MY IRISH ANCESTORS include three families on my maternal side: The Scotts, the Dolans, and the Darmodys.  The Scotts, the first to emigrate, arrived in Quebec Providence, Canada from Sligo, Ireland before 1759.  Where they originally settled is unknown but they eventually settled in Chambly moving to Illinois in 1850 and to Corcoran, Hennepin county Minnesota in 1855.

The Darmodys of Tipperary County and the Dolans of Cork County were driven from Ireland by the potato famine of 1845-49 and became Minnesota farmers in the 1860s.

The Irish Potato famine was the worst known to history up to that time.  The deaths resulting from it and the emigration which it caused, were so vast that, at one time, it seemed as if America and the grave were about to absorb the whole population.

The year 2009 is the 162th anniversary of  “Black ‘47,” the worst year of the famine.  After the autumn and winter of 1846-47, terrified and desperate, the Irish began to flee the land they deemed accursed.  Many of today’s American descendants ascribe romantic notions to their ancestors’ lives.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Ireland Lacked Industry

Immigration began to considered in September 1845 when farmers sniffed “a dampish putrid” odor coming from their fields.  Before the month ended, the potato stalks were “black as your shoe and burned to the clay.”   At that time, Ireland wasn’t industrialized and its few industries were moribund.  There was no agricultural employment because farms were too small to require hired labor – over 93 percent were smaller than 30 acres; 45 percent had less than five acres.  Farmers worked only when potatoes were being planted, cultivated, and harvested.  Without a patch of land to grow potatoes, a family starved.

In 1843 the Royal Devon Commission was appointed to document conditions in Ireland.  It visited every part of the land, heard 1,100 witnesses, and its three volume report concluded that the possession of a piece of land was literally the difference between life and death and that the principal cause of Irish misery was the relationship between landlord and tenant.  When the tenant’s lease expired or was terminated, improvements he made became the landlord’s without compensation.  By law, he was a tenant “at will” because a landlord could evict whenever he chose.  Evicted, families wandered about begging, crowding the already swarming lanes and slums of towns.  They put roofs over ditches, burrowed into banks, or lived in bog holes until, wasted by disease and hardship, “they die in a little time.”

According to the report, the Irish suffered more than people in any other country in Europe.  “In many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage is water, and their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather.  A bed or blanket was a rare luxury.  Pigs slept with their owners, manure heaps were outside entry doors, sometimes even inside. Their pigs and manure heap was their only property.”

The census of 1841 graded houses into four classes.  Nearly half of the rural population lived in the fourth and lowest class:  windowless mud cabins of a single room.  In 1837 the approximately 9,000 inhabitants of Tullahobagly, County Donegal, had 10 beds, 93 chairs, and 243 stools.

Families Survived on Half-Acre Plots

Most leases with clauses prohibiting land subdivision were seldom enforced.  Land was divided and subdivided and split into smaller and still smaller fragments until families were surviving on plots as small as half an acre.  As the population increased, parents let their children occupy a portion of their holdings rather than turn them out to starve.  The children in turn did the same for their children and in a comparatively short time up to 10 families were settled on land which could provide for only one.

In West Ireland, subdivision was aggravated by a system of joint tenancy known as “rundale” whereby the land was rented in common and divided so that each tenant received a portion of the good, bad, and medium quality land the farm contained.  For example, in Liscananawn, County Mayo, 167 acres of three qualities was divided into 330 portions – each of 110 persons had three portions.  This desperate competition led to enormous rents.

Day laborers, too poor to rent land, eked out an existence by conacre.  Conacre was a contract, not a lease, to use a portion of land to grow one crop.  No landlord-tenant relationship was created.  The plots were small.  A quarter-acre was common in Tipperary.  The land owner prepared the soil for planting and the laborer-contractor provided the seed, planted it, and cultivated and harvested it.  Rent was high:  £10 to £14 an acre for good ground, £6 for poor.

This system, coupled with the dense population subsisting at the lowest level, created  dependence on the potato.  In a good crop year, the potato generated great quantities of food produced at a minor cost.  An acre-and-a-half would provide a family of five or six with food for 12 months.  To grow the same amount of grain required four to six times as much acreage and some knowledge of tilling.  Planting potatoes only required a spade.

The potato was food for people, cattle, pigs, and fowl.  It was nourishing and simple to cook.  Yet it was a dangerous crop because it did not keep and could not be stored from one season to another.  The nearly 2.5 million laborers with no regular employment lived on starvation rations in the summer when the old crop was eaten and the new not yet harvested.  June, July, and August were called the “meal months” because meal had to be eaten.  The laborers bought meal on credit at exorbitant prices from the scourge of the Irish village, the dreaded Gombeen man.

In Ireland’s backward areas. cooking food other than the potato was a lost art.  In Kerry, Donegal, the country west of the Shannon river, and part of West Cork, the population lived so exclusively on potatoes that no trade in any other food existed.  Ovens were unknown.  There was no means of distributing home-grown food and no knowledge of how to use it.  Economic necessity compelled the small farmer to sell what he grew.  Wheat, oats, and barley were not regarded as food – they were grown to pay the rent, the first necessity of life in Ireland.  It would be a desperate man who ate up his rent because failure to pay meant eviction and death by slow starvation.

