Good neighhors: The Tierney family and St. John the Baptist Parish, Quincy, Mass.

`

St. John the Baptist Church on a beautiful day in 2008
(Photo thanks to "Slim" at Quincy Daily Photo)

It was in 1909 that my great-great-grandmother Catherine Tierney and her family moved to Gay Street from another home in Quincy (pronounced Quin-zee), Massachusetts. They resided at 52 Gay Street for several years, then moved to 32 Gay Street in 1912: just one house down and across the street from the rectory of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church. The church and the Tierney family would be good neighbors for many decades.

The location of St. John the Baptist Church and rectory in relation
to the Tierney family residences at 52 and 32 Gay Street, Quincy
(Click to enlarge)

The family had moved to Quincy from Boston's North End a few years before Catherine's husband Patrick's death in 1900. They were probably already well-acquainted with the parish around the time of this 1890s era photograph below.

St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in 1893

Over the years the Tierney family would form many connections to the church and many family milestones would be passed within its care. Catherine's daughter Margaret (my great-grandmother) married George William McCue within St. John's rectory on October 11, 1911.

This announcement appeared in the Quincy Patriot Ledger
after my great-grandparents' wedding in the parochial residence of
St. John the Baptist Catholic Church on October 11, 1911

Catherine Tierney was able to purchase her home at 32 Gay Street in 1923. The matriarch of the family known as "Gran" to her family passed away in 1934.

The obituaries of two of her daughters, my great-grandmother Margaret (Tierney) McCue and her sister Elizabeth "Betty" Tierney, tell of their involvement within St. John's Blessed Virgin Mary Ladies' Sodality. A cousin who visited them often as a child (and enjoyed milk and cookies at their home while his father visited with his older sisters) remembers that "both ladies were very active in all facets of the church activities".  Each of their requiem funeral Masses, held in the early 1960s, had at least three priests in attendance. This may be a testament to their long involvement with the church.

~

St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, its rectory and also the Tierney home at 32 Gay Street each have historical and architectural significance.

St. John the Baptist, built in 1853 to serve the many Catholic families who had arrived in the area to work in the granite quarries, was the second Catholic church in Quincy. The church was expanded in 1873.

The church backs up to the rectory,
but is located at 44 School Street

Its rectory is located just behind the church on Gay Street. According to the Quincy, Massachusetts Historical and Architectural Survey: "This large house has been the rectory for St. John's Church since at least 1876 and may have been originally built for that purpose." The survey continues:

"When this residence was built in the 1860s it was considered very modern for it imitated the latest French building fashions. It was concomitant with the Italianate and the Gothic Revival Styles which were part of the Picturesque movement. The distinctive roof (which could be convex, concave or straight as in this house) was named for a 17th century French architect, Francois Mansart. In the 1850s, the style was revived in France by Napoleon III, hence the term 'Second Empire' or 'mansardic' for modest structures." 

The porch and a series of additional rooms were added to the rectory during the 1920s. Unfortunately, during the siding of the building with aluminum most of the original exterior features of architectural significance were removed.

The priests' residence at 21 Gay Street

Unlike the priests' residence, the long-term residence of Catherine Tierney and her children at 32 Gay Street has kept its architectural integrity. According to the Quincy survey:

"This residence is one of the fine Greek Revival cottages in Quincy which has retained most of its architectural integrity. Built in the 1850s as gable-end-to-street one and one half story cottage with the typical cornice board around the house and under the eaves and a recessed side entrance, it had added to it during the Italianate period two one-story angular, bracketed bay windows. The windows have stylized pediments atop them; the entrance is framed with pilasters and on top is the same type of lintel as the windows; the door has sidelight to floor level. The house rests on a granite foundation. Unlike the other Greek Revival property listed in the South Quincy inventory list which has been resided with vinyl to its detriment, this cottage has retained its wood clapboards and its architectural integrity. It is a fine component of the Gay Street streetscape."

The Tierney family resided at 32 Gay Street from 1912
until the latter part of the 20th century

~

This article is part of the "Doors of Faith" series on our ancestors' Catholic parishes. Visit The Catholic Gene to learn how you can share photos and stories of your family's "Doors of Faith" in honor of the upcoming Year of Faith 2012-2013.

An American treasure: St. Stephen's celebrates 150 years

It's bell was cast by Paul Revere.

It is the only remaining church designed and built by the renowned Charles Bulfinch, the first native-born American architect (who also completed the creation of the U.S. capitol building).

But Charles Bulfinch and Paul Revere have nothing to do with the special anniversary celebrated this week by St. Stephen's Church, though the well-renowned neoclassical architectural treasure is a frequent stop for tourists in Boston's North End partly because of the fame of these two men.

