In the seven years from 1848 to 1854, 1.1 million more left Ireland. Famine immigrants accounted for only 40 percent of the whole American immigration for those years. They were typically rural, Catholic, Irish-speaking, unskilled, tied to family and community, and impoverished. And despite encountering a hostile reception when they reached these shores, they triumphed over diversity to become major contributors to the development of this country.
In years prior to the famine, the exodus of King James II heralded hard times for the Irish. Irish-Catholics, who had lost lands during the Cromwellian settlement before King James, had made gains during his reign. With a succession by James� Protestant daughter, Mary, thwarted by the birth of his son, Protestant supporters backed Mary�s husband William of Orange resulting in the Battle of the Boyne. Subsequently, penal laws devised by acts of Parliament in London effectively disenfranchised thousands of Irish-Catholics throughout Ireland. Catholics were barred from voting or holding public office. They were forbidden to send their children to parochial schools, if they even had a parish and parochial school close by. These same acts prohibited Catholics from buying land or acting as guardians to heirs of estates. Mayo was particularly hard hit. According to police records, between the years 1849 and 1867 some 109,500 families were evicted throughout the land. A bit of trivia for you: the origin of the word �boycott� can be traced back to Mayo and land agent Charles Boycott, who was ostracized in that county in 1880 for his participation in tenant evictions (Newman 16).
Most Irish who ended up settling in Butte, passed through other American mining towns on their way west. Michael Whalen spent some years in Michigan before he settled in Butte during the 1890s. Several of his children were born there. [For more on Michael Whalen, please see Page 3] The other great supplier of Irish immigrants to Butte were the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania, coming from the four major coal-mining counties of Luzerne, Shuylkill, Carbon, and Columbia, Pennsylvania, between 1870 and 1890 (Emmons 16, 53). Both Daniel O�Grady and James Lavelle would settle in Scranton, Pennsylvania before moving on to Butte, Montana.
When this project began, the first document I obtained was the death certificate for Michael Patrick Lavelle. He was the earliest Lavelle my father, Daniel, recalled. He further recollected that the family had lived in Scranton, Pennsylvania before reaching Montana. It was his belief that his grandfather was the only member of the family who ventured West; leaving friends and relations back in eastern Pennsylvania. I had a general sense for when Michael Patrick had died because of a magazine clipping I�d found some years before, slipped between the pages of an old book. [That clipping, unfortunately, is missing because I foolishly sent it to Dad without making a copy!] The clipping was an obituary from a professional magazine for agents of Bankers Life Insurance; for which Michael Patrick had been an agent in his later years. When I succeeded in receiving the death certificate from the Butte County Recorder for Michael Patrick I experienced such a feeling of exhilaration! His parents were listed as James Lavelle and Catherine Sweeney, both of Ireland.
Thus, I found my �compass point�-- the point from where I would move backwards and forwards in an ever-expanding circle of family members. How we arrived on this continent was no longer a mystery.
|
