Celebrate St. Patrick's Day with Small-leaved Shamrock!

Just two weeks left to get ready for the St. Patrick's Day 2008 edition of the Carnival of Irish Heritage & Culture over at Small-leaved Shamrock.

Now your's chance to join us, whether you have Irish heritage or not. An appreciation of any and all things Irish is the only prerequisite for entry. Here are the details:

March is Irish heritage month in many places, thanks to the feast day of St. Patrick, beloved saint of Ireland. Our topic for this month will be anything and everything about Irish heritage, genealogy and culture.

Posts about St. Patrick will be appreciated, but posts related to any meaningful aspect of Ireland's heritage are welcomed. To borrow an idea from Bill West's genealogy parade, we'll have our very own virtual St. Patrick's Day parade!

The deadline is March 14, 2008. Submit your entry here. Then come join us for the celebration on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 2008.

On the feast of St. Patrick, everyone likes to be Irish, at least for one day. Hope to see you wearing your green!

Image of the shamrocks courtesy of Karen's Whimsy.

Good Samaritans across the Atlantic: February 1847

It was one-hundred and sixty-one years ago that America rallied to send aid to a suffering Ireland. Word had come across the Atlantic of the devastating famine that had hit Ireland, and Americans responded with kindness and generosity.

According to Mass Moments and its sources (Thomas O'Connor's books The Boston Irish: A Political History and Fitzpatrick's Boston, 1846-1866: John Bernard Fitzpatrick, 3rd Bishop of Boston) the city of Boston was among the first to respond to the crisis. The Irish Catholic community eventually sent $150,000 to its brothers and sisters in Ireland. On February 7, 1847, the city's new Bishop John Bernard Fitzpatrick had made the needy Irish the focus of his first pastoral letter, stating:

"A voice comes to us from across the ocean, the loud cry of her anguish has gone through the world. . . . Apathy and indifference, on an occasion like this, are inseparable from crime!"

On February 18, 1847 leading citizens of Boston (both Catholic and Protestant) met in Fanueil Hall to sort out plans for aid to the Irish. The committee eventually sent 800 tons of food and clothing to Ireland by way of the United States Navy's U.S.S. Jamestown.

Little did those that aided the Irish in the year 1847 know of the severity of the famine or its eventual length over a period of years. They could not have known the almost complete devastation of the Irish people that would be the result of the potato blight. And they could not have foreseen the role that their own city would play in the coming years as the newfound home for many of the suffering Irish that they had sought to aid.

Irish public records online

A little research goes a long way...

I was doing some research on my Hungarian side of the family when I came across a great resource for genealogy and history in all European countries: the European public record portal. Not only does it have some nice resources for my Hungarian research, but it has even more links to Irish records and other resources online (some I'd seen and some I had not). Here are a few that I'll be visiting in the near future:

Irish Baptism & Marriage Record search
Ireland's Golden Pages directory
National Archives of Ireland
National Library of Ireland

There are also some links to various counties' census records. Check out the entire list at the European public record portal.

On the finer points of Irish lacemaking

No, I'm not actually going to explain to you how to do fine lacework. It would be hard for me to find the time and the patience to gain proficiency at that amazing craft.

However, I would like to share some of the finer points of Irish lacemaking with the regard to Irish history: namely the fact that it supported thousands of families during the decades after the Great Famine, providing a way for women to make money to help feed their families.

I enjoyed reading the Irish Family History blog's post about the topic entitled Irish Crochet Lace and Muings Lace School and following their link to the website for the 2005 ‘Irish Crochet Lace - 150 Years of a Tradition’ at Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles in California. Thanks to the Irish Family History blog, I enjoyed viewing the slide show and reading the exhibit brochure, which gives a nice history of Irish lacemaking in Ireland along with details about the craft itself.

Speaking of Irish lace, ever heard the term "lace-curtain Irish"?

This term was not so much an Irish term as an Irish-American term. It was often used to refer to the more "settled" Irish immigrants - those that were no longer "just off the boat", so to speak.

Kate Marin's comment on the Wicked Good Guide to Boston English site sums up the term "lace-curtain Irish" very nicely:

Lace was an industry that poor women in Ireland were able to pursue whilst doing everything else required to run homes on no resources. However, like the produce and livestock raised during the Irish Famine, lace wasn't made for home use. It was only for export and the tourist trade. Thus, "lace curtain Irish" were doing well for themselves, & might well be lording it over those a rung or two lower on the immigrant ladder.

