Visiting the Relatives

Times Have Changed

15 Trumbell Street, Stonington Borough, Stonington, Connecticut

It took me two tries to draw this house, where lived the family of Timothy Lynch, an immigrant ancestor of mine. The house sits on a short dead-end street in the town of Stonington, Connecticut. Actually it’s in the charming section of that town called the “Borough.” Residents of the town make the distinction clear because the Borough is more upscale than other parts of this seaside community. Cute shops and cool bars line the one main road which runs down a peninsula packed with perfect little houses like this one. Many are weekend houses for people who live away from the ocean. From the tip of the Borough, you can look over the Atlantic to see the edge of Long Island, New York, and the nearby Rhode Island town of Watch Hill.

The first time I came to draw, the view of the house was blocked by a huge new shiny Land Rover. On the second visit, in early June, it was a picture-perfect day, followed by a beautiful sunset. Times have changed. In 1930, when Timothy Lynch lived here, this was not a fancy place. Timothy was an iron moulder, working in the foundry of a big mill around the corner called the Atwood Machine Company. Actually, every family on his street had a worker either in that mill (13 total) or the nearby ribbon mill (2). The only other worker on the street was Mary Robinson, who was a school teacher. Her father worked in the Atwood mill. The Robinsons were the only full family on the street without an immigrant. Julius Williams was born in Massachusetts, but his wife and parents were from Portugal. Everyone else on the street, including most of the children, were from Portugal. The Williams family was the only one that owned their house. Everyone else rented, including Irish immigrants Timothy and Elizabeth (Galligan) Lynch and their two Stonington-born children.

1930 US Census, Stongton Borough, Stonington, Connecticut

Pearl Street

Both the accused billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and my great-great-great-grandmother Ellen (O’Connell) O’Day died at the same place. It’s true! In 1881, Ellen died from a fall down the steps. She was very old, 93, and lived with her son James and his family at 479 1/2 Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, near the Brooklyn Bridge. She and her son were Irish immigrants. In the 1880 census, it states that Ellen could neither read nor write… English, that is. Perhaps Irish was her first language. Anyway, the entire neighborhood that the O’Days lived in is gone now. What was often referred to as a slum was replaced by government buildings and public housing high-rises. The exact place where the O’Day’s tenement building was is now a prison: The Metropolitan Correctional Center. It has housed many notorious criminals and sits behind federal courthouses.

When I drew there last spring, I didn’t quite know what I was looking at. It doesn’t look like a prison. I thought it was simply an ugly federal office building. I did like the old lamppost though, and how it represents the past.

Undated photograph of across the street from 479 Pearl Street, Manhattan, NY

Off to War

46 Warren Street, West End Neighborhood, Providence, Rhode Island

My grandfather, John Lynch, left this place in 1916 at age 21 to fight in WW1. His brother James went two years later. They both worked in local factories. The house they left behind is gone now. Today it’s a dirty, fenced, parking lot. Across the street is an empty industrial building. John’s immigrant father had died young, only a few years before, leaving his wife to raise five children alone. John was the oldest son. A year after enlisting in the Army, he came home from France with a bullet in his leg and some war medals. The neighborhood of my grandfather’s youth probably hasn’t changed much. The West Side of Providence is still industrial, gritty, and full of immigrants.

Suburban

297 Ronald Avenue, Cumberland, Rhode Island

This is the house I grew up in. Cumberland, Rhode Island. My parents still live here. They were the second owners of this “ranch” house which was built in 1956. The world I grew up in was middle-class suburban. In my neighborhood, surrounded by woods, swamps and former farmlands, almost every house and family was the same size. Everyone lived in a house of their own. Most mothers did not work outside the home. Many of the fathers’ jobs were blue-collar—like truck drivers, carpenters, and utility workers. Lots of union people. My father was a teacher, and then a school vice principal. My mother was a nurse. I lived in a completely white, largely Catholic town. Diversity for us was about whether someone was Irish American, Italian American, French Canadian, or Protestant. The newest immigrant group to town was the Portuguese, who lived near, and worked in, the mills that used to employ many of our grandparents, or great grandparents.

