Hanging between the Past and Present, an Irish Journey

US Census files for my maternal grandparents recorded their arrival dates as 1890 for James Joseph O’Neill and 1891 for Ismy Letitia Kelly. However, combing passenger lists for steamers leaving Liverpool for New York in those years led me nowhere. I looked for many iterations of their names, also scrolling through the arrival records for Castle Garden and Ellis Island. I came up with nothing. But they must be in there somewhere because, by 1893, they were naturalized citizens who married in Manhattan.

There are many, many places to find the past online these days. I needn’t name them. But while using the old standbys, I bumped into the very one I’d tried to avoid - AI. 

All along I’ve been cursing the artificially intelligent for butting into my sentences while I’m writing: “No, I don’t want any *&^%$#@ help. Leave me alone.”

                        Ismy, c.1902, NYC, pastel by Judi Mintzer from family photo

I was focusing on a casual exploration of Ismy. I entered a few known facts into the search bar, and Surprise! AI answered in the voice of a polite, research librarian: “Would you like to know what life was like in Kensington, England the year your relative was born?”

And it went on from there. “Ask me anything” the Robot said. 

Whoa. That’s a lot, I thought. But, ask I did. 

“How did a poor 16-year-old girl travel from Kensington, England to New York City in 1890?”

The Robot told me that Ismy, who worked as a servant, probably took a train from South Kensington to Liverpool. Since the Kellys were “workhouse poor”, Ismy’s steerage passage, about $25, on the Cunard or White Star Line was most likely purchased by a US relative. My guess is that her father had aunts who had emigrated (Sarah and Mary?). Perhaps they sponsored Ismy’s immigration.

The crossing took from seven to ten days. Ismy spent endless hours on the lowest decks. Steerage passengers slept in tiered bunks. Families were positioned between the quarters of single men and women to protect women from male advances. Ismy’s fare included meals of bread, gruel, and soup. The air was stagnant. Seasickness was torturous. Conditions to care for bodily waste were horrid, and privacy screening was extremely limited.

By 1890, according to my Robot, transatlantic shipping laws required all lines to provide plumbed restroom facilities for all on board. In the daytime, steerage passengers used long troughs that employed a constant flush mechanism. Seawater pumped through tubs beneath wooden seats rushed human waste into the ocean. However, during rough seas, the system pushed sewage onto the decks and into the lower quarters of the ship.

Also, steerage facilities were locked at night. Stewards placed huge tubs at the end of each aisle of tiered bunks. These were for communal, nighttime use and were subject to the same overflows as the troughs.

The consequences led to chaos, disease, and many deaths. One’s death in steerage meant immediate burial at sea. Death by suspected disease (regardless of ticket class) meant all belongings and bedding accompanied the body.

What Ismy witnessed had to have stayed with her because, through it all, she was alone. Not that she’d led a warm and fuzzy family life to begin with. She had been in and out of workhouses since the age of five. God knows how long she had been working in domestic service while living in Lewisham Union, but even a day was too long. Somehow, Ismy found her way out of there. I’d like to think her father helped her, but I suspect she helped herself.

Coming to America wasn’t a dream. It was an escape.

When Ismy arrived in New York’s harbor, she faced more indignities. A ferry took steerage passengers to Castle Garden (Battery Park today; Ellis Island did not open until 1892). She was immediately checked for signs of contagious diseases and then subjected to rigorous questioning about literacy, sponsorship, US relatives, and work prospects. Imagine how daunting this was to a teenage girl from a troubled upbringing who faced an unknown future.

Though I have no proof, I believe a Kelly relative met Ismy and offered her transitional respite. Since my grandmother could read and write, as well as converse in Irish and English, she was a fine candidate for domestic service.

Speculation prevails as I imagine her meeting the man with whom she would parent 11 living children. So, let’s look at James Joseph O’Neill as an official US citizen and a real Irish New Yorker. 

More from the past coming soon.

######## Fiction: Don’t Ya Know https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dont-ya-know-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1122048551 Memoirs: Manhasset Stories I & II https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1112360942 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-more-baby-boomer-memories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1113982658

“What’s Past is Prologue” - The Tempest, Wm. Shakespeare

Tracking the past of my maternal grandfather’s O’Neill family in Bearna, Ireland was easier than doing so for my grandmother’s, the Kellys of Mayo County.

                               Frances O’Neill with her young nephew, circa 1922, NYC

In the account that precedes this one, I mention a letter about my maternal grandparents from their daughter, Frances O’Neill. Two sentences concerning my grandmother, Ismy Letitia Kelly, born November 25, 1875 always stayed with me:

     

       “Mom was just five years old when her mother died. 

       Her dad put her and [Elizabeth Frances, an infant] 

       into a home and paid for them. This was most 

       unsatisfactory and he had them released. “

This struck at some residual pain within me. At the time, I didn’t know much about children in London workhouses in 1879, but what I did know from reading Charles Dickens wasn’t good. Today, electronic files point clearly to the details of a hard life for the Kelly family, going back to Mayo County Ireland in 1828 when and where Ismy’s grandfather, Hugh Kelly, was born. 

Little is known of Hugh’s life except that, at the age of 15 while living in Leitrim, Ireland, he fathered a son in 1843 with a woman who was 29. Her name was Mary and their child, my great-grandfather, was Patrick Kelly.

It is fair to assume Hugh Kelly was from a family of flax farmers in an area where nearly all tenants were. As a cottage industry,  flax had been grown from seed, spun into yarn, and woven into linen fabric since West Ireland’s history began. Patrick’s mother, (Hugh’s wife, I assume), would have been a weaver whose products were sold commercially. The 19th century population dressed in homespun fabrics, and though the fashion didn’t change in the years after Hugh Kelly reached adulthood, the cottage industry that supported the farmers did.

Disaster loomed for Hugh Kelly’s family and others like them who also depended on the potato crops for sustenance. Most likely, Hugh joined the thousands of Irish from the West who made their way to Dublin to cross the Irish Sea as “Spaleens,” temporary workers in the mines and factories of Liverpool and beyond. Laborers bought fourth-class tickets on steamers for seasonal work in large cities. They lived in ramshackle housing and worked for paltry wages they brought back to their starving families in Ireland, only to repeat the journey when the work picked up again.  If this is the cycle of poverty in which Hugh Kelly found himself, it’s no surprise that he died at the age of 32 in 1860.