Potatoes were suited to the moist soil.  Trenches were dug, beds made, the potato sets laid on the ground, and earthed up.  The trenches provided drainage so crops could be grown in wet ground, the spade made it possible to plant on hillsides where a plough could not be used.  As the population increased, potatoes were grown in bogs and up mountains, where no other crops would have been possible.

Potatoes, Not Money, Determined Value of Labor

The potato, not money, was the basic factor to determine the value of labor.  Farmers and landlords gave their laborers a cabin and a piece of potato ground, or permitted them to put up a conacre.  Wages were not paid in money but were credited against rent at a rate varying from four to eight pence a day.  The laborer’s real reward was the patch of potato ground.

The laborer only dealt with money when he sold a pig for a few shillings and used the money to buy clothing for the family.  The poorest laborers could not afford a pig and were so unfamiliar with money, they did not recognize coins and notes.  Despite this, money was prized in the extreme.  It was used to purchase land which was life itself in Ireland.  However wretched a family, if they had a little money they would hoard it to pay land rent rather than improve their living conditions.

The census of 1851 reported 24 potato crop failure between 1728 and 1839, including complete failures in 1740, 1800, and 1839.  Thus its unreliability as a crop was an accepted fact and the possibility of another failure caused no particular alarm.

Britain’s leading horticultural publication, The Gardeners’ Chronicle and Horticultural Gazette, reported in mid-September 1845 that the potato Murrain had infested the potato.  The crops about Dublin were suddenly perishing.  By mid-October, disastrous reports poured in from all sections of the country.  As digging progressed, the news grew steadily worse.  When first dug, many potatoes were sound but within a few days had become a stinking mass of corruption.

The consequences are not immediate and the first effect is plenty, not scarcity, because people dispose of their potatoes before they become useless.  Famine begins five or six months after a failure.  By then, every scrap of food, every partially-diseased potato, everything edible was consumed.

Famine – An Opportunity to Profit

By spring 1846, people in many districts had begun to starve and local relief commissions had formed committees to raise money to buy food for resale to the distressed.  An Irish Board of Works was formed to create employment in public works and fever hospitals were authorized.  Similar efforts during previous periods of famine had not been successful.  History was to be repeated.

Laissez faire, a theory that individuals should pursue their own interests with as little interference from government as possible, was, almost without exception, the belief held by the politicians and high British government officials responsible for Ireland.  The loss was to be made good by the operation of private enterprise using the normal channels of commerce – in short, famine was an opportunity for profit.

Charles Edward Treyelyan, head of Great Britain’s all-powerful Department of Treasury and watchdog of the nation’s money-bags, was in charge of the various famine relief programs.  He believed the food shortage “would be aggravated in a fearful degree” if traders confined “themselves to what in ordinary circumstances might be considered fair profits.”  When the Marquess of Sligo complained in October that the Commissariat Officer at Westport was refusing to sell food to people who were starving because they couldn’t pay the trader’s exorbitant prices, he was told “we must bear in mind if an article is scarce a smaller quantity must be made to last for a longer time, and that high price is the only criterion by which consumption can be economized.”  Treyelyan regretted the “evil” of an insufficient food supply but believed providing more would be “a crying injustice to the rest of the country.”

Government officials and relief committee members treated the destitute with impatience and contempt.  Sympathy and kindness were not on the agenda in December 1845.  English newspapers pictured the Irish, not as helpless famine victims, but as cunning and bloodthirsty desperadoes.  Punch published cartoons week after week depicting the Irishman as a filthy, brutal creature, an assassin and a murderer, begging for money – under a pretense of buying food – to spend on weapons.  Ireland was a disturbing thought and it was a comfort to be able to believe its people were not starving or, if some of them were, the depravity of the Irish was such that they deserved to starve.

Because many ate seed stock to fend off starvation, about one-third less acreage was planted in 1846.  With their naturally optimistic temperament that plenty follows scarcity, Irish hopes were high.  Weather was warm during May and June and the plants grew strong.  However, by the middle of July, disease was more prevalent in the early crop than in 1845.  By August 3, it was apparent the crop was a total failure.

Reports from Cork to Dublin said the crop was a “waste of putrefying vegetation.”  One report said 32 miles of potato fields “in full bloom” became “scorched black” overnight.  Disaster was universal.  The September 2, 1846 London Times described it as “total annihilation.”  By the end of autumn, all berries, edible roots, and cabbage leaves had been eaten.  The blighted fields had been combed over and over until nothing edible remained.

The fungus phytophthora infestans caused the blight but scientists and farmers were ignorant of the cause so there was no understanding of its nature or any idea of how to treat it.  It was 15 years before blight was acknowledged to be the work of a fungus and nearly 40 years before a spray was developed.  Threatened crops are now sprayed.

