"The city where a century ago he came unwanted, he has made his own..."

If any city in the United States could be described as a place with strong Irish heritage today, it would be Boston. But that wasn't always the case. The city provided perhaps the most unpleasant welcome of any American city to the poverty-stricken Irish of the 19th-century. Yet today Boston is known equally for its Irish heritage as for its Puritan and Patriot origins.

After at least a century of discrimination and sometimes actual physical endangerment, the Irish finally found a place of acceptance in the city, and today it would hardly seem imaginable to have Boston without the Irish.

Of all the immigrant groups who made their home in Boston during the 19th-century, the Irish held the most strongly to their identity and culture. This was probably as much because of their mistreatment by other residents of the city as because of their strong traditional ways and beliefs.

As Oscar Handlin explains in his classic 1941 book, Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation:

"Every phase of the experience in America [of the Irish who settled in Boston] heightened the disparity between their heritage and that of their neighbors. The physical barriers segregating them from the dominant cultural currents of the day disappeared in the New World; but the spiritual ones crossed the Atlantic in the hold of every immigrant ship. Reaffirmed and strengthened by the difficulties of the new environment, these restraints ruled Irish thoughts as vigorously in Boston as in Cork."

The Irish in Boston were different from other Boston residents. In a predominantly Protestant city, they were Catholic. In a world of intellectuals, well-to-do citizens and a thriving middle-class, they were dirt poor. Even as compared to other immigrant groups in the city (of which they were the largest) the Irish were at the bottom of the ladder economically.

As Kerby Miller writes in his Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America,

"Because of their alien religion and peasant habits, all seemingly repugnant to native institutions and bourgeois ideals, Irish Catholics provided easily identifiable targets for middle-class reformers and beleaguered Protestant workers who joined ranks in a second Great Awakening to purge the United States of everything sinful and foreign."

Miller goes on,

"The sacking of the Charlestown (Boston) convent in 1834 and the great Kensington riots of 1844 - both incidents ranging native and Irish Protestants
against Irish 'papists' - were only the most blatant examples of the religious and ethnic animosities permeating Jacksonian America."

Boston was not a safe place for the Irish in the early 19th-century and conditions did not improve significantly until many years later.

In her book Separatism and Subculture: Boston Catholicism, 1900-1920 Paula Kane quotes Katherine Conway, a new resident who had just moved to Boston in 1880. Katherine observed,

"To a young journalist coming to the capital of New England from Western New York, it was like coming to another world... The whole aspect and outlook were radically different. There was a line of cleavage in Boston that she had not encountered before in the few cities in which she had dwelt. It was a frankly racial and religious line - a little more religious than racial."

Back in 1847, Boston had sent aid to the Irish during their time of need. According to Jim Vrabel's When in Boston: A Time Line & Almanac, on February 18, 1847 an Irish Famine Relief Committee was organized at Faneuil Hall. The committee, which included prominent Catholics and Protestants, responded to Bishop John Fitzpatrick's plea to aid the Irish in "famine and despair". They eventually sent four provision-loaded ships to Ireland.

Sending aid across the ocean was one thing. Receiving the impoverished Irish as immigrants into their own city was another thing altogether for Bostonians. The mid-19th century saw the swelling of the city with waves of immigrants, most of them Irish. What was a strongly Protestant city with a proud connection to their English roots, became the new home of thousands of Irish Catholics looking for escape from famine and mistreatment by English overlords.

As Miller describes in Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America,

"Unskilled workers and servants, especially, encountered the ubiquitous 'No Irish Need Apply' notices when they searched for jobs in Boston, New York, and other major cities... Even well-educated, middle-class Irish Catholics experienced religious barriers to success and respect: 'Although in this country all religions enjoy perfect equality before the law, in society it is far otherwise,' lamented the Young Ireland exile John Blake Dillon."

By 1880, according to When in Boston: A Time Line & Almanac, the city was the fifth largest in the United States and its population had grown to 362,839. This number included 114,796 foreign-born Boston residents, 64,793 from Ireland. The Irish were clearly in Boston to stay.