The 1861 UK Census recorded Patrick Kelly, 17, living with his widow mother, Mary, 48, in Holborn, England, a densely populated area of Irish, Jewish, and poor English who lived in squalid conditions. Covent Garden, grand homes, and music halls were just an Omnibus ride away. And though Patrick couldn’t afford those, the many pubs of Holborn welcomed him.

It’s virtually impossible to identify Patrick in UK’s 1871 census because there are seven pages of Patrick Kellys, many of whom are single and living in the London area. However, clear records reemerge in 1873, and Patrick’s circumstances had improved immeasurably. His Westminster marriage certificate to Fanny Smith (b. 1846, Islington, England) listed his occupation as “Police Constable.”

Serving the Metropolitan Police in 1873 meant wearing a uniform top hat, frock coat, and badge while carrying a truncheon and a wooden rattle, according to the UK National Archives. Constables, nicknamed Bobbies or Peelers, patrolled assigned neighborhoods at the required 2.5 mile per hour pace for up to 12 hours a day. They were overseen by Scotland Yard and few abuses were tolerated, including fraternizing with the public, drunkenness, and corruption. Unlike single police officers, who were provided with room and board in their districts, married constables received an inadequate stipend to pay for their housing. All residences were required to be in the same area in which a constable patrolled.  In 1873, Patrick was assigned to Kensington where housing costs were significant.

My grandmother, Ismy Letitia Kelly, was born to Fanny and Patrick in 1874. Two years later, Elizabeth Frances arrived. Then, tragically in 1879, Fanny Smith Kelly died.

Soon, even more catastrophes befell them.

Respectable, approved lodgings were a requirement for constables. As a widower with two young children, Patrick had few choices. A Metropolitan Police Constable could not care for two children while working 12 hour shifts. The chilling words of Aunt Fran’s letter about putting the children in an institution were actually much starker. On September 7, 1879, Patrick Kelly and family were admitted to the Lewisham Union Workhouse. Records reveal Patrick was an inmate “breaking stones,” the servitude imposed on the destitute in return for room and board. Entering a workhouse as an inmate, destroyed a man’s reputation and that alone would have led to Patrick’s dismissal from the force, even though other circumstances may have contributed to his departure, including the fact that he was an Irishman, and less likely to have support.(workhouse.uk.org/lewisham).

 

At the gates of Lewisham, Ismy and Elizabeth were separated from their father immediately and housed in quarters where he rarely had the time or the permission to visit. Patrick paid for their daily rations and general care with forced labor. Workhouses in the Victorian years offered the destitute only a place to survive. Upon acceptance, inmates were searched for alcohol, bathed, given a clean nightshirt, and fed watery porridge or gruel. Able-bodied male residents were required to smash large stones into small gravel for road construction. This was Patrick’s fate. Breaking rocks was punishing work. With no protective gear, shards of rock flew like shrapnel into the eyes, extremities, and heads of the men. Lacking gloves, their hands were ripped open from the force of the hammers against igneous rocks; inmates were assigned a quota of rocks to break each day from a quarter to a half a ton.(surreycc.gov.uk)

                                                                             Breaking Stones at the workhouse

Patrick appeared to find his way out of the workhouse with a second marriage. In 1880 a certificate was issued to Patrick and Mary Ann Marfell, who married at the Church of St. John the Evangelist. Patrick was 37 and Mary Ann was a decade younger. It’s an interesting document. Patrick’s father, Hugh, was recorded as a coachman. Mary Ann’s father was a farmer and Patrick was a police constable which must refer to his former position. He, Mary Ann, and Patrick’s children  lived at 58 Vincent Street in Kensington. Apparently that was Mary Ann’s residence at the time of their marriage.

A year later the 1881 Census recorded that a third child entered the family, Ismy and Elizabeth’s half sibling, Thomas. Now the Kellys lived in St. Margaret where common tenement housing crowded the poor into dismal quarters.

In this census, Patrick’s occupation was “coal miner.” Understanding that there were no underground mines near London, this was a common term for those who worked on the Thames as “heavers” or “whippers”. These workers unloaded coal from the barges that brought it from mines up north. The laborers shoveled up to 225 pounds of coal into sacks which they heaved onto their backs and bore down shaky, river ladders to the docks. Their lungs were poisoned by escaping coal dust while their backs were torn with spinal injuries and ruptured muscles. At some point, Patrick left for another job involving freight portage, but, perhaps, it was a bit less strenuous. In the 1891 census, his occupation is “railway porter” that required him to haul packages and trunks from place to place. 

But the facts of 1891 point to a crisis in the family. The Kellys lived in South St. Barnabas Parish at 2 Catherine Terrace. Patrick, 49, was a railway porter still married to Mary Ann, 39; Ismy, 17, was a servant and Thomas, 10, a scholar. Patrick and Fanny Smith’s daughter, Elizabeth, was not included in the family unit.

Shockingly, in 1891, Ismy’s sister, Elizabeth Frances Kelly, was a resident in St. Catherine’s Orphanage in Marylebone. She was 15 and had resided there for a few years. It is incomprehensible as to why this was so.

Aunt Fran is my primary source at this point in the history. She wrote that Patrick’s second marriage was a “bad decision” and “he left this woman.” If that is the case, the separation occurred after the 1891 census in February. A certificate and an inquest for the death of a Mary Ann Kelly on March 18, 1891 is attributed to the Kelly ancestry tree, and though I can’t find any other death reports, I’m not sure this is Mary Ann Marfell Kelly.

Nonetheless, the purge of Patrick’s family in 1891 continued when he sent his eldest daughter to America. Ismy was sponsored by relatives of Patruck’s: Sarah and Mary Kelly who already lived in New York.

To add further pain to Patrick’s situation, if Mary Ann died that year, the Francis Thomas Kelly in St. Pancras workhouse in Camden may well be their 10 year old son whose life becomes very difficult to track in the ensuing years.

Patrick’s daughter Elizabeth married Francis Draper in 1899 in Marylebone. She listed Patrick’s occupation as “Police Constable,” the occupation of which he was most proud.

As for Patrick, in the UK census of 1901 he was a single boarder at a home in Lancashire where he worked as a Bailiff for the Farm Bureau.

A certificate of death was issued in 1904 in Chorely, Lancashire. Patrick’s place of burial is unknown.

