Visiting the Relatives

Irish Connector

422 Academy Avenue, Elmhurst Neighborhood, Providence, Rhode Island

Catherine “Kate” McMahon came to America in 1900, and last year, from a farm in County Kerry, Ireland, I got a message from someone looking for her. Kate was the McMahon that left. The rest had stayed behind in the then gritty city of Cork. My online family tree had provided the missing link for the searcher from Ireland. Kate went to America and married a man from her old neighborhood soon after. She took his name – O’Connor, and evidently was lost track of over time. I know a little about Kate because she was my great-grandmother.

This house on Academy Avenue in Providence, Rhode Island was her residence until nearly when she died in 1939 at the age of 61. She was renting an apartment with three of her ten grown children: Margaret who was a “typist,” and Frank and Bernie, who worked at the same big rubber factory that their late father had worked.

A long time ago, I wrote to Margaret, then very old, for some family history. She sent me some copies of letters she had written about visiting relatives in Ireland way back in the 1960’s. I can’t remember making much of them until I was contacted by the Irish farmer’s wife. Digging them up from the bottom of a file cabinet, I found that it was her family, in Tralee, that Margaret had visited. A broken branch is now mended.

The Weaver

John J. Lynch, my great-great uncle, lived here in 1900 with his wife Delia. Their home was the left one of the four in this multi-family building. It’s within walking distance of the big factories of downtown Norwalk, Connecticut. Both John and Delia were from Ireland. John worked as a “cotton weaver” according to census records. They shared their rented space with a mother and daughter, also from Ireland – Ellen and Delia Sullivan.

The second home from the left was rented by the Bauch family from Germany. John, the father was a tailor and his wife Annie was a laundress. Their oldest boy, age 13, was not in school. He was a farm worker.

Behind the third door was the family of brick mason Frederick Carter and his family. They were also immigrants – from England. They had six kids in there and yet they shared their place with a family of four from Germany, the Berger’s. Alfred , the father, was a “file cutter.”

The home on the right also contained two families, both American born. The Vergasons were a young couple – he was a machinist, and she was a dressmaker. The other family was headed by Samual Frink, a conductor for the “street railroad”. The building is empty now. Maybe I got here just in time.

Upper Falls

On a cold clear day in late November, as the sun was setting, I drew at the Upper Falls Heritage Park in Norwich, Connecticut by the remains of an old mill building. Norwich was a town of water-powered industry and in the last century, my great-great grandfather lived here.

A few weeks ago, I had no idea that he had come to America. I thought he and his wife Mary were the ones who were left behind in Ireland. There were a lot of things I didn’t know. It turns out that my family tree was just a small branch hanging over a high wall. There was much more tree to found. Norwich, it turns out, had Lynches galore – all mine – so many that it’s quite confusing. Immigrants follow other immigrants and John Patrick Lynch and his family came to America in the early 1880’s to join his brothers and other extended family who had emigrated years earlier. They had survived the Potato Famine, but left rural Ireland to work factory jobs in Southeastern Connecticut. The area is filled with people from their old hometown.

John P. Lynch died here, in 1897 in a house that’s gone now – by these falls on the Yantic River. He died of malaria. John and Mary so identified with where they left behind that it was carved on their gravestone: “Native of Cahersiveen, County Kerry, Ireland.” All these old stories are new to me.

John and Mary

John Lynch was an uncertainty. Years after my great- grandfather Michael Lynch died young, the story goes, family visited old John Lynch in Southeastern Connecticut. Maybe in New London? Maybe in Norwich? He might have been blind. There was talk of a sister Mary Lynch, too, who might have lived down there. But no details were known – no certainty.

Research lead me to a 1940 census record placing a John Lynch and a Mary Lynch living together in this New London house. Here were a brother and sister – a widower and a spinster – old Irish immigrants – John and Mary Lynch. That day-trip to draw this single house changed everything. At New London’s city hall, I found clues that lead me to proof that not only were these my ancestors but that I should drive on to Norwich. More research there revealed how little I knew about my immigrant ancestors. What I thought would be a single drawing of the last of the immigrant Lynches, was instead the first of many more to come. My family history had expanded in surprising ways.

Lonsdale Landlord

2 Brayton Court, Cumberland, Rhode Island

John Joseph Lynch (my grandfather) was named for his immigrant uncle, an Irish-born mill worker in Norwich, Connecticut. Younger John worked in mills too, as a young man in Providence. He had dropped out of school to help support his poor family. Later, he went to night school and eventually got himself an office job as the credit manager of a Kay Jewelers store in downtown Pawtucket. His career afforded him a middle class lifestyle and at some point he bought a mill house behind his own as an investment. After hundreds of years as tenants, a Lynch was now a landlord. Like his home, this one was built by the Lonsdale Corporation, a big textiles company in Cumberland. One Blackstone Court’s units are now owned not rented, and to be honest, they’ve never looked better.