M. J. Berkeley of Northamptonshire, England, whose studies on fungi had been published in English Flora in 1836, observed minute fungi on blighted parts of leaves and tubers in the summer of 1845.  In January 1846, in an article in the Journal of the Horticultural Society of London, he described the fungus as a parasite and claimed it caused blight.  The general belief was that “wet putrefaction” and “dropsy” caused blight.  With little evidence to support his theory, it was almost universally rejected and wasn’t accepted until well into the 20th century.

Bitter Cold Winter

William Forster, a minister in Norwich, England and a respected member of the Quaker community, his son W. E., and others went to Ireland to investigate the extent of the famine.  They reported “destitution and suffering far exceeding that which had been at first supposed.”  Children were “like skeletons, their features sharpened with hunger and their limbs wasted, so that there was little left but bones, their hands and arms, in particular, being much emaciated, and the happy expression of infancy gone from their faces, leaving the anxious look of premature old age.”

Forster offered a donation to start a soup kitchen every place he visited.  With the exception of Castlerea the offer was gratefully accepted.  The Catholic priest at Castlerea declined because acceptance would bring the poor from the surrounding country into the town, “by which they would be over-whelmed.”  In January 1847 at Bundorragha in Galway, Forster said all sheep and cows were gone, all poultry killed, only one pig left, and no dogs.  His son, after visiting Clifden County Galway, said men and women were “more like famished dogs than fellow creatures.”   He decried reports in English newspapers that Irish starvation was exaggerated.

As the winter continued with unrelenting severity, frantic appeals for food poured into the government offices at Whitehall, the center of the British government, from all over Ireland.  Money was useless in Limerick because there was no food to buy.  Cork’s Nicholas Cummins, Justice of the Peace, wrote that “unless something is immediately done the people must die.”  The Relief Inspector at Sligo wrote he was unable to adequately describe the desperate circumstances there.  The Commissariat Office at Burtonport, County Donegal, wrote that “the distress of the wretched people is heart-rending; something ought to be done (as) there is absolutely no food.”  A Colonel Jones wrote that the people had reached a state of panic.

February was the worst month of the terrible winter.  Heavy snow falls and fierce gales made roads impassable.  Carts could not be used.  Horses sank in drifts and had to be dug out.  Families without food or fuel took to their beds.  Many died believing it was the will of God.

Soup Kitchens Opened in 1847

Two new government programs were begun early in 1847.  (1) Soup kitchens, a favorite English philanthropic activity, were established throughout the country.  (2) Distressed persons were classified as paupers,  placed under the Irish Poor Law and given “outdoor” relief paid for by local taxes.  Previously, only workhouse inmates were eligible for relief and the capacity of the workhouses determined who could be fed.  By the end of January 31,000 pints of soup were distributed daily to about a tenth of the destitute population in West Cork.  Crowds waited for hours at distribution centers, sometimes all night, and savage struggles took place when distribution began.

By early February private enterprise was finally functioning with supplies of Indian corn and Indian meal beginning to arrive from North America.  Two-hundred-fifty ships carrying 50,000 tons of foodstuffs were in Cork harbor February 26.  But it was to late.  Destitution and disorganization had gone too far; high prices and lack of money put the long-expected food out of reach of the starving laborer.  Ireland was ruined.

Irish “Black Fever”

Fever is a natural consequence of famine.  The government was warned in the autumn of 1846 to expect an epidemic.  It arrived at the end of March in the form of typhus and relapsing fever, filling the Irish with terror.  Rickettsia, the microscopic organisms that cause typhoid, attack the small blood vessels, especially those of the skin and brain.  With blood circulation impeded, the patient becomes all but unrecognizable as the face swells, and the skin becomes a dark, congested hue (giving typhus its Irish name of black fever).  Temperature rises; in severe cases limbs twitch violently; patients rave in delirium, throwing themselves about, and as the fever becomes so intense some jump out of windows or into a river in search of cooling relief.  Additional symptoms include vomiting, agonizing sores develop, some-times gangrene causing the loss of fingers, toes, and feet.  The odor from the typhus patient is almost intolerable.  A medical officer of the Tralee jail where typhus was rampant wrote, “when the door was opened he was forcibly driven back by the smell.”

Relapsing fever is transmitted by a louse which has swallowed blood containing the micro organisms of the disease.  Once infected, progress is rapid.  High fever and vomiting begin within a few hours and continue for days.  A crisis with profuse sweating follows, succeeded by extreme exhaustion.  If the patient survives, the symptoms can be repeated three or four times before the fever leaves.  It is often accompanied by jaundice.  Observers in Cork in 1847 described victim’s skin as “all gaunt, yellow, hideous.”

Outbreaks of Dysentery, Dropsy, and Scurvy

Dysentery was rampant.  Bacillary dysentery, known as the bloody flux is caused by a group of bacilli in contaminated food and the excrement of infected humans and flies.  The bacilli are swallowed with infected food or inhaled from excrement and multiply in the stomach and bowels.  Inflamation, ulcers, and finally gangrene follow, with intense pain, diarrhea, violent straining, and the passing of clots of blood.  It was easy to tell who had the disease by the clots of blood on the ground around their cabins.