Ismy arrived in America and settled with the Kellys in Manhattan. She became a US citizen in 1893 and somehow, she met James Joseph O’Neill.

I’ll go back to that time, another time.

#####

Fiction: Don’t Ya Know

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dont-ya-know-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1122048551

Memoirs: Manhasset Stories I & II

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1112360942

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-more-baby-boomer-memories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1113982658

     

Boats Against the Current

 

 Galway Gaol

I don’t know why I seek the past, but I do.

Decades ago, I coaxed my Aunt Fran to put a document together about her Irish family’s immigration to New York in the 1880s - something  about which few relatives ever spoke. What she gave me only contained bread crumbs on a path from the West of Ireland across the Atlantic. I’ve followed their trail over a very long time, and I finally know parts of the history of my mother’s family, especially what occurred to them during the worst years of Ireland’s “Great Hunger,” an Gorta Mor, 1845-1852.

The story centers around my great-grandmother, Bridget Codyre, who was imprisoned in Galway’s Town Gaol at the age of 13 in 1849. Bridget was charged with “assault and rescue” along with her brother, ten-year-old John. This occurred six years after the recorded arrest and confinement of their parents (Margaret Gilloway and Patt Codyre) for the same crime.

The Codyres were a struggling family of tenant farmers living in West Galway. Around 1839, their potato crops, the only harvest the poor quality soil could yield,  began to wither and weaken. Within a few years, slimy potato vines bore ugly, weeping blotches. Soon, the farmers main source of sustenance was gone and the famine was raging. Poor families like the Codyres faced starvation, as well as diphtheria, dysentery, typhus, and cholera. Conditions were so severe, according to the Research Repository of the University of Galway, that deaths outpaced cemetery space and many of the dead were interred in backyard gardens.

When Bridget's parents went to jail in 1843, the charges indicate they were guilty of unpaid debts, a bill which they resolved eventually. However, an ominous sign defined their later troubles. In 1847, durung the deadliest year of the famine, Bridget’s mother, Margaret, was granted an eight pound loan through a fund for the destitute. It is her address at the time that sends a chill: “New Village, Ireland.”

In 1847 the notation “New Village” meant the Codyre family had been pushed off their tenancy to some hastily constructed community even farther West. Whole towns had vanished due to the landlords  abandonment of properties and the departure of entire families, either through death or emigration. So ghost villages forced the living to move farther toward Galway Bay where, perhaps, the sea could feed them. 

The Codyres headed to Bearna. This was their only chance for survival given that their Roman Catholic family was illiterate, a fact of life imposed upon them by the Catholic bishops of Galway. Believing the National Public School’s were out to indoctrinate the Catholic poor with Protestant influences, the bishops hampered the enrollment of their parishioners. Though early in the famine other “free schools” were available to the Codyres, students were expected to bring money to support the teacher, food to help out, and fuel to heat the school house. Education was a luxury the Codyres could never afford.

As a result, they continued to live in a cycle of extreme poverty while those with food on their tables, like a prominent Earl,  said they were “fearful” of the farmers’ children who were “untutored savages.”

Knowing these facts, it is no surprise that 13-year-old Bridget Codyre and her 10-year-old brother were arrested for stealing food in 1849. It was a sad fact of life for thousands of children who became either gaol inmates or workhouse residents with varying degrees of criminal charges.

Some aspects of life may have improved for Bridget at 19 when her marriage to Michael O’Neill was registered in the beautiful and wild country of Ballynew. Then, according to Griffiths’ Valuations, the young couple settled as tenants of a dairy farm on the Boleybeg Road, a place of pasturelands and peat bogs. Over the next 24 years, they had 11 children while moving around to farms in the same area. Traditionally, children worked on the farm, but were also hired out as servants to neighboring landlords. Some schooling had taken place for the O’Neills because later census reports reveal all the children could read and write Irish and English. 

Bridget was 45 years old when she gave birth for the last time, to a son named Michael in 1879. Having another child had to have stretched the limits of a burden already placed on them following several cold and wet seasons that produced mucky fields and undernourished cattle. That year, the O’Neills joined thousands of tenant farmers unable to pay their rent. Absentee landlords who were cruel and heartless ordered court evictions with little regard for a family’s well-being.

The tenant farmers of West Galway had been here before and grueling memories of the famine gave them the strength to fight back. The Land Wars of 1879 startled landlords, as tenant farmers began to stand side by side to halt evictions. Neighbors used whatever they had to ward off the Court Constables, often throwing boiling water at them. Raging against their servitude, whole communities appeared at town meetings to demand that Parliament change the laws governing the owners of agricultural land (OpenPress, University of Galway).

In the meantime, rampant emigration continued. For the O’Neills, this meant saying farewell to their daughter, Mary, who married a neighbor, Michael Clancy, in 1880 and left for New York immediately thereafter.

The fight to gain more property rights and more housing security continued in varying degrees of scuffles - both mild and deadly - until the 1890s. The stress of the times wore on the O’Neills, especially  their mother, Bridget Codyre O’Neill who, in 1887 at the age of 52, was arrested for “throwing water at a court officer.”

Shortly after, another of Bridget’s children emigrated to New York - my grandfather James Joseph O’Neill. He was followed by two more siblings a few years later.

Their mother, Bridget,  died in 1901 and their father, Michael, died in 1903. Siblings, Michael and John, returned to Bearna from the US in the 1920s. John died in 1954 and Michael in 1962. They are buried with their parents in the New Rahoon Cemetery. 

Mary O’Neill Clancy and my grandfather stayed in America, raised their families in New York, and are interred there in Calvary Cemetery.  

I know nothing of Mary’s life “in the states” and what I know of James Joseph’s is limited, but I haven’t stopped wondering and looking.

James Joseph O’Neill

My maternal grandfather, James Joseph O’Neill,  sponsored by his sister Mary O’Neill Clancy, became a US citizen in 1890. He lived on West 65th Street in NYC as a boarder and worked as a “fireman.” Somehow, he met my newly immigrated English grandmother before their marriage in 1893. But that’s for another trip to the past in the future.

                         #############

Fiction: Don’t Ya Know

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dont-ya-know-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1122048551

Memoirs: Manhasset Stories I & II

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1112360942

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-more-baby-boomer-memories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1113982658

Gilded Memories

 GILDED MEMORIES

I want to write again. It eats at me, has been eating at me for more than a decade.

