupied by Irish rebels during the Easter Rising of 1916.)
I never knew my great-grandmother. I’ve only seen a few snapshots of her as a stout, white-haired elderly woman, and heard relatives speak of her who knew her in later years. But in a way, I think it almost makes it easier for me to picture her as that little Irish girl of more than a hundred years ago; to imagine the emotions and the untold stories of her journey. Five feet two, brown hair, blue eyes, able to read and write, ten dollars in her pocket…the passenger records fill in some of the details. I wonder what kind of a girl she was. What did she feel about leaving her homeland—was the thought of America exciting or intimidating to her? Was her younger brother (three inches taller) a companion she could lean on, or was she the leader of the two? What was the ocean voyage like for her? And how did she feel when she had her first glimpse of New York City from the deck of the Celtic?
Years of digging among genealogy records have filled in some more pieces to the story of their decision to emigrate. I found that eldest brother John had already tried his luck working abroad in England, and that one of their American cousins had visited Ireland shortly before John set out to join that same cousin's family in Troy—probably at his encouragement. But the more personal aspects of the story still can only be conjectured. What kind of family discussions were held, what letters exchanged across the sea…what made their parents decide to send Emily and Joseph on alone? Those stories I may never know…stories that will have to live only in my imagination, stirred and prompted, perhaps, by the accounts of thousands of other families who lived the same story of crossing the ocean to a new life. But still it brings my knowledge of history closer and makes it more real, more lifelike, to know that someone connected with me walked the streets, saw the sights, and lived their life in an era that I research and read about and write about today…because it’s my history, too.