Another appalling infectious condition was famine dropsy.  Bennett of the Society of Friends described it in March 1847 as “that horrid disease – the results of long continued famine and low living – in which the limbs and body swell most frightfully and finally burst.”  Scurvy, previously unknown because the potato provided the necessary vitamin C, was prevalent.  Scurvy is painful and revolting.  Gums become spongy, teeth fall out, joints are enlarged causing acute suffering.  Blood vessels burst under the skin, especially on the legs.  In its advanced state, legs turn black up to the middle of the thigh.  The Irish called scurvy black leg.

By the spring of 1847 starvation had so reduced the people that Sidney Godophin Osborne, later one of Florence Nightingale’s helpers in the Crimea, wrote that “the skin had a peculiar appearance, rough and dry like parchment and hung in folds; eyes had sunk into the head, shoulder bones were so high the neck seemed to have sunk into the chest; faces were so wasted (they) looked like a skull; and there was an extraordinary pallor such as (he) had never seen before.  The starving children were skeletons, many too far gone to walk . . . many had lost their voices.”  He never heard a child  moan from pain or shed a tear.  Two, three, or four in a bed “lie and died, suffering, ever silent, unmoved.”

Irish Workhouses

In March 1847, the Central Board of Health sent doctors to inspect and report on conditions of the workhouses of Cork, Bandon, Bantry, and Lurgan.  The Cork workhouse was described as “utterly wretched and deplorable, (with) a death taking place every hour.”  It was over-crowded, lacked ventilation, the drains were deficient, and the stench almost insupportable, even in cold weather.  Bandon was without order and completely chaotic.  One-hundred-and-two boys slept in 24 beds in a ward 25 by 30 feet, in some cases six to a bed; 700 slept and ate in the hall.  There were 45 beds in the convalescent ward for 125 fever patients.  The drains were “revolting” and “disgusting stench lasts all day.”

The wards in the Bantry workhouse were clean and orderly, but “language couldn’t give an adequate idea of (the) state of its fever hospital,” the inspecting doctor said.  “It was appalling, awful, heart sickening.”  He “did not think it possible to exist in a civilized and Christian community.”  Fever patients were “lying naked on straw, the living and the dead together.  The doctor was ill and no one had been near the hospital for two days.  There was no medicine, no drink, no fire; wretched beings were crying out, ‘water, water’ but there was no one to give it to them; the sole attendant, a pauper nurse, was utterly unfit.”

Conditions in Lurgan were equally horrible.  The dead were buried four yards from the fever hospital and the hospital well was in the center of the burial ground.  The Master had died, the Matron was ill; two of the doctors were down with typhus; everything had fallen into confusion; and the Board of Guardians did not seem to know anything except that the workhouse was overcrowded.

Deaths in the workhouses and in hospitals were only part of the total.  Dublin doctors wrote that vast numbers of poor remained at home and never thought of applying for hospital care.  Many deaths were unrecorded because the horror of fever even conquered the bond of family affection.  Parents deserted their children; children their parents.  Neighbors, usually kind and generous, would not enter a cabin where fever was known to exist, and in lonely districts fever-stricken persons died without anyone coming near them, their bodies left to rot.  Families buried relatives in fields and on hillsides, intending “to get church rites for the bones in better times.”  In Clifden, corpses were burned, in other districts they were buried under the cabin floor.  In Leitrim, many were buried in ditches, unknown to anyone.  The total of those who died during the fever epidemics and of famine diseases will never be known, but probably about 10 times more died of disease than of starvation.

They Flee to North America and Great Britain

After the autumn and winter of 1846-47, terrified and desperate, the Irish began to flee.  Emigration was a lifesaver for the man or woman able to afford passage.  The London Times “gloated over the Irish exodus, and gleefully announced that in a short time a Celt would be as rare in Ireland as a red Indian on the shores of Manhattan.”  Of the million Irish who emigrated   They crossed the ocean to Canada and the United States or the Irish sea to Britain. landing at Liverpool, Glasgow, and the ports of south Wales.  Fever went with them and the path to a new life became a path of horror.

The vast majority who left in 1846 went to Canada despite their belief justice and opportunity would be denied them under the Union Jack.  Some considered Canada an Ireland with more room.  They believed the U. S. offered greater opportunity, a belief reinforced by the 1839 report of Lord Durham, Canadian High Commissioner and Governor General, who contrasted the two sides of the border as follows: “On the American side all is bustle and activity; on the British side, with the exception of a few favored spots, all seems waste and desolation.  The ancient City of Montreal which is naturally the commercial capital of Canada, will not bear the least comparison with Buffalo, which is the creation of yesterday.”

To offset the attractions of the U.S., the British made passage to Canada cheaper and gave free passage into the interior for those who declared their intentions to settle in Canada.  The desire to populate Canada was not the only reason Britain encouraged Irish emigration.  It wanted to prevent migration into England.  In 1827, 18 years before the famine, a Parliamentary committee proposed low fares to their North American colonies so the mother country wouldn’t be deluged “with poverty and wretchedness and equalize the state of the English and Irish peasantry.”  But cheaper passage didn’t work.  After reaching Canada, many walked across the border into the U.S.

