-
Chapter 5. Family Paths [Includes Image Plates]
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
108 5 Family Paths { The drama of people struggling with conditions that confine them through cycles of limited life spans is the heart of all living history, and the development of that drama itself . . . must provide the framework for any interpretation of history. —Bernard Bailyn, American Historical Association Presidential Address, 1981 How, in what ways, with what success, does an individual interact with, create a life from, and possibly alter a culture and a society not of their own making, one which they largely inherit? —Nick Salvatore, “Biography and Social History: An Intimate Relationship” An individual’s actions and a family’s choices after eyeing the paths open to them may reveal their conflicts, priorities, memories, and daily experience in making their way. How the tenant farmers of Ballykilcline behaved around Strokestown, where perhaps their greatest losses occurred, may tell what the subsequent record does not, but what happened thereafter may shed light on what came before. The remainder of the farmers’ lives is significant in their story. Their later years were lived where they were freer to act openly for themselves and where their stories come closer to narration in their own voices, since their U.S. records were less filtered through the eyes and voices of their opponents than were the Irish records. In America they spoke for themselves. Where they chose to invest themselves demonstrated what was important to them, showed what they valued. How they aided one another helped to explain the survival strategies of the Irish as they put aside and emerged from a collective trauma, an experience that sociologist Kai Erikson has described as a “blow to the tissues of social life that damages the bonds linking people to each other and impairs the prevailing sense of community ” (qtd. in G. Stern 1976, p. 235). Recovery after trauma, according to Deborah Peck in an essay about the famine’s psychological legacies, requires a safe environment (2002, p. 169). Family Paths 109 Here then are brief accounts of a number of families, most of them evictees and several others who emigrated from the Kilglass and Strokestown neighborhoods surrounding Ballykilcline. The focus on the stories of these particular families—and those of the Hanleys, Brennans, and Colligans who remained around Rutland and whose lives are described in other chapters—stemmed from the fact that their records “talked.” That is, the information gathered about them from descendants and public records was sufficiently detailed and weighty to tell something about who they were, what they did, what happened to them (and sometimes why) over time in one or both locations. These families also represented a range of experience: in some cases they exemplify the most common choices of the immigrant Irish (e.g., settling in East Coast urban centers); in others , they took roads less trodden. Although most of them passed through or settled in Rutland, the accounts about the Padians, who were evicted from Ballykilcline but went elsewhere, and the McCormicks and Rileys, who had roots in Kilglass-area townlands and whose surnames were present in Ballykilcline but who so far have no documented links there, were fleshed out enough by descendants to be presented here. Their surrogates ’ lives come out of similar experience and speak to diverse aspects of the immigrant position, warranting inclusion here because of the stories they tell. In large measure, these profiles were built on the descendants’ efforts to learn their own history. The accounts of all these families allowed views of the Ballykilcline and Kilglass people’s experience in multiple other geographic contexts (both England and the northeastern, midwestern, southern, and north central United States) and in a variety of sociopolitical circumstances. The cases drew in a family of evictees who held themselves loyal to the southern cause in the great divisive issue of their early life in the United States—the Civil War. Another family made its way on the American frontier where the McGintys’ son was kidnapped by Indians in what likely was the family’s third or fourth American home place. These life stories include accounts of three men—John McGann and Patrick Brislin here, but also Bernard Colligan (see chapter 3)—whom British officials had labeled as criminal suspects in Ireland. Two of them had emigrated as fugitives from the law; McGann just barely escaped that designation. Their stories make it possible to see how their alleged actions in Ireland carried over in an American setting. For McGann and Brislin, Irish...