A record of Joe Burke's emigration in 1909?

In my last post I mentioned that I hadn't managed to find any record of the Burkes on the passengers lists of ships that crossed the Atlantic. Well, my luck may have turned!

According to the 1910 US Census, Joe Burke (the last of the family to emigrate) arrived in the US in 1909. Using this date I began searching the passenger lists and I've found a Joe Burke who emigrated from Croom (the local town to Kilmacow) to the US in 1909 (above is an image of the first page of the record - Jow Burke is on the second line). While it's impossible to be 100% sure that it's the same person the evidence is pretty convincing.

There is a lot of detail in these passenger lists. Joseph Burke gives his age as 20 -our Joe would have been 25 but many of the Burkes knocked a few years of their age with many of them having incorrect birth years on their gravestones. For the emigrants it may have been to do with making themselves more employable or eligible for certain jobs. Joseph gives his home town as Croom and his next of kin as "Mother - Mrs Mary Burke, Croom, Co. Limerick". In those times I would have expected a son to list his father as next of kin but our Joe's father died in 1908 so this points to us being on the right track. He lists his occupation as "farmer" and his onward destination as "Chicago". He has a ticket for onward travel to Chicago and is joining his brother Thomas Burke who lives at 3431 Butler St. Chicago. Again, this all fits our Joe Burke. He is described as being in good health, 5ft 10inches in height, fair complexion, brown hair and blue eyes.

I've searched the Irish 1901 census and there are only 5 "Joseph Burkes" listed and our Joe is the only one who would have been eemigrating in his twenties in 1909.

Presuming this is the right Joe Burke, he travelled on a ship called the "SS Caronia" which sailed from Queenstown (now called Cobh) on September 15th 1909 arriving a week later in New York on the 22nd. This was a Cunard liner. For someone who more than likely never travelled more than 20 or 30 miles from his home it must have been an amazing experience to step on to an ocean liner and a week later disembark in New York.

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)

The ancestral home (or "the home place" as Irish people refer to it) no longer stands having been demolished in recent years. It was lived in up until the 1980s by Mick & Mary Burke until they built a new bungalow on the farm. The house was then used as a farm shed until it was demolished.The photo above taken in the early 70s shows Mick and Mary in the kitchen of the house with their daughter Marie and son Micheál (Gaelic form of "Michael"). Micheál now farms the Kilmacow farm, the fourth generation of Burkes to do so. The photo was taken by Catherine Burke (a daughter of Bill Burke who had emigrated in 1899) on a visit to Ireland in 1971. What I love about this photo are two things that make it uniquely Irish. Firstly, the picture of the Sacred Heart (of Jesus) in the top left hand corner. The practice of consecrating the family to the Sacred Heart was widespread in Ireland until the 1960s. Families placed a picture of the Sacred Heart in some prominent place in the home, below which a lamp was kept constantly burning. This was the centre of the family’s spiritual life. To this day, the Sacred Heart picture with the eternal lamp evokes the mood of 1950s and 1960s Ireland. Secondly, in the centre above the dresser is another common item in Irish homes in the 1960s, a framed collection of three photos - Pope Pius 12th, President John F Kennedy and Pope Paul 6th - which emphasises the Catholicism of the time and the pride in President Kennedy's Irishness and Catholicism. We had one as well at home which hung in the parlour (the good room!) for years until the pictures of us as children replaced the famous trio. I have since rescued the original photos.

Between 1829 and 1842 Ordnance Survey Ireland completed the first ever large-scale survey of an entire country. Acclaimed for their accuracy, these maps are regarded by cartographers as amongst the finest ever produced. On this map a house and farm buildings are marked on the Kilmacow site so it was present at that stage. Who owned this house and farm prior to John & Mary Burke I haven't found out yet. I reckon they got married around 1860 and presumably became tenants on the farm around this time. In the 1901 census the house is described as a stone house with a slate roof with up to 4 rooms. There was a stable, a cow-house, a piggery and a barn reflecting the mixed nature of the farm. In the 1911 census the house has increased to 5 rooms and a calf house and fowl (poultry) house have been added.

Below are pictures of the house when it was no longer lived in and was used as a farm shed. The house is unusual in having no windows at the rear. There was a garden to the front of the house. These pictures were taken by me when I took Les and Toni Burke to visit the farm in the 1990s. Les's grandfather, Patrick Burke, emigrated from here around 1885.

This is John Burke and his wife Mary Hannon. I particularly like the photo of John - something very kind and gentle about his eyes. John died in 1908 and Mary died in 1930. They are both buried in the family plot in Kilmacow graveyard.

