I’m not sure 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 the 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. 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.
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.
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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
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