As each of those years passed, I reminded myself that I’d spent many others without putting pen to paper or digits to keyboard. Those days, the urge ate at me insatiably as well, but something always came along to shake me out of it.

I guess I relied on that happening again, until I realized at 78.5 years old I’d best just get on with it.

So, I fooled with a sequel to the novel I wrote in 2014 (Don’t Ya Know) with a WIP called “Healing Properties”. It is the continuing saga of a fictional island off Long Island’s East End. However, the mojo required has failed me, repeatedly, even while I hear my late friend Martha urging me on. (Damnit, Martha. I know. I know.).

I’ve also played with creating a story about my maternal grandparents and their roots in Ireland. I’ve scrapped it. The scenes I write don’t read ‘real’ to me. 

I dabbled with a full-length piece about the oldest, or at least most interesting, book club in Atlanta and loved every minute of its research and writing. It’s a good, solid feature. I was pleased, but not further inspired.

I would venture to write about the impending death of American democracy, however the Heathers, Robin, and Mary Geddry are acing the topic; Anne Lamott covers the fear and faith angle; and,  I’m trying my damndest to engender only kindness in my 80s.

Once upon a time, I wrote weekly features for an old LI newspaper while living on a small Island lush with natural beauty, surrounded by a bay, and ripe with wonderful characters. 

I haven’t lived there for more than three decades, and though I’ve lived long enough to know there are intriguing people and places everywhere, it’s so much harder to see them in the tech corridors and townhomes where I live now (in a city the NYT has named #1 this year for jobs and homes).

My character studies assume no one in this town is like Lottie, our feisty 100 year old Island neighbor who told stories on everyone in residence or Mal, the philosophical seafarer and one time town supervisor who bellowed his truths to all who’d listen or Jimmy, aka Commander Cody, who can still filet a fish faster than most humans while cackling away at some great story about his SC youth.

Currently, all the quirky humans I know are my dearest friends. NDA’s exist, legally binding though implicit.

There was a time when my ‘new’ town hadn’t been discovered globally and  companions to my characters of yore lived here. I was writing about other places then, and I missed the opportunity to feature the former cotton farmers, or the oldest of the Old Soldiers who still marked 1865, or the Methodist quilters who made blankets to comfort any bereaved family in their little town - population 3,000 in the 1980s and 68,000 today. Now, houses with many garages, multiple stories, and enormous windows have replaced modest, mid-Century ranches that dwelled on large tracts of land. Their owners have moved on.

As for our former home, these days I see it as a visitor and note a similar facelift has surgically altered the landscape. It’s true that mansions have looked out at the Long Island Sound for decades. They appeared to respect the sole source aquifer beneath the loamy land. Likewise, generations of bay families had lived harmoniously in cottages along the shores. They fished the waters to make a living. A few of them still do, and I respect the hell out of how difficult it must be. The same for the old family merchants and ancestral residents, the ones who fight to retain what was, but isn’t so much any more. Because the cottages have given way to the colossal second homes of new Island wayfarers - to private planes and personal beaches. They are people living on the land, not with it.

The new structures - there and here - dwarf the characters dwelling within them. The owners aren’t outside caring for their tomato plants, waving to their neighbors, or crossing the street to chat. 

Oh, I know there are exceptions, and thank the good Lord there are many. My own husband, a front yard gardener,  knows all our neighbors by name. That is not me. I’m more of a waver than a chatter, but I understand one simple fact - humans crave interaction. The popularity of Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden supports the theory. In it reside characters galore. Fictional ones, but symbols of the intimacy we’ve lost somewhere along the way and want to read about in record numbers.

And all the while here I am, listening for my voice after so long and wondering what it has to say. It’s me, waving to my reading neighbors while we stop to chat about that pesky American dream becoming gilded again, and I position myself in a boat battling the current where I find myself, like Gatsby, being “borne ceaselessly into the past” and thinking it’s a far more comfortable place to be.

                                       ################

Fiction: Don’t Ya Know

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dont-ya-know-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1122048551

Memoirs: Manhasset Stories I & II

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1112360942

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-more-baby-boomer-memories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1113982658

The Oldest Continuously Running Book Club in Atlanta

  The Story of The Book Club of Roswell 

Imagine it’s 2010.

Martha Wayt is hosting the monthly meeting of the 50-year-old Book Club of Roswell. She has been a member for most of the last four decades. At 10:30 on this morning of the second Friday of the month, cars begin to pull into Martha’s driveway. The small house sits with the elegance of its owner off the side of a bustling road amid a busy commercial section. A path of native flowers leads to a charming rural entrance. Inside, one is instantly greeted with the warm essence of a book lover. Shelves and tables are adorned with the personal library of a lifetime reader. Beyond a row of windows, out back, are the beautiful rewards of a lifetime gardener.

The women arrive in groups with warm hellos and hugs. In 2010 only a few of the original members remain. They are joined by a scattering of legacy daughters. The other members are women who have been invited and approved over time. Today, after attending a few months of meetings as guests when each one reviewed a book, two new members are voted in. One is the daughter of a recently deceased OG; the other is her friend. Once they are officially inducted, the membership limit established in the 1960s is met again: No more than 18.

As always, on this day the dining fare is light and the reading fare is deep.

Each month a different host prepares a table with wine, sweet tea, coffee, and small bites. A designated reviewer leads a discussion on that month’s selection. While socializing for an hour or so, the members wander about catching up with each other’s lives. At some of the homes, there are horses to love on. At other’s there are garden walkways that astound the senses. At Martha’s, there is a meditation labyrinth behind the house in a field of wildflowers, beautiful trees, and stables.

Generally, Martha calls everyone to order and all assume seats in a circle. Minutes from the previous meeting are read, announcements are made, and a calendar is set for future months of hosts, books, and reviewers. Recent

reading selections have included: Patti Smith’s Just Us, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and Jill Taylor’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Today, one of the original members, Anne Gowen Spalding, is reviewing Leaving Mother Lake by Yang Erche Namu and Christine Mathieu. A thoughtful discussion of the general rebelliousness of girls toward their mothers intertwines with the story of a Himalayan girl who must leave her mother’s house.