The first immigrant ship arrived at Québec April 24, 1846.  From early August until the ice closed the St. Lawrence river, an unprecedented number reached Québec.  The 1847 flight, for the first time in history, began in the winter.  Despite it being the most sever winter in living memory, about 30,000 landed in the U. S.  An officer of the Society of Friends described emigrants boarding ships as “joyful at their escape, as from a doomed land.”  A landlord at Tervoe was begged by his tenants for assistance to emigrate as “the greatest blessing he could bestow.”

Three-quarters of emigrants crossing the Atlantic sailed from Liverpool; 95 percent were Irish.  As no passenger could board his vessel until the cargo had been loaded, the emigrant had to spend at least one, generally two or three nights, in the low Irish lodging houses of Liverpool.  The squalor and filth of the houses was notorious and thousands who had escaped typhus infection in Ireland were infected before leaving Liverpool.

“Coffin Ships”

They thought they were headed to the shores of “the best poor man’s country on earth” and up the streets of New York where they believed “every day is like Christmas for the meat.”  More than 85,000 sailed directly from Irish ports: Sligo, Dublin, Baltimore, Ballina, Westport, Tralee, and Killala.  Fewer left from Waterford because access to Liverpool was easier.  Their wild desire to get out combined with utter ignorance of the sea and of geography, caused many to book ships that were overcrowded and which sailed without adequate provisions.  Some were called “coffin ships.”

A typical example of a coffin ship was the 330 ton barque Elizabeth and Sarah built in 1762.  It sailed from Killala, County Mayo, in July 1847, arriving at Québec in September.  The officer at Killala certified 212 passengers; she carried 276.  She should have carried 12,532 gallons of water but only had 8,700 gallons in leaky casks.  The law required seven pounds of provisions be given weekly to each passenger.  No distribution was ever made.  She had 36 berths, four for the crew, 32 shared by 276 passengers who otherwise slept on the deck.  No sanitary convenience of any kind was provided and the state of the vessel was “horrible and disgusting beyond the power of language to describe.”  During the eight-week crossing, passengers starved and were tortured by thirst.  ‘Forty-two died.  The ship broke down and was towed into the St. Lawrence by a steamer.

Few Emigrants Had Technical Skills

Few Irish brought technical skills to their new home.  They were not carpenters, butchers, green grocers, glaziers, masons, or tailors.  For most, their knowledge was limited to the spade-culture of a  potato patch.  The majority drifted into unskilled, irregular, badly-paid work, cleaning yards and stables, unloading vehicles and ships, and pushing carts.

The emigrants who left after the failure of 1848 were of a class Ireland could ill afford to lose.  To deter immigration of the helpless and diseased, fares to Canada were raised so the small ruined farmer couldn’t leave.  Farmers of substance left for the U.S.  Landlords offered to defer their rent for a year if they stayed.  There were few takers.

Half of all Irish immigrants to the U.S. before, during, and after the famine disembarked at New York, a city of 630,000, half immigrants.  Boston was the second most popular port.  The Irish looked upon New York as “heaven’s front parlor” and soon its Irish population was larger than Dublin’s.  Their first view was heavily wooded Staten Island and the spiral of Trinity Episcopal Church.  Horse-drawn street cars moved up Fifth Avenue to 34th Street where “the sticks” began.  Harlem was a country town.  Right off, the immigrant was in for three disappointments.  First, the streets weren’t paved with gold.  Second, they weren’t paved at all.  Third, he would be expected to pave them.

The Irish Quarter

Upon arrival, they went straight to the Irish quarter, called “Irish town,” “Paddy town,” or “The Irish Channel,” and associated exclusively with fellow-countrymen and had no contact with American culture or American ideas.  They took longer to be accepted, longer to become genuinely assimilated, and waited longer for the opportunities offered by the United States.  “Their glimpses of American manners, morals, and religion were few and faint,” wrote an American journalist.

It was a hideous life and the way to forget was to drink.  Whiskey dulled physical pain, disappointment, and bereavement.  Birthdays, weddings, christenings, and national and political festivals were celebrated with whiskey.  The words “Irishman” and “drunkard” became synonymous.  A drunken, fighting, law-breaking man was the Irish image.  United and isolated by clannishness, they were soon exploited by the political bosses.  The vote of the naturalized Irishman was as good as the vote of any New England Yankee and his vote was bought with a glass of whiskey and jobs and favors handed out at political headquarters.

But the newcomers demonstrated incredible generosity and filial love by saving to bring brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and parents over to join them.  Their frugality became a banking legend.  In the 15 years after the famine they sent home $65 million in Letters from America, as remittances were called.  New York’s Emigrant Industrial bank, founded in 1851 to protect the savings of Irish laborers, remitted $30 million to Ireland in its first three decades.  “Such a beautiful story of un-forgotten affection is unmatched in the world records of human attachment,” said Robert Murray, an unsentimental Scot who was chief officer of the Provincial Bank on the receiving end in Ireland.

