A Pauper’s House

[by Fred Lynch in New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA]

On May 29, 1884 a huge ship named the Furnessia, pulled up to the little island of Valentia, right next to the western coast of Kerry, Ireland. It was far to big to meet the shore, as Valentia hosted only little fishing boats. The Furnessia was more fitting of its usual ports of Glasgow and New York. Waiting ashore, were hundreds of locals who were leaving for America. They were being sent abroad by charity to a new life in America. In exchange, they were relinquishing all holdings in Ireland. They were abandoning one life for another. This was the third boatload in two years from this place and boarding were my ancesters, the Lynches. They travelled in the steerage with their neighbors for a week long Atlantic crossing into the unknown. I had assumed my ancesters were poor, but it seems that they were very poor. Fearing another famine, the British charity had created what they sometimes referred to as a “deportation” to remove these desperate citizens, rather than worry about them later. 

Looking down from Google Earth, I can see the remains – rubble really – of where they lived. Their spongy bog farmland, situated between the ocean and the mountains in Cahersiveen, is empty. 

Michael Lynch, my great-grandfather was 18 when he left Ireland on the Furnessia, and was 31 when he rented this house in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He had just started his family. His wife Theresa O’Day, was American born, from Manhattan, and was the daughter of an Irish immigrant as well. Rumour has it the O’Day’s were not pleased that she had married a new immigrant. They had wished to move on, and move up in social status.

There are newspaper articles which can be found online describing the immigants departing the very ship that took the Lynches to Castle Garden in New York. From the Morning Journal, June 5, 1884: “England’s Pauper Poor: Still Being Landed in this Country By the Hundred – And They Are Almost as Rapidly Being Sent Back.” The article goes on to say, “Superintendent Jackson told the reporter that any or all of the assistant immigrants who had no friends in this country would be sent back at the expense of the line that brought them. A great number of the 300 who arrived on the Elysia (a previous ship) had been sent back.” A year before, immigrants from the same place were described in the New York Herald as “…of the class that should be prevented from living here.”

Somehow, the seven Lynches made their way to Norwich, Connecticut, joining family and neighbors from previous trips – starting a new life of hard work in textile mills and service jobs.