1973 Lynch family photo (artist with white tie)

Beach Bothered

Good Harbor Beach, Gloucester, Massachusetts

Perhaps I was trespassing when I visited and drew by Bass Rocks, overlooking Gloucester’s Little Good Harbor Beach on a beautiful evening in June. Nearby was a sign telling me that visitors were not welcome. However, I felt a little entitled to be there, actually. You see, nine generations ago, my ancestor John Rowe, an immigrant from Devonshire, England, owned this whole area. That was in the 1650s. Rowe had lived in the settlements of Dedham and Salem before becoming the first white settler here, outside the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. History books tell us that John Rowe didn’t like this area as much I did. He expressed some buyer’s remorse for his remote home, then surrounded by forest and ocean. Rowe ranted that he was of a mind to “set his house on fire & run away by ye light” and stated that he wished to “live no longer among such a company of hell hounds.” For the insults, the community ordered him to pay a small fine and to apologize at the next town meeting. Despite his being disgruntled, he lived the rest of his years here.

Old Guard

St. James Church, St. James Street, Lower East Side, New York, New York

The second oldest Catholic Church in Manhattan is where my earliest Irish immigrant ancestors were married in 1866. Ellen Shea, who had escaped the Irish Potato Famine in Kilgarvan, Kerry, with her mother and sister, arrived in 1851 with many of her extended family and neighbors. James O’Dea came around 1865, but I’m not able to pinpoint his hometown—my best guess being Ballydesmond, Cork.

This was a rough and tumble area back then. An extreme version is presented in the film, The Gangs of New York. – St. James Church was built in 1836 and spent its early years on the defensive. Long ago, there was a gate across the front as protection from anti-Catholic mobs. Also in 1836 the Ancient Order of Hibernians was founded. A plaque on the church wall points out that the Order was formed for “…those dauntless Catholic Irishmen… penniless and alone in a strange land,” “to be a bulwark of faith and fatherland, a protector of the weak and friendless, and a defender of American democracy.” The Hibernians are now best known for running New York City’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

As for the Church, perhaps it’s on the defensive again. Although saved from demolition in 1986, it is closed now, due to fire damage. A woman on the street who looked at my drawing asked with great enthusiasm, “Can you imagine that as a house? That would be incredible!”

1866 Marraige record, St. James Parish, Manhattan, New York

Paupers Landing

Castle Clinton, Battery Park, New York, New York

The Lynches walked through this big doorway uninvited and poor on June 7, 1884. Before them, other ancestors, the O’Days, did the same in the spring of 1865. Millions of Americans can trace their families to this doorway at the southern tip of Manhattan. Built as a fort in 1811, Castle Clinton (named in 1815 for NYC mayor DeWitt Clinton) was created to protect New York from invasion. However, the sandstone structure was repurposed in 1855 to become the first official immigration center in the United States, which was known as Castle Garden. Millions passed through, having departed from their homelands by ship, before Ellis Island became the new immigration center in 1892. As I sat and drew on a quiet overcast day, families of many colors and languages passed by me on their way to enter the roofless structure to buy ferry tickets to the Statue of Liberty .

Mount Hope

55 Camp Street, Mt. Hope Neighborhood, Providence, Rhode Island

The photograph that follows this drawing of stairs is from October, 1958. That’s my mother, the bride at the top of those stairs. Her father—my grandfather—is at the top, too. This house was one of a few places where my grandparents lived. They were the children of immigrants and never owned a house. They always lived near extended family in the working-class neighborhood of Mount Hope in Providence, Rhode Island. Last week, across town from there, my mother suffered an acute stroke before my very eyes. Help came quickly since she was at the hospital at the time, and that made all the difference. She is recovering well—home now after a week of tests and recovery. On the day of the stroke, I went and found the staircase and drew. I was so glad to find that after all these years, it survived .

1958 Wedding, 55 Camp Street, Providence

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 story takes countless hours of digging, cross-referencing, and speculation. The drawings have taken me to places I’ve never been, even in cities that I thought I knew. Many places are filled with new immigrants. Some are lost to decay, or have changed dramatically. Entire neighborhoods are gone, due to “Urban Renewal.” Some are nicely preserved after over century and a half. What doesn’t change are the surprises that come from uncovering a long tangled web of immigrants that formed my family and the American story.

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. Mary’s church, down the street. But I drew it anyway, because it was an interesting next-door neighbor. Mary had ten children, according to a census form, of which I have found records of eight, including two that I believe died as children back in Ireland, where they were very poor. When Mary died in 1911, the obituary in the newspaper described her this way: “She was a woman of pleasing characteristics, and her death will be deeply regretted.”