This Sunday St. Stephen's will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its acquisition by the Catholic Church and its origin as a place of worship for Irish Catholics in Boston's North End.

My great-great-grandparents Patrick Tierney and Catherine Kennedy were among those Irish Catholics served by St. Stephen's in the first decades after its conversion to a Catholic parish. They were married at St. Stephen's by the Rev. John W. McMahon on August 16, 1874.

Patrick Tierney and Catherine Kennedy were 32 and 26
at the time of their marriage at St. Stephen's in 1874.

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, on September 23, 1862, the church made the transition from Unitarian to Catholic. A place of worship was first built on the site as early as 1714: the Middle Street or New North Meeting House, church home to Paul Revere and his father. The year 1804 saw the completion of the current building designed and built by Charles Bulfinch. It was first named the New North Congregational Church and later the Second Church, Unitarian.

This plaque is one of several mounted on the church
building that tells the history of St. Stephen's

By 1862, the North End had become home to thousands of Irish immigrants and the church building began its new identity as St. Stephen's, in honor of the first Christian martyr. Among those Irish who attended the church over the years were Boston's first American-born Irish Mayor John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald and his daughter Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, mother of President John F. Kennedy.

St. Stephen's is located at 401 Hanover Street, across Paul Revere Mall from the Old North Church, another frequent stop on the tourist trail. My great-great-grandparents and their family lived only a two-minute walk from the church, like many other Irish immigrants who populated the North End during the second half of the 19th century. The map below shows their home in 1877 at Rear 448 Hanover Street, just up the road from the church.

Patrick & Catherine Tierney and their family lived a
2-minute walk from St. Stephen's (Click to enlarge)

St. Stephen's has seen many changes over the years, including a complete 6-foot lift of the entire building (during the widening of Hanover Street), and its return to the original level designed by Bulfinch during a large restoration in 1965.

St. Stephen's Church prior to
its 1965 restoration

Though it was changed by the Diocese of Boston from a full parish into a "chapel" about fifteen years ago, Mass is still held daily at St. Stephen's. It is one of three former parishes administered by St. Leonard's Parish. It is also the headquarters of the Missionary Society of St. James the Apostle.

~

The 150th celebration of the parish's founding will be at the 11 a.m. Mass on Sunday, September 23 at St. Stephen's. All are welcome.

~

"The North End's changing ethnic and religious groups have always had a good friend in St. Stephen's Church..." - from a St. Stephen's Church plaque

This article is part of the "Doors of Faith" series on our ancestors' Catholic parishes. Visit The Catholic Gene to learn how you can share photos and stories of your family's "Doors of Faith" in honor of the upcoming Year of Faith 2012-2013.

On French Hens, a Partridge and God Himself (Advent Calendar: Christmas Music)

In the spirit of the true meaning of Christmas, I was planning to write a post about the well-loved carol The Twelve Days of Christmas. I had learned several years ago that the objects throughout the carol had hidden meanings - they represented various aspects of the Christian faith. I understood that the carol had been written for use by persecuted English and Irish Catholics during the time of England's Protestant reformation. Or so I thought...

After a little bit of research on the subject (much thanks to Douglas Anderson's Hymns & Carols of Christmas website) I have learned enough about The Twelve Days of Christmas to write a book, never mind a blog post. And, no, the background of the carol may not be exactly what I had thought. But it does have a fascinating history steeped in the joy and merriment of the Christmas season which traveled through several countries before becoming an international phenomenon.

The song probably had its origin as a French carol and was sung as a sort of "chanson de geste" by the medieval troubadours of France, according to The Folk Carol of England by Douglas Brice.

Elizabeth Poston writes in The Second Penguin Book of Christmas Carols that the earliest written version of the song appears in "Twelth Day", a 13th-century manuscript located at Trinity College, Cambridge. The Twelve Days of Christmas was first published in a children's book called Mirth & Mischief in 1780, with its first appearance in a collection of Christmas songs coming in 1868.

Just to clarify, the "twelve days of Christmas" refers to the period of celebration between Christmas day itself and Epiphany on January 6. The song was originally sung by the French on Epiphany, otherwise known as Twelth Night.

In its more recent history, The Twelve Days of Christmas song has become a favorite throughout the traditional Christmas season and now our modern extended secular Christmas season which gets rolling in late November (and perhaps even earlier) in some places.