T. N. Redington, Under Secretary for Ireland and a Galway landlord, pronounced the famine over at the end of 1849.  There were about a million destitute in the workhouses and on relief at the time.

Kerian Dolan and Patrick Darmody Move to the U.S.

If you were Kerian Dolan and Patrick Darmody, both my great grandfathers, and living in Ireland during the famine years, do you think you would have stayed?

Kerian, believed to be born in County Cork, arrived at the Port of New York 15 October 1849 aboard the DeWitt Clinton from Liverpool.  The passenger manifest identified him as a 23-year-old farmer.  John Dolan, 26, who may be his brother, was listed on the second line below Kieran.  If the manifest is correct, Kieran’s birth year is 1826.

He married Margaret O’Rourke, ca  1858.  She  was born 3 Dec. 1839, probably in Ireland, and died in Minnesota 6 Feb. 1898.  They had five sons and five daughters, Thomas, my great grandfather, born 24 January 1859 or 1860 in New York State, the oldest, and William, probably born in Minnesota in 1886, the youngest.  According to his obituary, Kieran died 18 Sept. 1907 at St. Mary’s hospital in Minneapolis.  He had been a resident of Minnesota for more than 40 years.  The funeral was at the home of his son Thomas at 1514 6th St. N., Minneapolis.   Kerian and Margaret are buried in St. Anne Cemetery in Hamel, Minnesota.

Entry way to Ste. Jesnne de Chantal  Cementery in Corcoran, Minnesota where Didas, Angeline and Flevia (Trudeau) Scott are buried.

Blaine Whipple in St. Anne Cemetery in  at the Kerian and Margaret Dolan Memorial.

The family was in Minnesota by 1866, 15 years after Kieran arrived in New York.  Those are lost years as I have not been able to find him until the move to Minnesota.  They eventually lived in Walnut Lake Township, Faribault Co. where on 1 August 1872,  Kerian was granted a 160-acre homestead in “the west half of the southeast quarter and the east half of the southwest quarter of Section 17 in township 103 of Range 25 in the District of lands subject to sale at Jackson, Minnesota.   Ulysses S. Grant was president.   They moved to Plymouth Township in Hennepin Co. ca 1876.   Antoine LeCount, Plymouth’s first settler, had arrived about 23 years earlier.

My Dolan Lineage: (6) Blaine Whipple-Ines M. Peterson,, (5) Pearl Julia Scott-Blaine Whipple, (4) Ellen Nellie Dolan-Benoni Scott, (3)Thomas Dolan-Julia Darmody, (2) Kerian Dolan-Margaret O”Rourke, (1) Roger Dolan.

Patrick Darmody was born ca 1821 and arrived at the port of New York from Waterford, Ireland 20 May 1850 on the Bark Alert.  His age was listed as 17 on the passenger manifest which would suggest a birth year of 1833.  However, St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church in Osseo, Minn. records his death of brain fever as 5 Dec. 1879, age 58.  If the church records are correct, his birth year was 1821.  His tombstone in St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Maple Grove, Minn. list the place of birth as County Tipperary.

He married Ellen (maiden name believed to be Peters).  According to the 1870 U.S. Census for Minnesota, her place of birth was Ireland.  She was born between 1820 and 1825 and died 14 October 1893 in Maple Grove.  They had two sons and four daughters, including Julia, my great grandmother, born 25 February 1862, all born in Minnesota.  The 1870 census places them on a 120-acre farm in Maple Grove Township.

Maple Grove had large forests of hard or sugar maple. There was an abundance of water with several fine streams and lakes providing a variety of fish for the settlers.  As the land was cleared, the rich black loam topsoil was productive and the farmers prospered.

According the Minnesota State Census of 1869, their farm of 20 improved, 20 unimproved, and 80 acres of woodland was valued at $1,200.  Livestock included 2 horses, 4 milk cows, 3 other cattle, 5 swine, and 1 sheep all valued at $415.  They sold $30 of forest products, slaughtered $145 worth of farm animals, raised 200 bushels of spring wheat, 30 bushels of Indian corn, 150 bushel of oats, 4 bushel of peas and beans, 60 bushels of Irish potatoes, 11 tons of hay, and 300 pounds of butter.  The estimated value of the products was $598.

My Darmody Lineage: (5) Blaine Whipple-Ines M. Peterson,, (4) Pearl Julia Scott-Blaine Whipple, (3) Ellen Nellie Dolan-Benoni Scott, (2) Thomas Dolan-Julia Darmody, (1) Patrick Darmody-Ellen Peters.