The meeting follows the traditions set forth early on when The Book Club of Roswell first took shape, casually, among literary friends at the dawn of the 1960s. It formed with a group of people interested not just in reading, but with literature’s influence on culture. The rules were simple: Read the book, think about it, and prepare to discuss your thoughts. The fact that the book club is still around in the 21st century is a tribute to those who gave it birth. Its history matters even further because the current members stand on the shoulders of a curious group of Atlanta intellectuals who contributed to the growth of the city during turbulent times.

This is the story of the early members, how the original four came together more than a half century ago to discuss the ideas within “The Great Books of the Western World,” and how those ideas gave growth to the development of Atlanta into the 21st century.

An accepted fact is that Atlanta arose from her Civil War ashes to find she bore the aesthetic of her past: little more than a railroad stop on the way to bigger cities. In 1920, H.L. Mencken dubbed Atlanta “a cultural Sahara.” Four decades later in 1960, Atlanta had a fine arts home at the High Museum but lacked a home for her symphony, ballet, and theatre arts. Also, the city’s social construct was reeling from the unsolved bombing of the Jewish Temple two years earlier and future Georgia Governor Lester Maddox’s ongoing, racist rants against Blacks.

In the Spring of 1960, peaceful sit-ins with black students inspired by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. disrupted Rich’s lunch counter. Later that year two students who were black challenged the racial admissions’ policies at UGA. The flaws of the city became open wounds. However, there were whispered signs of healing. A young, vibrant John F. Kennedy, as President, promised to

ensure equal opportunities for all Americans, and the segregationist signs that separated Atlanta’s population by race in elevators, at water fountains, in waiting rooms, in restrooms and on buses came down.

However, Atlanta needed revitalization in body as well as soul. Delivering an address on the topic “The Mess We Live in,” Atlanta architect James “Bill” Finch said, “Atlanta is ugly....Ugly in a structural way. And it’s getting uglier all the time.”

Finch wasn’t alone in his thoughts. His friend Leo Lanman, a co-founder of the Georgia Conservancy and an urban environmentalist, agreed. Lanman believed a city chain of green mini-parks and walking trails would soften the urban environment and prevent the destructive push toward suburbia.

Lanman and Finch were friends with Jack Spalding and Jim Childers of the Atlanta Journal; two journalists who felt compelled to improve the lives of all Atlantans. Spalding often declared that one of his “compulsions in life [was] a desire for change.” In 1952, he had won awards for an expose of the horrendous conditions at the mental hospital in Milledgeville, Ga. Spalding’s friend James Saxon Childers, a Rhodes Scholar and former Atlanta Journal Editor, had disclaimed a racist editor from Alabama while receiving applause from the audience at the 1956 American Society of Newspaper Editors convention. Childers was fired from the Journal for his progressive views later that year, and though Jack Spalding replaced him as the Editor of the newspaper, they remained steadfast friends, a tribute to each man’s character.

Jack Spalding, a UGA grad known as “a walking encyclopedia,” had an insatiable thirst for finding out ‘why’ things happened, according to Pat LaHatte Langley of the Journal. His brother, Hughes Spalding, once said, “[Jack] wants to be stimulated by people with different ideas.” During his reign as Editor-in-Chief, Spalding educated Journal readers about ecology, race relations, rezoning, and the power of people working in groups. His editorial pages were written with a theme of “community betterment” and underscored his philosophy to, “Make haste slowly” which guided his editorial leadership amid Atlanta’s chaotic years.

Spalding’s friendship with Lanman and Finch was rooted in a firm commitment to bring art and beauty to their city, and with Childers, each had

long believed racial integration was the key to unlocking Atlanta’s greatest potential. In1960 Spalding’s editorial pages gave strong support to a bond approving the construction of a cultural arts center. Ironically, when the issue got mixed up with the many racial travails of the times, the bond was defeated at the polls.

Jack Spalding opined in the Journal: “Atlanta lost big that day.”

The four friends discussed the static growth of their city often enough for Leo Lanman to suggest they find a new approach. Improving civilizations and environments was a challenge for the ages. Lanman proposed that the friends begin to study the cumulative ideas of Western Civilization through Encyclopedia Britannica’s “The Great Books of the Western World.” Research into the history of ideas could expand their own visions for Atlanta.

In that moment one of Atlanta’s oldest, continuous book clubs was born. *****

In 1960 door to door sales of the 54-book Encyclopedia Britannica series had gained traction. The series came with the optional purchase of appropriate bookshelves, and stately-bound books lined the walls of living rooms and dens throughout America.

Lanman suggested their discussions follow the outline of the series’ creator, Mortimer J. Adler, who believed “philosophy is everybody’s business” and learning is a life-long practice.

The four men met twice a month over “whiskey and peanuts,” the standard cocktail fare at the Spaldings' home off Riverside Drive. They began with Volume 1: The Great Conversation and used Volume 2: The Great Ideas as a springboard for their discussions about social construct, civic duty, and community enrichment.

The readers moved on to explore the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes. They unraveled the quandaries of morals and values in Homer, grappled with Sophocles’ ideas about democracy, and waxed on about the women’s sex strike in Aristophones’ Lysistrata. It was apparent

quickly that the enlightenment of a “salon” began to pulse with a powerful fervency in a living room in Atlanta.

Anne Spalding provided the cocktail peanuts and often sat in. Jack and Anne Spalding had met in 1954 when Charles Gowen, Anne’s father, was running for Georgia governor and Jack Spalding was covering the campaign. Before that, Anne had been a poli-sci major, a Phi Beta Kappa grad at UNC Chapel Hill, and an Atlanta Constitution reporter with a courthouse and politics’ beat. An avid reader of the classics, Anne provided her insights at the literary meetings with ease.

“At some point,” Anne said, “the other wives got wind of it” and decided to join their husband’s philosophical pursuits. These new members included Maude Lanman, a Columbia University graduate and member of the Georgia Board of Elections and Bess Finch, an Agnes Scott grad and member of the Ruth Mitchell Dance Company.

Following them came Doris Hinckley Lockerman, the first female associate editor of a US newspaper (the Atlanta Constitution, 1948). In the 1930s, Doris was secretary to Chicago’s famous FBI chief, Mervin Purvis, who took down the infamous with his machine gun squad (of which Doris’ future husband, Allen Lockerman Jr, was a member). Doris was known for reading one book every day. In 1960, renowned Constitution editor Ralph McGill praised her “brilliant, decisive mind.” Doris and Allen were also avid devotees of enriching the cultural life of Atlanta and eagerly joined into the illumination of great reading with a group of friends. The ten of them still covered two books a month, but with a different format. Now, one member led each discussion and others alternated hosting in their homes.