The year 1885 saw Boston's first Irish mayor: Hugh O'Brien.

Just a little over two decades later, in 1907, the city received a new Catholic archbishop, William Henry O'Connell. He would be elevated to Cardinal (Boston's first) in 1911. According to Paula Kane's book he established a "triumphalist, separatist Catholic subculture...sacred but equal, separate but integrated."

The city's Irish Catholics had received a spokesman, pleading on their behalf before God as well as the residents of Boston.

In 1908 the Boston archdiocese celebrated its centennial. What had begun as two priests and 2,000 parishioners had grown to 1,500 priests and over 1.5 million people. Archbishop O'Connell delivered the centenary sermon at Holy Cross Cathedral declaring:

"The Puritan has passed, the Catholic remains. The city where a century ago, he came unwanted, he has made his own...It is time for Catholic manhood to stand erect, square its shoulders, look the world in the eye and say, 'I am a Roman Catholic citizen; what about it?"

This story has a happy ending for the Irish. Modern Boston wouldn't seem itself without the Boston Irish Heritage Trail, numerous St. Patrick's Day celebrations, the Boston Celtics, even a library honoring a hometown Irish Catholic boy who became President of the United States.

Generations later, peoples who struggled to coexist live side by side and intermarry happily. And descendants of those struggling Irish, like myself, are amazed at what a difference one-hundred years can make.

Boston image thanks to National Geographic Urban Drives Photo Gallery.

Image of Mayor Hugh of O'Brien by John Angel James Wilcox can be found on the website of the Boston Public Library's Digital Image Gallery.

Image of William Cardinal O'Connell courtesy of American Catholic University of America.

Touching letters from a "strong & feisty" old Irishman to his son

A few decades ago an American named Peter Jones made the discovery of a family treasure in the attic of his parents' home. Tied together in a box was a series of letters sent from the 1860's to 1890's by Jones' great-grandfather, John Coyne of Kilkelly, Ireland, to his son John. John had immigrated to America and the letters from his loving father tell the story of his concern for his son and his family and of the lives of the family that remained behind in Ireland.

Jones, overcome with emotion at this personal glimpse into his great-grandfather's life in Ireland, took the words from the letters and turned them into a song. The result is Kilkelly, a haunting melody that cannot help but tug at the heart of anyone who wonders about their own immigrant ancestor's impact on family at home.

Kilkelly
by Peter Jones
©1983 Green Linnet Music

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 60, my dear and loving son John
Your good friend the schoolmaster Pat McNamara's
so good as to write these words down.
Your brothers have all gone to find work in England,
the house is so empty and sad
The crop of potatoes is sorely infected,
a third to a half of them bad.
And your sister Brigid and Patrick O'Donnell
are going to be married in June.
Your mother says not to work on the railroad
and be sure to come on home soon.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 70, dear and loving son John
Hello to your Mrs. and to your four children,
may they grow healthy and strong.
Michael has got in a wee bit of trouble,
I guess that he never will learn.
Because of the dampness there's no turf to speak of
and now we have nothing to burn.
And Brigid is happy, you named a child for her
and now she's got six of her own.
You say you found work, but you don't say what kind
or when you will be coming home.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 80, dear Michael and John, my sons
I'm sorry to give you the very sad news
that your dear old mother has gone.
We buried her down at the church in Kilkelly,
your brothers and Brigid were there.
You don't have to worry, she died very quickly,
remember her in your prayers.
And it's so good to hear that Michael's returning,
with money he's sure to buy land
For the crop has been poor and the people are selling
at any price that they can.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 90, my dear and loving son John
I guess that I must be close on to eighty,
it's thirty years since you're gone.
Because of all of the money you send me,
I'm still living out on my own.
Michael has built himself a fine house
and Brigid's daughters have grown.
Thank you for sending your family picture,
they're lovely young women and men.
You say that you might even come for a visit,
what joy to see you again.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 92, my dear brother John
I'm sorry that I didn't write sooner to tell you
that father passed on.
He was living with Brigid, she says he was cheerful
and healthy right down to the end.
Ah, you should have seen him play with the grandchildren
of Pat McNamara, your friend.
And we buried him alongside of mother,
down at the Kilkelly churchyard.
He was a strong and a feisty old man,
considering his life was so hard.
And it's funny the way he kept talking about you,
he called for you in the end.
Oh, why don't you think about coming to visit,
we'd all love to see you again.