My Earliest Irish Ancestors Move to Canada

My first Irish ancestor, Andre (Andrew) Scott, emigrated to Canada before 1759.  He and his first wife, Charlotte lived together for a number of years before their marriage was solemnized by the Catholic church.  The record of their marriage performed by Father Mennard is as follows:

“The twenty-third May, 1779, I, the undersigned Pastor of St. Joseph de Chambly, heard the confession and gave communion to the man named Andre Scot of Irish nationality, native of Sligo, son of Jean Scot and of Marie Cracheten, his father and mother of the said parish of Sligo in Ireland and Charlotte Serre dit St. Jean, widow of first nuptials with Michel Barthelot of the parish of Montreal, and on the same day, by a specific and special directive from Monsieur Montgolfier, Vicar General of the diocese of Quebec, without publication of any bann, I received the mutual consent of marriage of the said Andre Scot and of the said Charlotte Serre dit St. Jean, presently living in the Seignneurie of M. de Labruaire, parish of Longueuil, and gave them the nuptial blessing following the rite prescribed by our holy mother the church in the presence of Francois Petrimoulx, captain of the militia, Jean Pairaut, and Charles Genese, residents of this parish, who all signed with us, the spouses having declared themselves unable to sign, and in view of the fact, before their marriage, the said spouses had children together, of whom three are still living, namely Andre, Joseph, and Charlotte, whom they have acknowledged and do acknowledge in the present company and in the presence of the said witnesses as being their own children and their legitimate heirs in the future.  At Chambly the day, month, and year stated.  Signed Francois Petrimoulx, Jean Pairaut, Charles Genest, Mennard, priest.”

Andre married second on 6 May 1790 Lucie Truchon.  Their marriage contract stated Andre Scott lived in the Seiniory of Montarville and was the widower of deceased Charlotte Serre.  Advising him on the contract were his son Andre and friends Francois Treant and Joseph Lacombe.  The bride was identified as Lucie Truchon de Leveille and defunct Marie Denoyon.  She was advised by her sisters Marie Catherine Truchon and Marie Louise Truchon, and her brother-in-law Jean de Thiriagne.

The contract provided that the “future married couple” would openly disclose all their personal property, house and land and any acquired after the marriage and to treat it like “the customs of Paris, followed in the Province of Quebec,” i.e. as community property except property and revenue valued at 350£  sterling and two coppers or shillings, old rate of exchange brought to the union by Lucie.  They agreed that any debt at the time of the marriage was the responsibility of the one who incurred it.  The contract described Andre as an “elderly man” with “weakness” and he agreed to bestow and reward his future wife “for labors and for her full attentions during their life” all of his property, then valued at 900£ sterling, old rate of exchange, after his death.  The contract was read aloud and signed in the notary’s chambers (Maitre S. Racicot, Notary) at Poncherville borough, Montreal “in front of witnesses who signed and the future couple and others appearing who did not know to sign.”  Andre and Lucie each signed with an X. Notary Racicot and Joseph Lacombe signed as witnesses.  Andre and Lucie were married 22 years.  He was buried 10 July 1812, age 99, at Chambly.

The Scotts Leave Canada for the U.S.

Why did the Scotts leave Canada for the U. S?  Interestingly, for the same reason the Dolans and the Darmodys left Ireland:  A failing economy and an inability to adequately support and educate their families.

Chambly is about 50 miles northeast of Montreal.  Other than Montreal and Québec, the  the Province was agricultural and nine out of ten residents lived in this rural environment.  The family farm was the basic unit of production and oriented toward self sufficiency.  Wheat was the major cash crop and the success or failure of its harvest largely determined the prosperity of artisans, mechanics, and small businessmen employed in villages where mills were located.  Peas and potatoes were major items in the diet.

The farmer was inefficient.  He tilled the soil, planted, and harvested according to age-old custom and stubbornly resisted change.  He did not use fertilizer, kept turning the same topsoil with a shallow plow, sowed unclean and unimproved seed infested with insects and subject to  blight, allowed weeds to grow everywhere, and knew little about crop rotation.  Wheat was planted in the same fields yearly until signs of declining productivity forced the farmer to move to the fallow areas.  As one observer wrote, “deprived for 90 years of all means of improvement and devoid of professional teaching, agriculture in Quebec could only end by a degeneration into a deplorable routine.”

By 1838 when the Diocese of Québec only had 178 Catholic schools, few could read and write.  This educational backwardness among a peasant society perpetuated their strong conservatism and resistance to change, even when change was to their benefit.  In 1849, the Québec Parliament studied the relationship between education and agricultural improvement and concluded without education, agriculture would not improve.  But it took many decades before education at the primary grade level was required.  As is evident in both the early Scott families, when signatures were required on records, the priest and/or the Notary who wrote the document found it necessary to add the phrase “ils n’ont su ssigne,” meaning they could not write – not even their names.

Simultaneously, land had become scarce and increasingly expensive.  Under the seigneury system, absentee landowners did not pay their taxes and ignored their responsibilities toward the construction of roads, bridges, and drains, and authorities seldom repaired roads that were in deplorable condition much of the year.  Since the area was unable to support a growing population and farmers lacked capital to purchase tillable land, the French-Canadians began leaving in large numbers about 1840.   Substantial numbers settled in the Upper Mid West.  In 1851, the Illinois Canadian population of about 8,000 grew to about 20,000 by 1859.  Wisconsin and Minnesota attracted a large number.

THE FIRST SCOTT TO EMIGRATE TO THE U.S.