The group continued to expand. Author and noted raconteur, Alex Bealer began to attend with his wife, Helen, a singer and WWII WAVE. Alex was a man famed Atlanta author Celestine Sibley called “the most interesting man in the world because he is the most interested man in the world.” Bealer had lived, played, and hunted with Cherokee Indian friends as a youth. He was a blacksmith and a woodworker. Sibley said “ [Bealer’s] curiosity and enthusiasm were so infectious a lot of us found ourselves looking at things... with interest we never knew we possessed.”

Alex and Helen were active participants in the enlightened conversations that ranged from art and aristocracy to citizenship and government. All were threaded with applications to the future of Atlanta, including the Bealers’ keen interest in preserving Georgia’s Indian mounds, and Maude Lanman’s determination to register all eligible voters in Roswell and beyond.

                                                          ***

The community groups in which the members participated “made haste slowly.” But there were signs Atlanta was awakening. In August of 1961, Atlanta integrated its public schools peacefully while other Southern cities roiled in racial turmoil. A new slogan was born: “Atlanta: The city too busy to hate.”

Sights were set on the future. Alex Bealer told the book group that a cultural arts’ center was back on the table following the bond defeat. To that end in the summer of 1962, his sister and sister-in-law were joining more than 100 Atlanta cultural and cvic leaders on a month long tour of the art treasures of Europe, ending with an AirFrance flight from Paris’ Orly airport.

Word got around the close-knit community of Atlanta journalists, thinkers, and artists about a stimulating group of movers and shakers who were taking on the works of the world’s great philosophers. As a result, more people asked to attend the bi-monthly gatherings. James Barker and his wife, Arletta Peck, attended with friends. Jim Barker, an architect, had a hand in designing some of the most stunning churches in Atlanta. He was also the architect and owner of the famed “Barker House,” a flying-saucer-shaped house erected on top of Forsyth’s Sawnee Mountain in the 60s.

The original members set the limit at 18 to facilitate ease of discussion. They chose to book a meeting room in the library of the Atlanta History Center for every other Friday night. New members included two pyschiatrists, Dr. Tom Malone (on the founding board of the Galloway School) and his wife, Dr. Virginia Grotheer. The Malones were a couple known for their interest in community wellness who were eager to discuss the importance of a liberal arts’ education.

*****

The addition of women to the book club, coupled with the racial conditions of the times, brought the group to the realization that gender and equality were topics Mortimer Adler had left off his list of great ideas.

In 1962, Martha Wayt joined during the reading of Plato. Martha, who worked with Leo Lanman as the first Chair of the Georgia Conservancy Education Committee, was a graduate of Vassar. She proudly claimed the influence of her grandfather, John Huston Finley, the Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times in the 1930s, and later, a Professor at Princeton and President of City College of New York. Martha was known to always have a book in her hands with a pen at the ready to take notes. Her greatest interests were people, ideals, and ideas. Discussing Plato’s thoughts on equality, justice, and humanity brought her back to the lively discussions she had experienced as a child in a highly-educated family. Martha, who founded the Atlanta Steeplechase with her husband, John Wayt, made copious notes about her decades’ long, book club membership. Those notes have aided the recording of its history.

Early in 1962, as they reviewed Aristotle’s theory that people needed each other to survive, the group watched their beloved city devolve into further chaos. In an ongoing saga Lester Maddox, the segregationist owner of Atlanta’s Pickrick Restaurant, ( and soon-to be Georgia Governor’67-’71), refused to seat staff members of the Atlanta Journal and the AtlantaConstitution saying they were “trying to cram integration down the throats of [Atlanta] merchants....”

On the other hand at a meeting of the American Society of Newspapers that February, Felix R. McKnight of the Dallas Times-Herald said the U.S. wondered “what happened to just plain Americans...those people who could sanely and soundly debate...without endangering the precious unity of this land?”

The members’ reading continued to sustain them. Repeated cautions to persevere in the face of calamity and to seek truth in the midst of beauty were woven in the next book club volumes with Virgil, Ptolemy, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.The readers explored the dimensions of God within the natural order of civilizations. They labored over Dante’s hell, Chaucer’s

journey, and the power trips of Machiavelli. And when they got to the great British bard, Martha Wayt noted: “Shakespeare is an insightful joy.”

They had read up to the middle of the 54 volumes when crushing news came to the city of Atlanta. Sunday morning June 3, 1962 the AirFrance jet carrying 106 Atlantans home from Orly in France crashed, killing all of them and many others. The list of dead included Alex Bealer’s sister, Mary Louise Humphreys, a young mother and aspiring artist traveling with her sister-in- law, Elizabeth Gloning Bealer, an artist who taught French at The Lovett School.

Nothing the book club read had prepared them or their city for this. The Atlanta Constitution editorial on June 4, 1962 reminded readers: “The select cultural leadership of the whole city has been decimated.” It emphasized that the lives lost left a gap in Atlanta’s “advance toward the goal of greatness.” In the same issue, columnist Eugene Patterson wrote: “...they held in common that divine spark of which Plato wrote and without which there is no art.”

Racial unrest was put aside respectfully, but temporarily, when Martin Luther King Jr. and Harry Belafonte cancelled a planned sit-in protest; and though MalcolmX created a stir, little could penetrate the communal grief of a city plunged into mourning.

In the darkest of times, Atlantans found a way to make the loss a catalyst for funding a memorial arts’ center as an endless stream of funerals took place across the city. And then, just over a year later, President John F. Kennedy was killed and a new communal grief swept the entire country.

*****

As time went on, the club continued to accept new members. Roy “Splinter” Wood was in the Kennedy administration’s Interior Department in the US wildlife Service until 1967 when he and his family returned to their Roswell residence from DC. Roy and his wife, Tillie King, were a welcome addition to the book club. “Splinter” was a known storyteller and a persuasive speaker. Tillie held a Masters in Biology, coupled with a fierce love for education. They had contributed to the establishment of the Chattahoochee Nature Center and Tillie had started the first public kindergarten in Roswell. The

Woods were part of the group when the members celebrated the completion of all 54 volumes of the series.