I was happy to read that Peter Jones, the writer of the song and the grandson of the immigrant son that never returned, was able to make a visit to Kilkelly a few years ago. I understand that he was greeted warmly by the village that his grandfather had left almost a century and a half before.

You can read more about the background of the song and the story of Pat MacNamara, the Irish schoolmaster who handwrote the letters for John Coyne, at this Irish Identity webpage. The song was recorded by Moloney, O'Connell & Keane on their album "Kilkelly" in 1988, not to mention a variety of other recording artists' versions. Look for various arrangements of Kilkelly on iTunes.

Can you make a passing grade in Irish geography?

I thought I knew a little bit of Irish geography until I came across this little map quiz of Irish counties on Professor Thomas J. Archdeacon's website for his History 200 course on The Great Irish Famine at the University of Wisconsin.

It looks like I've got some studying to do...

Give it a try yourself and then click here for the answer key. No cheating!

A round-up of Tierney family history resources

If you are a Tierney and you have a link to the family that I've written about here at A Light That Shines Again, I would love to hear from you!

Even if you haven't found such a connection, if you have Tierney (Ó Tighearnaigh) ancestry, chances are we are related in some way - although it might a very-very-distant-cousin kind of relationship (there were three main septs of the name in ancient Ireland, according to Irish Names and Surnames by Patrick Woulfe).

If you have a Tierney connection, or are interested in all things Tierney, you may find the following resources helpful.

Want to get a nice overview of the history of the Tierney surname, learn more about the family's coat of arms, learn about distinguished Tierney family members and more? Check out the official website of the Tierney Clans Society. Their stated goal is to "safeguard the heritage of Tierney descendants worldwide through research and education". Now that's a goal that I would like to support! The society is open to all that can show that they have Tierney ancestry. The good information on the website, however, is available to all visitors - Tierney descendant and member of the society or just plain interested websurfer.

While you are visiting the Tierney Clans Society website, you may want to stop by the Tierney Clans Society Y-DNA project info webpage. As I discussed in my posts Mr. Tierney, I presume? and Where Science Meets Family History, DNA testing is the newest source for information about family history. Not only is it new, but it is unique in the information that it can provide for those researching their heritage and the history of a particular surname or family line. The link to the actual project for the Tierney surname is located at the Family Tree DNA Tierney Clans Society Y-DNA project webpage. If you'd like more information about genetic genealogy in general, including the most up to date news about the subject, check out Blaine Bettinger's informative blog The Genetic Genealogist.

Wanting to get in touch with other Tierney family descendants and researchers? The following message boards might be a good place to start:

• Rootsweb's Tierney surname and family mailing list
• Genealogy.com's Tierney Family Genealogy Forum
• Ancestry.com's Tierney message board

The Tierney Clans Society also holds regular clan rallies on both sides of the Atlantic that would be a great place to meet distant cousins.

Want to do some Tierney family research online?

Here are a few sites that you might find helpful:

• The Irish Times' Tierney surname search includes a breakdown of Tierney households as listed in Griffith's Valuation done during the years 1848-64; it also provides a link to the births distribution of Tierneys in Ireland during 1890 and a link to a list of family history publications focusing on the Tierney surname (although at this time only one is listed, it may be the one you are looking for!)


• Linkpendium's Tierney Family: Surname Genealogy, Family History, Family Tree, Family Crest offers a nice assortment of links to all-types-of-things-Tierney


• FamilyHistory.com's Tierney webpage is another good place to visit, as is...


• Cousin Connect's Tierney Genealogy queries webpage

If you are a Tierney and have some other good suggestions for sources of all things Tierney, please contact me and let me know.