My great great grandfather Joseph was born in Chambly between 1815 and 1821 and died of dysentery 17 May 1872 in Corcoran, Minn. He married Flevia Trudeau 12 January 1841 in Chambly.  A  daughter of Toussaint Trudeau and Marie Monty, she was born in Chambly in 1821 and died in Corcoran 15 October 1906. The family, which included 5 daughters and 2 sons, moved to Illinois by 1850.  They were among the first settlers to arrive in Corcoran in 1855.  Corcoran is in the northwestern part of Hennepin Co., bounded on the north by Hassan, on the east by Maple Grove, on the south by Medina, and on the west by Greenwood.  By section lines, it is 12 miles west of Minneapolis and five miles north.  Benjamin Punder, the first settler, also arrived in 1855 as did  R.B. Corcoran and on 11 May 1858, at a meeting in Corcoran’s house, the town was organized and by common consent took his name.  The town was entirely agricultural with no village or large settlement and no thoroughfare other than the State and town roads.  The timber was gradually cut and comfortable farm houses replaced settler’s cabins.

In 1855 the family included Joseph, 40, Flevia, 35, Joseph, Jr, 13, Didas, 11,  Sedaly, 9, Matilda, 8, and Elizabeth, 5; all born in Canada except Elizabeth who was born in Illinois.  Joseph acquired a 120-acre farm in Section 29 and began his farming career.  The land was heavily timbered with maple, oak, elm, and linden.  Interspersed among the timber were low lands of natural meadow.  The topsoil was heavy, black loam and produced grain, Indian corn, potatoes, hay, small fruits, and vegetables.

The farm was valued at $960 in 1869 and included 25 improved, 55 unimproved, and 40 woodland acres.  Personal property was valued at $421, livestock at $366.  He owned 2 horses, 4 milk cows, 2 other cattle, 4 sheep, and 3 swine.  His machinery was valued at $85 and his farm production:  16 pounds of wool, 150 pounds of butter, 900 pounds of maple sugar, seven gallons of molasses, 10 tons of hay, 150 bushels of spring wheat, 200 bushels of oats, 100 bushels of Indian corn, and one bushel of peas and beans at $430.  They sold $20 worth of forest products and slaughtered farm animals worth $40.

According to the 1870 U.S. Minnesota census, Joseph, Joseph, Jr., and Didas had become U.S. citizens.  Joseph and Flevia were recorded as “unable to read or write.”  Didas worked as a farm hand for his father and at the time of Joseph’s death, the farm passed to him.  Joseph, Jr. had previously acquired and was farming the adjacent 120 acres.  The census of 1880 and 1900 show that Flevia was living with Didas and his family.

My great grandfather, Didas was born 27 Nov.1844 and died 27 April 1929 in Corcoran of apoplexy.  He married Angeline Hamel 23 Nov. 1868 and they raised 8 sons and 4 daughters, all born in Corcoran.  Angeline, daughter of Lange Charles Hamel and Eugenie Moffett, died 2 May 1915.  Lange was farming in what became Hamel, Hennepin Co. early in 1855.  After building a log cabin, his wife, 7 sons and 6 daughters joined him in 1856.  They emigrated from St. Eloi Parish, Quebec.  St. Anne’s Catholic Church and Cemetery were built on the edge of their farm and the railroad depot on land owned by their son William.  They are buried in the cemetery.

Blaine Whipple at Hamel grave site.

Contemporaries   remember Didas as a  successful farmer, a gregarious, friendly fellow, quick to tell a story, and a good neighbor.  French was his native tongue.  He never spoke English, and could not read or write.  In 1873, at 28 and with a wife and three children to support, he had to cope with the financial panic of that year as well as with a severe blizzard.  While still reeling from those two setbacks, he was faced with the grasshopper plagues of 1874 and 1876.  He, his wife Angelina, and mother Flevia are buried in the French Corcoran Cemetery, Ste. Jesnne de Chantal.  A large tombstone marks their grave.

My Scott Lineage: (9) Blaine Whipple-Ines M. Peterson,, (8) Pearl Julia Scott-Blaine Whipple, (7) Benoni Scott-Ellen Nellie Dolan, (6) Didas Scott-Angelina Hamel, (5) Joseph Scott-Philomene (Flevia)Trudeau, (4) Andre Scott-Sophie Demers, (3) Andre Scott-Marie Ursule Trahan, (2) Andrew Scott-Charlotte Serre, (1) Jean Scott-Marie Cracheten.

The move to America by my three sets of Irish ancestors resulted in a far better and healthier life for them, their families, and descendants.

Nellie Dolan, my grandmother (1884-1953), whose mother was Julia Darmody (1862-1899 ) and who married Ben Scott (1882-1935) united our three Irish emigrant families.  She and Ben had 14 children — 7 sons and 7 daughters.  Two of the daughters died young:  Lydia at about age 2 and the first Alice Irene of bronchial pneumonia three days after birth.

Picture taken in Underwood, McClain  County, North Dakota in the mid 1930s.

Front row:  Robert (B0b), Nellie, Alice.

Second row:  Clara, Edwidge (Tuts), Pearl Julia, Margaret (Babe).

Last row:  Arthur (Bud), Donald, John (Jack), William (Bill), Gordon, Leonard (Pete).

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