As for the meaning behind the symbols, here is the story as best I could find it. It turns out that a Catholic priest by the name of Fr. Hal Stockert had done some research for a project years back. In the process he came across some letters from Irish Jesuit priests to the motherhouse in Rheims, France. According to Fr. Stockert's memory (he hasn't been able to relocate the letters) some of the documents had mentions of the symbolism of The Twelve Days of Christmas being used as a secret catechism for persecuted Catholics at the time. Fr. Stockert posted his findings online not "as a doctoral thesis", as he put it, but "simply as some delicious tidbit [he] thought the world would be delighted to share over a holiday season". (See more about his story at Catholic Culture or Catholic Information Network. For another interesting discussion on the topic and a list of the symbols, see this CRI/Voice webpage.)

So it turns out that the carol, not necessarily written as a tool of faith, may have actually been used that way. Whether or not this was the case, thanks to this song we now have an interesting and memorable way to remember various aspects of faith.

Here are the symbols, according to the Catholic Culture webpage:

• true love = God Himself
• partridge in a pear tree = Jesus Christ
• 2 turtle doves = Old and New Testaments
• 3 French hens = faith, hope and charity (the theological virtues)
• 4 calling birds = the four Gospels and/or the four evangelists
• 5 golden rings = the first five books of the Old Testament (Pentateuch)
• 6 geese a-laying = the six days of creation
• 7 swans a-swimming = the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and/or the seven sacraments
• 8 maids a-milking = the eight beatitudes
• 9 ladies dancing = the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit
• 10 lords a-leaping = the ten commandments
• 11 pipers piping = the eleven faithful apostles
• 12 drummers drumming = the twelve points of doctrine in the Apostle's Creed

Click here for the tune for The Twelve Days of Christmas along with lyrics in English and Irish Gaelic.

As the twelve days of Christmas draw near, I hope you'll take the time to read the story of the "Partridge's" birth written by one of the "four calling birds" in one of the "turtle doves". Make sure you obey the "ten lords a leaping", and I wish you a holiday season filled with "French hens!"

This article is part of a series written in celebration of the Advent and Christmas seasons. It will be included as part of the GeneaBloggers Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories 2009 Day 21: Christmas Music. Make a visit to Thomas MacEntee's GeneaBloggers website for some additional inspiration to get yourself in the holiday spirit!

The article originally appeared here at A light that shines again and was included in Thomas MacEntee's Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories 2007.

A blessed Good Friday

For an interesting article on the way that the Irish have traditionally kept Good Friday see Bridget Haggerty's article Good Friday Haircuts and Seaweed for Dinner on the Irish Culture and Customs website.

Wooden Penal Cross c. 1799. For more information about the crucifixes and other devotional objects that were made in Ireland during the period before the penal laws were enforced against Roman Catholics, see this Rosary Workshop webpage or Limerick's Hunt Museum website.

An Aidbhint agus Breith Chríost : An Irish Advent & Christmas

A light that shines again wishes you a Blessed Advent as you prepare for the coming celebrations of the Nativity of Christ! In Irish Gaelic those two seasons are called: An Aidbhint agus Breith Chríost.

As you prepare for Christmas this year, you might enjoy reading about some of the Irish Christmas traditions that I highlighted last year during Thomas MacEntee's Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories. In the nine articles at Small-leaved Shamrock and seven articles here at A light that shines again, I hope you'll find inspiration during your Christmas preparations in the wonderful traditions of the Irish people as they have historically celebrated this glorious season.

Happy preparations to all of you!

You might also enjoy reading Bridget Haggerty's An Advent Memory and a little lesson on Irish Gaelic for the Advent and Christmas season, both on the Irish Culture & Customs website

Image of the Celtic Advent wreath courtesy of Santa It.

Wishing you a Holy Easter!

"May God bless you at Easter,

and keep you all year through.

May God give you all the faith you need,

to make your dreams come true.

May His love and wisdom always help,

to guide you on your way.

May His light shine down upon you now,

to bless your Easter Day."

Beannachtaí Ná Cásca oraibh!

May the blessings of Easter be upon you!

A blessed Good Friday

For an interesting article on the way that the Irish have traditionally kept Good Friday see Bridget Haggerty's article Good Friday Haircuts and Seaweed for Dinner on the Irish Culture and Customs website.

Illustration of cross at Finglas from the Project Gutenberg eBook An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 by Mary Frances Cusack illustrated by Henry Doyle.

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.

"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.

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.

On French Hens, a Partridge and God Himself

In the spirit of the true meaning of Christmas, I was planning to write a post about the well-loved carol The Twelve Days of Christmas. I had learned several years ago that the objects throughout the carol had hidden meanings - they represented various aspects of the Christian faith. I understood that the carol had been written for use by persecuted English and Irish Catholics during the time of England's Protestant reformation. Or so I thought...

