The most famous immigrant ancestor of the Lynches was Jeremiah, a great-granduncle. He was an actor with a dramatic life. As an 11-year-old, he was working in a textile mill in Pawcatuck, Connecticut – his poor family having just arrived in the US from County Kerry. Somehow, from that start, he grew up to become an actor on the Vaudeville stage.
Jeremiah took the stage name David Walters and through deep digging in old Playbill magazines, he can be tracked performing in theaters all over the western part of the US from 1909 until his untimely death in 1925. He was a regular in Scranton’s Summer Stock where many shows were developed before moving to New York venues. In advertisements, he’s described as “Scranton’s Favorite Actor”. Jeremiah was never a movie star but he received some nice reviews for his acting on stage. Embarrassingly, some of the shows he performed in, featured actors in blackface.
Home addresses for the actor are nearly impossible to find. He eluded almost every census and city directory. Only in 1910 is he listed as existing – living in Norwich with his mother. I don’t believe he was there. (The house is gone now.) Even his death certificate had no home address and listed only the office of the actors’ union in New York. Finding the photo of him was a result of exhaustive digging – practically a miracle. He certainly looked like my grandfather – who, I learned from his obituary, was a pallbearer at the actor’s funeral. It was there that he witnessed the revelation of a remarkable secret – that Jeremiah Lynch had two families at the same time and that they only learned of each other at his death.
Jeremiah Patrick Lynch was 51 when he died in New York’s Bellevue Hospital. He was buried alone in his parents’ plot. The show was over.
Visiting the Relatives 