In the meantime, I hope that this post has given you inspiration and practical suggestions on how to begin to search for your Tierney family tree and also to help the Tierney Clans Society to complete their goal: to safeguard the heritage of the Tierney family.

I'm doing my part. How about you?

A remembrance: the Tierney family of Quincy, 1908

One-hundred years is a long time. In the case of the Tierney and McCue families and their descendants, one-hundred years had erased all memories of the lives and in many cases even the names of those who had lived just a few generations earlier. That is, until I started looking through U.S. Census records to learn more about my great-grandmother and her family. Basically all I knew was that they were Irish and they lived in Massachusetts.

I had a few names to begin my search, but no stories, no pictures - nothing to tell me about the lives of these family members who had passed only a century (or less) before me. In the process of adding a little more here and there to the puzzle of my family's history, I began to make amazing discoveries. Missing pieces began to fill out the picture of a family, a life in America, and a survival of what was one of the most devastating times in the history of Ireland: the Great Famine that began in 1845 and the subsequent exile of the suffering Irish.

With the help of the U.S. Census, city directories, obituaries and other records, I began to unravel the forgotten story of the Tierney and McCue families of Boston and Quincy, Massachusetts.

Here, thanks to those records, is a remembrance of my ancestors who were living their lives one-hundred years ago in 1908.

The patriarch of the family, Patrick Tierney, had passed away at the age of 59 only eight years before (in 1900). By the year 1908, fifty-one years had passed since Patrick had emigrated from Ireland as a 17-year-old young man. In 1908 the Boston subway, the first of its kind in the nation, had been running for a decade. The nation saw its fifth World Series that year, having ushered in the tradition with the first ever series in Boston in 1903.

The year 1908 found Patrick's widowed wife Catherine (Kennedy) Tierney acting as head of the household. She was 61 years old and the mother of at least seven children who ranged in age from 31 to 17. (There may have been eight children, according to the 1900 & 1910 U.S. Censuses.) Around the year 1895 the family had moved from Boston's North End to the town of Quincy. 1908 found them spending their last year residing at 312 Quincy Avenue, Quincy, Massachusetts before moving to a home on Gay Street. The family had lived in this home at least since 1903, as listings in the Quincy City directories show.


The children of Patrick & Catherine (Kennedy) Tierney were as follows in 1908:

Catherine J. Tierney (age 31) - the eldest child that I have found, she was the namesake of her mother. Catherine was born at the address Rear 448 Hanover in Boston's North End on April 22, 1877. Her occupation is unknown but in 1908 and for the rest of her years she lived with her mother and siblings.

Ann (Annie) P. Tierney (later Haley) (age 29) - the couple's second child, Annie, was born at Rear 442 Hanover Street in Boston's North End on April 22, 1879. (Interestingly she and her older sister share the same birthday.) Annie was a nurse. In 1910 she was single and living with her mother and siblings so I assume that she shared their home at 312 Quincy Avenue in the year 1908.

Elizabeth (Betty) Tierney (age 27) - Betty was born at 78 Cross in Boston on January 11, 1881. An accomplished seamstress who never married, Betty was very close to her younger sister Margaret, with whom she shared a home from the 1920's until her death over forty years later. Betty more than likely helped Margaret raise her five children after the untimely death of her husband. In 1908 Betty was living at home with her mother and siblings. She was probably already working as a seamstress in a dress shop as she was in 1910. Betty was a member of the Blessed Virgin Mary Sodality of St. John's Parish, the Catholic church down the street from her home.

John P. Tierney (age 24) - probably the first son of Patrick & Catherine Tierney, John's birth at Chelsea on February 26, 1884 seems to have foreshadowed his life. He appears to have been born away from home and, interestingly enough, he went on to move to many different places during his lifetime. His birth also occurred in the very year that the Fore River Shipyard began business in Quincy, Massachusetts. Fore River was where John began his long career in the shipbuilding industry. An employee of the shipbuilding industry for many years, John had probably worked at various odd jobs and was already a shipfitter at the Fore River shipyards by the age of 24 in 1908. (Although I also found him working as a laborer in a pancake factory at the age of 16 in 1900). During his time as a young man in Quincy, probably including 1908, John was a member of St. John's Catholic Church Knights of Columbus and Holy Name Society.

