On May 29, 1884, a huge ship named the Furnessia, pulled up to the little island of Valentia, on the western coast of Kerry, Ireland. It was far too big to meet the shore, as Valentia hosted only little fishing boats. Waiting ashore were hundreds of locals who were leaving for America. A British charity was sponsoring their trip to a new life in America. In exchange, they were relinquishing all holdings in Ireland—abandoning one life for another. This was the third boatload in two years from this place, and boarding were my ancestors, the Lynches. They travelled in the steerage with their neighbors for a week-long Atlantic crossing into the unknown. Fearing another famine, the charity had created what they sometimes referred to as a “deportation” to remove these desperate citizens, rather than worry about them later.
Michael Lynch, my great grandfather was 18 when he left Ireland on the Furnessia, and was 31 when he rented this house in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He had just started his family. His wife, Theresa O’Day, was an American-born woman from Manhattan—the daughter of an Irish immigrant, as well. Rumor has it the O’Days were not pleased that she had married a new immigrant. They had wished to move on, and move up in social status.
There are newspaper articles which can be found online describing the immigrants departing the very ship that took the Lynches to New York. From the Morning Journal, June 5, 1884: “England’s Pauper Poor: Still Being Landed in this Country By the Hundred – And They Are Almost as Rapidly Being Sent Back.” The article goes on to say, “Superintendent Jackson told the reporter that any or all of the assistant immigrants who had no friends in this country would be sent back at the expense of the line that brought them. A year before, immigrants from the same place were described in the New York Herald as “…of the class that should be prevented from living here.” Somehow, the seven Lynches made their way to Norwich, Connecticut, joining family and neighbors from previous trips—starting a new life of hard work in textile mills and service jobs.
Visiting the Relatives 