The home page for the exhibit at the Lacis Museum has a beautiful poem that honors those women who used every bit of their spare time to help support their families through the beautiful craft of Irish lacemaking:

A tribute to the human spirit.
Beauty born of necessity.
Conceived from lowly beginnings,
With a dream of higher aspirations,
It grew out of patience, perseverance and ingenuity,
To stand in majesty,
To feed a nation.

Muings Lace School in County Mayo is currently slated to become a heritage center and museum. For more information on the project please visit Fís na Muingi-Iorras's website: Save Muings Lace School.

Images of the Irish lace and instruction books from Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles, Berkeley, CA.

In search of Patrick

Well, I'm stumped. I've made phone calls to the St. Francis Xavier Catholic cemetery in Weymouth where Patrick Tierney would more than likely have been buried back in 1900, but he did not appear to be listed in their records. The cemetery, which was founded in 1850, was certainly open for business during Patrick's day. But where is Patrick, who I thought to have been laid to rest there in 1900?

It is now 107 years ago since Patrick Tierney passed away. He and his family had moved to Quincy from the North End just a few years before, and he must have been suffering from illness for quite some time. His obituary on page three of the Quincy Patriot Ledger of August 7, 1900 indicates that before his passing he had suffered "an illness of several years". According to the listing of his death on the civil registry, Patrick died of mitral stenosis. Just 59 years old but worn out from a hard life of stress and labor, he left his family to pass to the next life.

Patrick's death record in the civil registry lists him buried in Weymouth, but I cannot seem to find him there. Family members who died after him, beginning in the 1920's, are buried in New Calvary Cemetery in Mattapan, Boston, Suffolk County. Patrick is not among them. But where is he?

I've had other ancestors trouble me with hard to find information and missing records, but many of Patrick's records were easy enough to find. I just can't find where he is buried.

Must I search through all the cemeteries (where an Catholic Irishman might have been buried) in Norfolk, Suffolk and Middlesex counties in order to find him?

Patrick, oh Patrick, will you ever turn up?

What the "matchmaker" wrought

I've been enjoying the Irish Family History blog's Valentine focus this week. I was interested to learn that I'd done four unlucky things the day of my own wedding (I'm so glad I had two lucky ones on the list!). I've also enjoyed the posts on matchmaking and Irish weddings.

In honor of St. Valentine's Day today I thought I would remember some of the married couples in the Tierney/McCue family tree whose wedding dates I know (and some I don't).

Here's to all the loving couples in this extended family (several generations back). Without them there would be no family tree!

Michael & Mary (O'Neill) Tierney

Ralph & Bridget Kennedy

Frank & Catherine (Rogers) McCue

Patrick & Catherine (Kennedy) Tierney
Married August 16, 1874 at St. Stephen Catholic Church, Hanover Street, Boston, MA

George William & Margaret Helen (Tierney) McCue
Married October 11, 1911 at St. John Baptist Catholic Parochial Residence, Quincy, MA

John P. & Adeline (Sullivan) Tierney
Married in Oakland, California

Leo & Margaret (Wuerth) Tierney

Valentine image thanks to raggyann2 and eBay Forums.

Wanted: brother, sister, daughter, son

Boston College's Irish Studies Program has given us an online window into the world of Irish immigrants to America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its website entitled "Information Wanted: A Database of Advertisements for Irish Immigrants Published in the Boston Pilot" is an index of the 31,711 ads placed for missing family members and friends during the years 1831 to 1921.

As the website explains, "The advertisements contain the ordinary but revealing details about the missing person’s life: the county and parish of their birth, when they left Ireland, the believed port of arrival in North America, their occupation, and a range of other personal information. Some records may have as many as 50 different data fields, while others may offer only a few details. The people who placed ads were often anxious family members in Ireland, or the wives, siblings, or parents of men who followed construction jobs on railroads or canals."

The Information Wanted column pictured above (published in the Boston Pilot in 1858) reads as follows:

"Advertisements under this head are inserted three times one dollar. The immense circulation of the Pilot in every city, town, and hamlet on the American Continent, renders it the best medium through which to make inquiries about lost friends. More than three-fourths of those advertised for are found. Persons wishing their friends advertised, can send us a dollar inclosed in a letter, with the advertisement written as legibly as possible, in order that no mistakes are made by the printer."

It is one thing to study the era that saw the heavy flow of Irish immigration to America. It is another thing altogether to look one by one at the names of those immigrants sadly yet hopefully seeking their missing loved ones.