Sunday, March 18, 2012

Emigration to the US begins

The famine is a defining moment in Irish history not just because of the one million people who lost their lives but because of the wave of emigration that it unleashed, in particular, to the US. Between 1845 and 1859 nearly two million Irish settled there and by 1900 this figure had increased to almost four million. Overall, it is estimated that one out of every two people born in Ireland between 1830 and 1930 left Ireland. Despite being a rural people the majority ended up in the industrial states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and California.

The Burkes of Kilmacow were part of this great migration. Of John and Mary’s thirteen children, nine emigrated to the US. The heartbreak of John and Mary is unimaginable because when someone emigrated to the US in those days they were unlikely to return again. Because of this the party held for the departing emigrant was often termed an “American wake”. (For an account of an American wake visit this link - www.fenagh.com/history/american-wake). Indeed, of the nine who emigrated, only two ever returned, Margaret, who visited in the twenties and again in 1932 when she and Jack came back for the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. Margaret would have seen her mother before she died in 1930 but Jack or the others never saw their parents again once they emigrated. Mary would have heard of the deaths of three of her children (Fr. James, Kate and Edmond) in the US before she died herself.

I reckon that Patrick Burke (the first to leave Kilmacow) left in 1885. In US Census returns he gives his year of departure as a number of years between 1885 and 1890 but family lore in Ireland was that he left before his brother Dan was born (1885) and that they never met. He went to New York initially and may have stayed with relatives of his future wife, the Dempseys. He then moved to Chicago. What usually happened was that the first emigrant provided the fare of the next sibling and so the cycle of emigration continued.

Family members often lived together until they got on their feet, got a job and got married. In the 1910 census we see Kate Burke who had been in the States for 10 years living with her brother Pat and his wife Hannah. In the same Census we have Tom, Edwin (Edmond), Margaret and Joe living together at 120 East 56th Street.

Unlike many who emigrated the Burkes came from a relatively prosperous background. However, the farm as an economic unit could only support one family so the others had to leave. Ireland at the time provided few opportunities so the only option was to emigrate. While looking through ship passenger lists for the Burkes (unsuccessfully so far!) I was struck at how unskilled the Irish emigrants were at the time. Most of the girls list their occupation as “domestic servants” and the men list theirs as “labourers”. All they had going for them was English as their spoken language, a willingness to work and an unrivalled network of Irish emigrants that they could link in with.

(The statistics quoted in this post are taken from a book called "An Illustrated History of the Irish People" by Kenneth Neill, a very readable overview of Irish history if anyone's interested)