Margaret Helen Tierney (later McCue) (age 22) - a lifelong companion to her older sister Betty, Margaret was born into the Tierney family at 468 Commercial in Boston's North End on August 23, 1886. In 1908 she was living with her mother and siblings and probably already working as a bookkeeper, soon to be moved up to chief bookkeeper at the Gallagher Express Company in Quincy Center. Margaret was, along with her sister Betty, a member of the Blessed Virgin Mary Sodality of St. John's parish.

Joseph G. Tierney (age 20) - probably the second son in the family, Joseph was born at 468 Commercial in Boston's North End on December 12, 1888. In 1910 he was an apprentice at the Fore River shipyard, so I assume that he was doing the same type of work as an 18-year-old in 1908 and following in the footsteps of his older brother John.

Leo E. Tierney (age 17) - Leo, the youngest child in the family, was born at 66 Mercer in Boston's North End on September 28, 1891. In 1908 he was probably already working as a helper at Fore River where his brothers were employed. Leo would go on to complete 45 years of service in the shipbuilding industry, spending much of this time at Boston Naval Shipyard in Charleston, Massachusetts.

As you can see by reading the summaries of each of the Tierney family members in 1908, the family had come a long way since their father Patrick's arrival from Ireland and his start as a poor laborer in Boston's North End. By 1908 the family was clearly a "shipbuilding family", one of many who received their income from the Fore River shipyards in Quincy. (If you are interested, a list of the vessels created at the shipyard in the year 1908 can be found at this webpage.)

In the end, John Tierney was the only one of his siblings to leave the Boston area, sharing his skills as a steel hull builder and moldloftsman with various shipyards throughout the nation before later going on to own and operate the Blackstone Hotel in California. John's brothers Joseph and Leo continued to work in the shipbuilding industry in Massachusetts while his sisters Annie, Betty and Margaret continued their work as nurse, seamstress and bookkeeper.

If he had lived a few more years, their father Patrick would have been able to see them each begin their respective careers. I'm sure that he would have been very proud.

The poverty-stricken Irish: Why did they pick Boston?

Boston, Massachusetts was not the destination of choice for most immigrants arriving in America in the 19th-century.

According to Oscar Handlin's Boston's Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation:

"Certainly, prospective settlers who could be at all selective would pass Boston by in favor of its younger and relatively more flourishing sisters. For in this community there was no room for strangers; its atmosphere of cultural homogeneity, familiar and comforting to self-contained Bostonians, seemed
rigidly forbidding to aliens. And above all, space was lacking. Boston offered few attractions in either agriculture or industry. Its commercial ranks were not broad enough to absorb the sons of its own merchant class, and the fields of retail trading and handicraft artisanry were limited. The constricted social and economic life of the city and the far greater opportunities elsewhere, combined to sweep the currents of migration in other directions."

All "currents of migration" that is, except one: the poorest of the poor, the Catholic Irish.

As I mentioned in my earlier post Boston was a place where, according to Thomas O'Connor's The Boston Irish: A Political History, "an Irish Catholic, under any circumstance, should never, ever, [have] set foot."

But no other major immigrating group in the history of Boston, or even possibly the nation, arrived with such urgency, desperation and poverty as the Irish exiles forced from their homes during the time of the Great Famine.

In the words of the Cork Examiner, March 10, 1847:

"The emigrants of this year are not like those of former ones; they are now actually running away from fever and disease and hunger, with money scarcely sufficient to pay passage for and find food for the voyage."

As Oscar Handlin's book describes, "At the port of embarkation emigrant funds were inevitably depleted by weary weeks of waiting for passage, and any residue was used up during the long crossing. In New York and Boston the penniless newcomer arrived with no alternative but to stay where he was."