1888 Lonsdale Map, Cumberland, Rhode Island

Overseers

12 Blackstone Street, Cumberland, Rhode Island

The Lonsdale Company (1831-1946) built this big red brick house in 1888. It is identical to the one next to it, and to the others running up Blackstone Street in Cumberland, Rhode Island. This was a row of “Overseers” houses, built for executives of the Londale Company which ran a group of big mills along the Blackstone River. Behind these houses is a row of similar but smaller houses for laborers. Down the street is an entire neighborhood of small workers houses – all identical, and all in neat rows. They are all part of Lonsdale Village which spreads across the Blackstone River into two towns: Cumberland and Lincoln. In 1935 my grandparents bought half of this Overseers house from the company as it was slowly closing down. The textile industry that had shaped so much of New England in its Industrial Revolution was moving south, leaving behind this entire village and many others in the region. The mills brought jobs and immigrant labor to the area. It also left behind some problems. My father recalls walking along the river as a boy and seeing the different colors of the water from dumped dyes. One day yellow, another day red. No one ever swam or fished in the Blackstone River. Now Lonsdale is an historic district, with clean-up and preservation promotions.

John and Edna Lynch (the children of immigrants) moved their growing family here from Pawtucket and stayed the rest of their long lives. This is where my father grew up, and where I spend many cold Christmas afternoons rolling down the tiny hill (which is gone now – carved out for a driveway) with my brothers and many cousins. By the end of the holiday, the hand-knit mittens which we were given each Christmas by our grandmother had begun to fall apart.

Ipswich Immigrant

Edward Colborne was an immigrant from Cornwall, England and probably walked these fields in Ipswich, Massachusetts. He was a farmer for the wealthy Saltonstall family in the early years of his new life in America in the 1640’s. Edward did not come by himself – his brother Robert emigrated on the same ship, landing in Boston in 1635. They were part of what was called “The Great Migration” but I’m sure the Native Americans wouldn’t use that term. Later in life, Robert had his house burned down in King Philip’s War – a fight between European settlers and original inhabitants.

1641 Ipswich Land Grant, Richard Saltonstall

Highway Lost

12 Printery Street, Mt. Hope Neighborhood, Providence, Rhode Island

In 1903, Johanna (Cashman) Ivers lived here after her husband Patrick died. The house on Printery Street in Providence, Rhode Island, is gone now. So is John and Nora Ivers’ house which was down the street. Actually, the whole neighborhood is gone. Behind those trees now is Route 95, the main thoroughfare connecting the entire East Coast of the United States – from the top of Maine to Miami, Florida. The highway was built in segments from 1957 to 1965 through the center of Providence, dividing the city in half at some of its most populous points. The route was planned intentionally, to revitalize the city by easing travel to and from the city, and by erasing poor neighborhoods like the North End, which were filled with immigrants like my ancestors.

Wrong House, Right Place

Perhaps my earliest ancestor in North America was Edward Colborne who sailed to the New World from England with his brother Robert on the ship Defense in 1635. He landed in Boston and settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts, taking a job as a farmer for the wealthy Saltonstall family. I was excited to find that this beautiful house, known as the Whipple House, was a former home of Nathaniel Saltonstall. Drawing this beautiful “First Period” colonial home, I imagined my immigrant ancestor as a probable visitor here (no house of Edward Colborne remains). Too bad I was wrong. Further research revealed that this house was built in 1677, after Edward had moved on to Dracut, Massachusetts in 1673. On top of that, this house was never a Saltonstall house at all, and it was moved here from the other side of the river in 1927. A small consolation is that the Saltonstalls did live quite close to this spot, so Edward Colborne did at least walk around here. And so did his brother Robert, who stayed in Ipswich after Edward moved on.

New Boxes

84 Library Street, Chelsea, Massachusetts

Library Street in Chelsea, Massachusetts has two very different sides of the road. One side has old multi-family homes which have weathered a lot of changes in this former industrial neighborhood. The other has a brand new housing development called The Box District. In 1901, Irish immigrants Daniel and Kate O’Connor, (my great grandparents) lived here at 84 Matthew Street (now 84 Library Street). They rented an apartment and had the first of their ten children here. They moved on after a year, and the house they lived in likely burned down in the great fire of 1908. Next came the Spring Air Mattress Factory, and then recently, this development. The area was described as crime-ridden not long ago. Now things are looking up. Mixed income housing is being built all over the area and the remaining factories are being converted to lofts. The tagline for the new Box District? “It’s Hip to be Square”.