The Pretender

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

Saplings

By the trunk of every family tree are saplings that we suspect are connected somewhere below. James Lynch is one of those saplings. I know a lot about him, but not where we connect. He and his wife, Margaret Collins, were both Irish immigrants—James arriving in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1857. The two married in 1859

Crowded House

Michael Lynch left his family’s tiny patch of rented turf on the shore of Dingle Bay in 1855 with his new bride Mary Fenton, and headed to Connecticut, never to return. (One census states that Mary came a year after her husband.) Michael ended up in Bozrahville, Connecticut, a little mill town on the Yantic

So Many Sullivans

Soon after her husband died in 1898, my great-grandmother Mary Sullivan Lynch moved into this mill house in Norwich, Connecticut, with her son Timothy. This was one of a number of identical brick houses, built by the Yantic River in 1855 for workers of the big Falls Company textile mill, a short walk away. These

Presidential Connections

President Millard Fillmore (1800-1874) and I are related. It’s true. Really. The 13th US President’s great-grandfather, Captain John Fillmore II (1701-1777), who lived in this house in Norwich, Connecticut, is also my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather. It’s that simple. Captain John II was the son of an English immigrant, John Fillmore, who came from Manchester, England and

What is Lost

A project I’m currently working on is researching my immigrant ancestors and drawing at the places where they lived. It combines two hot topics of contemporary American times: immigration and genealogy. Often the records I find resemble the immigrant ancestor’s house that stood before me in this picture—far from complete. To piece together a family

Pleasing Characteristics

My immigrant great-great-grandmother Mary Sullivan Lynch lived in this house for a year in 1903 with her son Timothy. She was a widow at the time. I’m confident that she had little or nothing to do with the church next door which was built in 1890 because she was a Catholic and belonged to St.

Gun Factory

It must have been an odd transition for the Lynches to relocate from farming the oceanfront bog lands of Cahersiveen, Kerry, Ireland, to the factory life in the small industrial city of Norwich, Connecticut, in the 1800s. Among the places that my ancestors worked, was here, at the big now-empty firearms factory downtown. Connecticut has

Mill Workers

I grew up in a mill town. Massive red brick structures like this one sat abandoned along the Blackstone River in Cumberland, Rhode Island. They were the beached whales of the Industrial Revolution. Nowadays, some have been converted to condominiums with wonderful loft spaces. Some are scrappy artists’ studios. Others wait and rot.  Norwich, Connecticut,

Upstairs Downstairs

This is not the mansion where Mary Lynch worked and lived in 1900 in Norwich, Connecticut. That was down by the other end of Sachem Street, on broad beautiful Washington Street. This is the multi-family house where she died in 1938. Mary was living at that time with her retired, widowed brother John, her widowed