Patrick Bourke and Mary Clancy's family

What happened Patrick and Mary's children? Margaret married a man called McGrath and moved to Co. Tipperary. Their other daughter, whose name I do not know, married a British soldier, a marriage which wasn't approved of by the family according to family lore. Bill bought a farm at a place called Honeypound in Croom.Patsy inherited the farm, married a lady called Margaret Power and had two daughters, Jane and Noreen. My great-grandfather, John, married Mary Hannon from the neighbouring parish of Kilfinny. They moved to the farm at Kilmacow which is just up the road from the Four Gates farm. The farm comprised 32 acres and here they raised 13 children born as follows:

Mary-Ann (1861), Patrick (1862), Jack (1865), Kitty (Kate) (1870), Annie (1872), Michael(1874 - my grandfather), James (1876), Tom (1878), Bill (1879), Ned (1880), Margaret (1883), Joe (1884) and finally, Dan (1885).

Over the coming months we will follow the lives of these 13 individuals.

Patrick died in May 1967 and his wife Mary in April 1868 and are buried in Boherard cemetery (see post of 23/10/2011)

Certificate of Irish Heritage

Those of you on the American side of the Atlantic - did you know that you can now obtain a Certificate of Irish Heritage from the Irish Government?

If you have at least one Irish ancestor they are available for yourself or as a unique personalized Irish gift for family and friends of Irish descent. Designed to be framed, it can be displayed with pride at home or work.The first one was presented recently by the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs to the family of Joseph Hunter, a fireman who died on September 11th in the Twin Towers.

Go to www.heritagecertificate.ie

The Bourkes and the Famine

The Famine of 1845 - 1848 is a seminal event in Irish history. In the first instance, it was a major humanitarian disaster with an estimated one million people dying and a further million emigrating. The population of Ireland had doubled to over 8 millon between 1800 and 1840, one of the major reasons being the dominance of the potato as a subsistence crop. The suitability of the Irish climate for growing potatoes combined with their high nutrition value meant that very small farms could support large families. However, when the potato crop failed in 1845 and subsequent summers these people were left with no alternative food source.

Patrick Bourke and his family, as we have seen in Griffith's Valuation, were tenant farmers with 64 acres. This was a large farm and as well as potatoes they would have raised cattle. One of Patrick's daughters, Margaret, who was a child of nine at the time gave an account of the family's experiences to her grand-daughter Patricia Fitzgerald when she was in her eighties. My aunt, Sr Maura Burke, managed to get me a copy many years ago. Margaret tells us that her father (Patrick) was "a well-to-do farmer and his family did not suffer as much as less fortunate people as they were well provisioned when the famine began". In addition, the family were successful in saving a crop of turnips and were even able to distribute them to people less fortunate than themselves. The account in full is reproduced below:

"Historians tells us that 1847 and 1848 were terrible years but the printed page can never bring home to us the horrors of that dreadful time as clearly as the words of one who has experienced them. My informant (my grandmother – Margaret) an old lady ‘well on in the eighties’ was nigh in nine years of age at the time and so remembers it clearly. Her father was a well-to-do farmer and his family did not suffer as much as less fortunate people as they were well provisioned when the famine began. But how the people suffered!

The potatoes, their staple food, were destroyed by the blight. The grain crops failed. Even the turnips blackened. As the famine continued the sufferings of the people increased. To quote the old lady, “If they had the weeds itself they wouldn’t be too bad but even the weeds failed that year”. Her father, a thoughtful man, had done his best to save the turnips when the blight was first noticed. He was successful and was able to distribute them to the poor. At last it became a struggle to survive to get to Mass on Sundays. One woman rather than miss the Holy Sacrifice crawled on her hands and knees to the chapel, eating the grass by the roadside as she went, only to fall dead at the door. Along the road staggered men once fine looking fellows but now the merest skeletons, carrying or trying to carry their mothers or others of their womenfolk on their backs. To add to that awful misery cholera broke out.

Weakened by hunger, the unfortunate people dropped dead by the roadside, too weak to even eat the grass that was often found in their mouths. Everywhere were dead bodies and such was the nature of the disease that the bodies turned black after death. Great holes were dug and into them the bodies were flung, shroud-less, coffin-less, without even the last benediction of the Church. Everywhere death, everywhere desolation, everywhere misery. Pestilence, famine and death reigned supreme.
The loads of flour carried from a neighbouring mill were guarded by a military escort but such was the desperation of the women that they would pinch the bags so that a little flour fell on the ground. This they would eventually scrape up and put in the mouths of the children they were scarcely able to carry in their arms. Yet at this time the grain stored at Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford and other sea ports was being exported daily while the people starved.

At last America sent help in the form of quantities of ground maize. But the sailing ships of the period took six to seven weeks to make the journey and the meal had a sour bitter taste. This was served out for the support of the people, a pound a day for each person. Some of the men took ship to America hoping to send their relatives some help from there. During the journey the ship was lost. But death by drowning is at least quicker than the lingering agonies of death by starvation so they were lucky enough.

Such were the sufferings of the famine years. God grant that they may never again be endured in Ireland."