After a little bit of research on the subject (much thanks to Douglas Anderson's Hymns & Carols of Christmas website) I have learned enough about The Twelve Days of Christmas to write a book, never mind a blog post. And, no, the background of the carol may not be exactly what I had thought. But it does have a fascinating history steeped in the joy and merriment of the Christmas season which traveled through several countries before becoming an international phenomenon.

The song probably had its origin as a French carol and was sung as a sort of "chanson de geste" by the medieval troubadours of France, according to The Folk Carol of England by Douglas Brice.

Elizabeth Poston writes in The Second Penguin Book of Christmas Carols that the earliest written version of the song appears in "Twelth Day", a 13th-century manuscript located at Trinity College, Cambridge. The Twelve Days of Christmas was first published in a children's book called Mirth & Mischief in 1780, with its first appearance in a collection of Christmas songs coming in 1868.

Just to clarify, the "twelve days of Christmas" refers to the period of celebration between Christmas day itself and Epiphany on January 6. The song was originally sung by the French on Epiphany, otherwise known as Twelth Night.

In its more recent history, The Twelve Days of Christmas song has become a favorite throughout the traditional Christmas season and now our modern extended secular Christmas season which gets rolling in late November (and perhaps even earlier) in some places.

As for the meaning behind the symbols, here is the story as best I could find it. It turns out that a Catholic priest by the name of Fr. Hal Stockert had done some research for a project years back. In the process he came across some letters from Irish Jesuit priests to the motherhouse in Rheims, France. According to Fr. Stockert's memory (he hasn't been able to relocate the letters) some of the documents had mentions of the symbolism of The Twelve Days of Christmas being used as a secret catechism for persecuted Catholics at the time. Fr. Stockert posted his findings online not "as a doctoral thesis", as he put it, but "simply as some delicious tidbit [he] thought the world would be delighted to share over a holiday season". (See more about his story at Catholic Culture or Catholic Information Network. For another interesting discussion on the topic and a list of the symbols, see this CRI/Voice webpage.)

So it turns out that the carol, not necessarily written as a tool of faith, may have actually been used that way. Whether or not this was the case, thanks to this song we now have an interesting and memorable way to remember various aspects of faith.

Here are the symbols, according to the Catholic Culture webpage:

• true love = God Himself
• partridge in a pear tree = Jesus Christ
• 2 turtle doves = Old and New Testaments
• 3 French hens = faith, hope and charity (the theological virtues)
• 4 calling birds = the four Gospels and/or the four evangelists
• 5 golden rings = the first five books of the Old Testament (Pentateuch)
• 6 geese a-laying = the six days of creation
• 7 swans a-swimming = the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and/or the seven sacraments
• 8 maids a-milking = the eight beatitudes
• 9 ladies dancing = the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit
• 10 lords a-leaping = the ten commandments
• 11 pipers piping = the eleven faithful apostles
• 12 drummers drumming = the twelve points of doctrine in the Apostle's Creed

Click here for the tune for The Twelve Days of Christmas along with lyrics in English and Irish Gaelic.

As the twelve days of Christmas draw near, I hope you'll take the time to read the story of the "Partridge's" birth written by one of the "four calling birds" in one of the "turtle doves". Make sure you obey the "ten lords a leaping", and I wish you a holiday season filled with "French hens!"

"Where an Irish Catholic should never, ever, set foot..."

Thomas O'Connor's book The Boston Irish: A Political History tells the story of the Irish in Boston from many different angles, both politcal and otherwise.

I found these comments in the introduction very interesting in light of what I have learned about Patrick Tierney and his family and their lives in Boston's North End in the late 19th-century:

O'Connor writes:

If there had existed in the nineteenth century a computer able to digest all the appropriate data, it would have reported one city in the entire world where an Irish Catholic, under any circumstance, should never, ever, set foot. That city was Boston, Massachusetts. It was an American city with an intensely homogeneous Anglo-Saxon character, an inbred hostility toward people who were Irish, a fierce and violent revulsion against all things Roman Catholic, and an economic system that precluded most forms of unskilled labor. Boston was a city that rejected the Irish from the very start and saw no way in which people of that ethnic background could ever be fully assimilated into the prevailing American culture. Other major American cities, to be sure, shared many of Boston's social, cultural, and religious characteristics, but few to the same extent and none to the same degree. Yankee Boston was unique in the depth and intensity of its convictions. The generations of bitter and unyielding conflict between the natives of Boston and the newcomers from Ireland would forever mold the social and political character of the Boston Irish in ways not found elsewhere.

What a commentary on the world in which my great-great-grandfather lived!

What I would like to know is what he had heard about Boston before his arrival there, and what his personal experience was in this world so difficult for people of his background, religion and socio-economic status.

Boston has come a long way... and so has our family.