What became known as the couples’ group “went on so long that everybody knew everybody’s opinion about everything, so it folded,” according to Anne Spalding who spoke to the Atlanta Journal in a 1984 article about area book clubs. Noting that 22 years had passed since the club’s first days, Anne went on to say, “The ladies decided to keep on meeting - we grew up when we didn’t work and it was something to do on a Friday morning. We chose to read great books by trivial authors and trivial books by great authors.”

As the women’s group formed, early members were those who had connections to the Atlanta newspapers. Scarlett Blanton Rickenbaker, a former Fashion Editor at the Atlanta Constitution, earned a spot. Scarlett was a St. Simon’s native who had won attendance to NYC’s famed Art Students' League as an oil and watercolors’ artist and sculptor. Her lively, line drawings added flavor to the Constitution’s women’s section. In the future, Scarlett’s artwork would be held by private collections in the US and Europe. She would also be the illustrator beloved author Celestine Sibley chose for her books. However in the 60s, upon entering the book club, Scarlett was a young, housebound mom of three who loved to read and wanted to enjoy time with like-minded women.

Scarlett introduced her friend and fellow artist, Barbara “Candy” Morrow to the group. In addition to her established reading habits, Candy was a well- respected portrait artist, supporter of the Atlanta Symphony, and avid Scrabble player. She fit right in. So Scarlett and Candy introduced another artist, Jo Rudolph, an instructor at the Dunwoody Arts Center and member of the Roswell Arts Alliance. Jo was thrilled to be a “reader among readers” and spoke of the group often throughout her life. Another member brought along Carolyn Crompton, a former Roswell High School English teacher, a renowned grower of day lilies, and a well-appreciated Roswell Library volunteer.

In the 70s one new member, Evelyn Sommerville, began hosting meetings at her historic home in Roswell, “Holly Hill.” Evelyn Hanna Sommerville was an Agnes Scot grad, a WWII journalist in Britain, and a self-professed “book freak.” When she and her husband, Robert, (the President of Atlanta Transit)

bought Holly Hill, the Greek Revival mansion was inhabited by six families, one of which operated a hamburger stand in the front yard. Today their magnificent restoration is a protected “Landmark of Southern Heritage.” But Evelyn was a legend as well. She was the author of the acclaimed novel Blackberry Winter (1938), a contender for the Pulitzer prize which, according to the the AJC in 1971, Sommerville lost by one vote to Marjorie Kennan Rawlings’ The Yearling.

The Sommervilles acquired Holly Hill from the Wing family whose relative, Lucile Wing Hockenhull, became a book club member. Lucile was seven generations removed from the original settlers of Roswell. In the 1830s, they owned the first ferry across the Chattahoochee River and commissioned Roswell King’s firm to build Holly Hill in 1845. Like Sommerville, Lucile was an Agnes Scot grad (1915) and according to member Janet Tiller, Lucile had two loves: “the book club and the Braves.” Hockenhull’s praise for The Book Club of Roswell appeared in a 1979 article in the Roswell Neighbor. “Club meetings,” she said “were a place of such bright and brainy discussions” that to be a member was “very desirable.”

Anne Spalding brought Janet Tiller into the group in the early 80s. Janet Pearson Tiller’s family owns the “Mitchell-Tiller House” in Sandy Springs. Sometimes book club meetings were held in the 19th century, restored cottage where Janet provided stimulating conversations and an elegant spread. Today, as a member-emeritus in her late 90s, Janet recalls, “Anne Spalding and I lived in the same neighborhood and played bridge together. We talked about books. So Anne invited me to join.” Janet added, “I was so blessed to have my life enriched by these women.”

There are several other names listed in the membership records over the years, and each of the women made an important contribution to the staying- power of the book club. Some considered their affiliation so meaningful that their obituaries noted it:

In the late 1980s, the remembrances of Clyde La Fitte and Dorothy Lyons of Roswell mention their memberships, as does the 2013 obit of Norma Lou (Dove) Cannon who was a “30 year member of The Book Club of Roswell.” Imogen Banks Caudell died in 2006 and her obit notes that she was a “founding member of The [women’s] Book Club of Rowell.”

Members in the 1980s and 1990s included Barbara Whittier, Mabel Ritter, Hazel Fields, Pauline Dwiggins, Jaunita Mitchell, Shirley Steele, Jane Wilcox Smith, and Mary Bugge. They are all remembered as highly active members through the years by Darlene Walsh and Cindy Etheridge who came along during that era. Darlene is a member-emeritus who still keeps in touch and helped with this history - as did Cindy, a current member who brings her elegance, (following a career in fashion), to a strong commitment to the women of the book club.

At the dawn of the 21st century, legacy members began to appear at the meetings. Following Tillie Wood’s death, her daughter Mary Jo was inducted with a vote, as members continued the original tradition. Soon Anne and Jack Spalding’s daughters, Elizabeth and Maysie, (a “book club baby” born in 1967), joined their mother at the meetings. In 2010, two years after the death of her mother Scarlett, Ginger Rickenbaker Hamby and Scarlett’s daughter- in-law Jeanne Rickenbaker became a members, followed in the next decade by Rebecca Wayt Buck, daughter of Martha Wayt, an active member until her death in 2021.

The current membership is a reflection of the evolution of thought throughout the length of the book club’s reign. It is still a group of seekers, as it was when couples got together over whiskey and peanuts in the Spaldings' living room. That morphed into a group of women who were educated, employed, and empowered in a way their own mother’s had never been. Those traditions have been passed on to their daughters and the women who read with them today.

Legacy member Mary Jo Wood remembers “the long rows of white leather books with the same spines and different titles in gold” that lined the shelves of her parents’ home. “The Great Books of the Western World” adorned living rooms throughout the US then, and college classes about philosophy and logic were required for a degree. Mortimer J. Adler, editor of the series, called it “a sharpening stone for the mind.” Hence, it is logical to wonder about the book club’s influence on the outcome of the original members’ dreams. The first four were the cultural influencers of their day.

Here are a few facts that may contribute to an answer.

Jim Childers published 19 novels and documentaries, many with themes about racial equality, before his death in 1965. Leo Lanman’s dream of a city chain of walking trails has manifested itself in Atlanta’s “Beltline” today, and Bill Finch’s disdain for the “ugly structures” of Atlanta has given way to a beautiful skyline and softer urban environment which he lived long enough to admire. As for Jack Spalding, he has remained a legend for his brilliant mind and sharp wit as the ultimate “Newsman,” and, most importantly, for his stance on the ecological preservation of the Chattahoochee which earned him the title of “First Friend of the River.”