That is most likely the way in which my 17-year-old great-great-grandfather Patrick Tierney made his arrival in Boston in 1857. The son of Michael & Mary (O'Neill) Tierney of County Tipperary, Patrick had been born just a few days shy of the feast of St. Patrick in the year 1841. He was born just four short years before the most devastating famine in the history of Ireland. In 1857, after surviving what must have been an incredibly traumatic childhood, he stood on the threshold of a new hope for his future as a penniless new American immigrant.

Patrick lived most of the rest of his life in Boston's North End doing odd jobs - laborer, grocer, trader, peddler. He married and he and his wife Catherine Kennedy Tierney raised at least seven children in the North End before their move to Quincy just a few short years before Patrick's death in 1900.

It was a hard life where the struggle for daily bread was probably never far from this father's mind. Yet his move to Boston had saved Patrick from what might have been certain death had he remained in his homeland wracked by severe overlords and horrible famine.

If Patrick Tierney felt as his wife Catherine did, he was happy to have chosen the life of a poor Irish laborer in Boston's impoverished North End as opposed to remaining in the depravity of the land of his birth.

Patrick surely could relate to the feeling of the poet who penned these words to The Emigrant's Farewell published in the Boston Pilot on August 16, 1862:

Farewell to thee, Erin mavourneen,
Thy valleys I'll tread never more;
This heart that now bleeds for thy sorrows,
Will waste on a far distant shore.
Thy green sods lie cold on my parents,
A cross marks the place of their rest, -
The wind that moans sadly above them,
Will waft their poor child to the West.

For more information about the Irish Immigration postage stamp pictured above see this U.S. Postal Service webpage.

Boston's Big Dig: another one for the history books

After decades of work and colossal amounts of money poured into the project, Boston's Big Dig, the most expensive and complicated highway project ever undertaken in the United States, has been completed.

The project, which included the major transformation of Boston's eyesore Central Artery (circa 1950's) into the greenery of parkland, is one of a long line of changes that Boston has seen over the centuries.

I've enjoyed reading Mapping Boston, an MIT Press publication edited by Alex Krieger and David Cobb. It is a fascinating history of the city and its ever-changing features. Including maps, paintings, prints, photographs and accompanying essays on the history of the city of Boston, it is an amazing look at how far Beantown has come.

The book covers the various visionary plans for the city throughout the years: some carried out, some not.

Here's an excerpt from the section entitled Rings for the Spokes of the Hub on page 216:

Some of the most breathtaking plans for improvement came from visionary landscape architects who dreamed of rings around Boston, connecting the radial arteries and threading open spaces into the dense city. First, in the mid-1870's, the Boston park commissioners selected Frederick Law Olmstead to create what became Boston's emerald necklace - a sweeping arc of parks and parkways intended to encircle the city from the Public Garden to the mouth of the Muddy River at the other end of the Back Bay, then through Jamaica Plain and Dorchester to the ocean.

In the 1880's, as the emerald necklace was taking shape, Olmstead's ablest disciple, Charles Eliot, proposed a larger series of "public reservations" encompassing the entire metropolitan area. By the turn of the century, the 15,000-acre park system included 30 miles of river frontage, 10 miles of ocean shoreline, and 22 miles of right-of-way for parkways.

Jump ahead to 1908: just a few years after that turn of the century and one-hundred years before today's completion of the Big Dig. Below is a map from the book of the city of Boston and vicinity published in that year by George Hiram Walker.

The city of Boston has indeed come a long way.

Longtime residents know that change is nothing new. Even as they rejoice in the completion of the Big Dig, the question is at the forefront of many minds: What will be the next improvement project for the city on the Charles River?

You wouldn't miss a rainbow, would you?

Don't forget to take time to see the 2nd Carnival of Irish Heritage & Culture entitled They say there's a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow...

Posted over at Small-leaved Shamrock, this carnival offers links to a colorful collection of posts on Irish research - everything from geography to genetics to loads of good books and online resources specific to genealogy in Ireland.

Check out the carnival to get a head start on your Irish family history projects in the new year. You may find some good starting points for your trip back to your roots in the Emerald Isle.