Coming to America

When the Irish came to American in the 1800s, they did so with very, very little. I have a small wooden box that one of my ancestors carried with her. Another may have had a small satchel. I’m only guessing this because she brought with her a Lusterware pitcher that she had given her mother perhaps as a birthday gift not long before she left. Her mother gifted it back and told her to give it to the oldest daughter of the oldest daughter. I have it in my secretary desk.

I imagine that conversation sometimes. Her mother was ill, and I know she told her daughter, there’s nothing for you here. I know this because it was part of an oral history in my family. My grandmother told my mother the story and my mother told me. I can imagine the grief carried by my great-great grandmother, Margaret Ryan. You don’t just leave a mother.

Imagine a mother saying goodbye to an adult female. She’d never know whether the girl she brought into the world would have children of her own. If she would find a man who treated her with respect and kindness. All she had to have known was that there was truly nothing to offer in Ireland. Margaret Ryan was twenty-five years old and probably scrapping by. Go to America where there might be more promise. She’d never know if her mother died and if she was well taken care of. I imagine walking her away from everything she knew, those last looks serving as the last memories of her home.

Margaret left Tipperary, Limerick, Ireland, with her brother Michael. The year was 1850. As far as I know, there were no letters home, no letters written and sent back. Maybe one hastily written, ‘I made it’. And that’s assuming she could read or write. They landed in Syracuse, New York. Michael worked the Erie Canal. And he got Cholera and died. And that left her alone.

Somewhere between 1850 and 1855 she met a man named Thomas Casey. She married him and in 1857 had a son named Michael, and then Thomas, Margaret, Hanora, and James.

I’m three quarters Irish. Every ancestor from Ireland heard the same words from a parent. There is nothing for you here. One fled for fighting against the British. Everything that was familiar in their life stopped the minute they got on the ship heading for America. The paths they used to take, the shops, the sounds on the streets, the conversations, the animals, the smells of the ocean air, all gone.

With all those memories they also left a life of poverty and the workhouse, and starvation. Fears of British oppression, prison and being thrown into slavery. Did my ancestors fear the poor house? Did they have nothing to their name? Some did, I know.

I am the fifth generation from Ireland, the sixth oldest daughter to have the lusterware pitcher. Margaret Ryan’s mother probably thought her daughter was out of her mind spending money on such a thing. But all these generations later I feel Ireland. And I feel the loss. I feel disconnected from a past that was broken off as if my family were a limb taken from the tree and the sustaining roots to the earth. I know who I am as an American, but I don’t know those roots.