Overall, Kay Powell summed their influence up in the 2008 AJC obituary for book club member Scarlett Blanton Rickenbaker:

[Rickenbaker] “was a member of what is regarded as the last of a post-war literary and artistic coterie that was a factor in Atlanta’s emergence as the premier Southern city after WWII.”

Those words define the legacy of The Book Club of Roswell.

2023 - Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser

 Galway Gaol

I don’t know why I seek the past, but I do.

Decades ago, I coaxed my Aunt Fran to put a document together about her Irish family’s immigration to New York in the 1880s - something  about which few relatives ever spoke. What she gave me only contained bread crumbs on a path from the West of Ireland across the Atlantic. I’ve followed their trail over a very long time, and I finally know parts of the history of my mother’s family, especially what occurred to them during the worst years of Ireland’s “Great Hunger,” an Gorta Mor, 1845-1852.

The story centers around my great-grandmother, Bridget Codyre, who was imprisoned in Galway’s Town Gaol at the age of 13 in 1849. Bridget was charged with “assault and rescue” along with her brother, ten-year-old John. This occurred six years after the recorded arrest and confinement of their parents (Margaret Gilloway and Patt Codyre) for the same crime.

The Codyres were a struggling family of tenant farmers living in West Galway. Around 1839, their potato crops, the only harvest the poor quality soil could yield,  began to wither and weaken. Within a few years, slimy potato vines bore ugly, weeping blotches. Soon, the farmers main source of sustenance was gone and the famine was raging. Poor families like the Codyres faced starvation, as well as diphtheria, dysentery, typhus, and cholera. Conditions were so severe, according to the Research Repository of the University of Galway, that deaths outpaced cemetery space and many of the dead were interred in backyard gardens.

When Bridget's parents went to jail in 1843, the charges indicate they were guilty of unpaid debts, a bill which they resolved eventually. However, an ominous sign defined their later troubles. In 1847, durung the deadliest year of the famine, Bridget’s mother, Margaret, was granted an eight pound loan through a fund for the destitute. It is her address at the time that sends a chill: “New Village, Ireland.”

In 1847 the notation “New Village” meant the Codyre family had been pushed off their tenancy to some hastily constructed community even farther West. Whole towns had vanished due to the landlords  abandonment of properties and the departure of entire families, either through death or emigration. So ghost villages forced the living to move farther toward Galway Bay where, perhaps, the sea could feed them. 

The Codyres headed to Bearna. This was their only chance for survival given that their Roman Catholic family was illiterate, a fact of life imposed upon them by the Catholic bishops of Galway. Believing the National Public School’s were out to indoctrinate the Catholic poor with Protestant influences, the bishops hampered the enrollment of their parishioners. Though early in the famine other “free schools” were available to the Codyres, students were expected to bring money to support the teacher, food to help out, and fuel to heat the school house. Education was a luxury the Codyres could never afford.

As a result, they continued to live in a cycle of extreme poverty while those with food on their tables, like a prominent Earl,  said they were “fearful” of the farmers’ children who were “untutored savages.”

Knowing these facts, it is no surprise that 13-year-old Bridget Codyre and her 10-year-old brother were arrested for stealing food in 1849. It was a sad fact of life for thousands of children who became either gaol inmates or workhouse residents with varying degrees of criminal charges.

Some aspects of life may have improved for Bridget at 19 when her marriage to Michael O’Neill was registered in the beautiful and wild country of Ballynew. Then, according to Griffiths’ Valuations, the young couple settled as tenants of a dairy farm on the Boleybeg Road, a place of pasturelands and peat bogs. Over the next 24 years, they had 11 children while moving around to farms in the same area. Traditionally, children worked on the farm, but were also hired out as servants to neighboring landlords. Some schooling had taken place for the O’Neills because later census reports reveal all the children could read and write Irish and English. 

Bridget was 45 years old when she gave birth for the last time, to a son named Michael in 1879. Having another child had to have stretched the limits of a burden already placed on them following several cold and wet seasons that produced mucky fields and undernourished cattle. That year, the O’Neills joined thousands of tenant farmers unable to pay their rent. Absentee landlords who were cruel and heartless ordered court evictions with little regard for a family’s well-being.

The tenant farmers of West Galway had been here before and grueling memories of the famine gave them the strength to fight back. The Land Wars of 1879 startled landlords, as tenant farmers began to stand side by side to halt evictions. Neighbors used whatever they had to ward off the Court Constables, often throwing boiling water at them. Raging against their servitude, whole communities appeared at town meetings to demand that Parliament change the laws governing the owners of agricultural land (OpenPress, University of Galway).

In the meantime, rampant emigration continued. For the O’Neills, this meant saying farewell to their daughter, Mary, who married a neighbor, Michael Clancy, in 1880 and left for New York immediately thereafter.

The fight to gain more property rights and more housing security continued in varying degrees of scuffles - both mild and deadly - until the 1890s. The stress of the times wore on the O’Neills, especially  their mother, Bridget Codyre O’Neill who, in 1887 at the age of 52, was arrested for “throwing water at a court officer.”

Shortly after, another of Bridget’s children emigrated to New York - my grandfather James Joseph O’Neill. He was followed by two more siblings a few years later.

Their mother, Bridget,  died in 1901 and their father, Michael, died in 1903. Siblings, Michael and John, returned to Bearna from the US in the 1920s. John died in 1954 and Michael in 1962. They are buried with their parents in the New Rahoon Cemetery. 

Mary O’Neill Clancy and my grandfather stayed in America, raised their families in New York, and are interred there in Calvary Cemetery.  

I know nothing of Mary’s life “in the states” and what I know of James Joseph’s is limited, but I haven’t stopped wondering and looking.

James Joseph O’Neill

My maternal grandfather, James Joseph O’Neill,  sponsored by his sister Mary O’Neill Clancy, became a US citizen in 1890. He lived on West 65th Street in NYC as a boarder and worked as a “fireman.” Somehow, he met my newly immigrated English grandmother before their marriage in 1893. But that’s for another trip to the past in the future.

                         #############

Fiction: Don’t Ya Know

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dont-ya-know-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1122048551

Memoirs: Manhasset Stories I & II

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1112360942

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-more-baby-boomer-memories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1113982658