A Likely Story!

How unlikely, to wander alone through an abandoned cemetery in a little city you know only as a visitor, and to kneel at the etched stone, newly freed of vines and brush, and to put your fingers into the grooves until the truth they spell changes your story for good! To open the worn leather prayer book to find the name of the crossroads in Ireland where its owner was born, and where neighbors would come of a summer Sunday to gather and dance! To know, at last, that your own dear grandma knew the history of her father’s family perfectly well, in spite of being generations removed from Ireland.

I’ve written these stories down, as I remember hearing them from my husband, Bill, and his mother. From stories my own family told. From research I’ve done during the past twenty years, and from the grace of encounters with descendants of those Reilly and O’Hara immigrant ancestors. Facts speak for themselves, but stories speak for us.  These stories may not be factual, but they are true to what I have come to know about us.

How unlikely, to glean from the little black tin box, kept in your mother-in-law’s bedside cupboard, its contents shared in small, hard-won moments of revelation, the prayerbook and passport of a shadow of the grandmother who died on your husband’s third birthday, and who no one missed.  And now, you love her.

How unlikely, that Bill and I should meet at Hibernian Hall on St. Patrick’s Day, in 1951.  We’d never been there before, and he never wanted to go back again!

How unlikely, to be found by my local third cousins whose grandmother was my sister’s godmother, and whose company now feels like family. Whose family album answered a question from our family album: Who is the woman in the flowered hat?

CHAPTER ONE

As the fourth generation of Irish to be born in Albany, New York, I had the opportunity to live, during World War II, with my aunts, grandmother, great grandmother and great aunts in a row house at 185 Elk Street, behind the Armory.  My sensory memory filled up with the sounds of  horses’ hooves on cobblestone; the call of “Raaaggs” from the wagon loaded with old blankets and coats that had passed beyond being made into another garment; the sound of coal going down the chute from the wagon into the canvas bag; the thud of a rubber ball against a brick wall.

In that neighborhood, there was no central heating; we had an ice box, not a refrigerator; there was one electrical outlet in the middle of most rooms, hanging from the ceiling light, and any appliance would be attached to it:  a radio, a lamp.  In the kitchen, though, there were two electrical outlets: one on the wall by the table, and one hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room.  The stove was a combination of kerosene and coal. It was used to heat the house, the flatiron, the hair curling iron, and to cook. A tank for heating water stood between the stove and the sink; another similar tank stood in the one and only upstairs bathroom. It was lit when Saturday baths were to be taken.  The bathroom was so cold in the winter that we had to leave the water running during the night, or the pipes would freeze. Many of my contemporaries, raised in other areas of the city, had cars and furnaces and little freezers in their refrigerators, and might as well have been born a century after me.

Our neighbors were largely Irish; no one in the family's five generations since the 1840’s, when our folks came from Ireland to Albany, had ever married anything but an Irish Catholic.  But no one ever talked about the “Old Country.”  There were no letters back and forth to Tipperary or Louth.  My great grandmother Catherine Donahue Segrave was born in Albany in 1859, and still had a touch of an Irish accent during World War II; my grandmother, less so, but even she was a little prone toward a “toity-toid and toid” accent. We never went to any Irish clubs or made a big deal out of St. Patrick’s Day. No ethnic nor racial bias could ever be expressed, but it was clear: Everyone is created equal; still, it’s best to be Irish. I had no idea, though, of the depth of anger that remained, after a hundred years, for what happened to cause our ancestors to leave Ireland.

Before the Great Hunger, in County Galway, the level of misery of the lowest class of Irish peasants (52.8 %, according to the Devon Commission Report) was hard to imagine.  They lived in mud cabins of one room, without window nor chimney.

The next level of housing up from that was a cottage built of mud, with two or more rooms and a window or two.  This group represented another 37.6 %, according to the Devon Report.  Nine percent had a good farm house or lived on a small street in a town, with up to nine rooms and windows, and the best homes were lived in by four percent of the population.  Houses and lands were subject to the County Cess, a tax levied by the Grand Jury.  Among taxable things were:  hearth, window, dogs, carriage taxes, and a voluntary tax for the destruction of vermin.  So, if you had a hut with a window, you were apt to block it with mud, to save on tax.  Famines and partial famines occurred throughout the eighteenth century, with disease attending.

In the early nineteenth century, the potato crop failed several times, spurring emigration.  The poor grew and ate a potato known as the “Lumper” that was susceptible to crop failure and poor in quality.  Those who were able to do so kept a pig, not to be eaten, but to be sold for the money to pay the rent on the plot of earth that was usually owned by absent landlords.

In 1815, an agricultural depression followed the Napoleonic War.  Land was converted to pasturage, and laborers and cottiers found themselves evicted.

By 1830, this wave reached its peak.  Even the poorest farmer’s precious and only food, the potatoes he grew on his meager piece of rented land, could be seized, according the Acts of Parliament passed between 1816 and 1820.  Tenants had to emigrate or starve.  In the ten years preceding 1841, Census Emigration Returns show that nearly 3,000 people left from the Port of Galway, most of them going to Canada; some to the United States. It was less expensive to emigrate to Canada than the United States. Once on land, it was not impossible to cross the border and find yourself in New York or Maine.

Catholics in Ireland, since the Reformation, had been reduced incrementally to the condition of hopelessness in which the potato failure of the 1840’s caught them.  As late as 1779, just eleven years before our ancestor, Anne Devine O’Hara was born in Ardee, County Louth, the property of a Catholic proprietor was unsafe unless he converted to the Church of Ireland.  Many did so, pro forma, and worshiped secretly as Catholics.  Many refused and lost property that had been in their families for centuries.

I was pretty ignorant of this Irish history the night my cousin, Beth, and I were preparing our maternal grandmother “Mame’s” bedroom for a visit from the doctor.  “Mame” was very ill, and we were visiting with her as we tidied up. I teased her about her maiden name, “Segrave,” and told her it didn’t sound Irish, but English. She began to cry, and, for the first time in my life, she  raised her voice to me. “We were Irish and Catholic, Pillars of the Church, and never English!” Only when I started my genealogical research did I come to know that we were both right. Our branch of the Segrave family came to Ireland from Segrave, England, in the 12th Century. If they didn’t become Irish between then and when they left for Albany in the 1840’s, then I’m a monkey’s uncle. They were staunch Catholics, and “more Irish than the Irish.”  My apologies to “Mame.”

At the outset of my research, I felt comfortable that I knew plenty about my mother’s Albany ancestors. Having visited my father’s hometown only infrequently as a child, I knew little about the Herkimer County branches, althoughI had inherited a copy of the limited O’Hara family tree from my cousin. It went back to my great grandparents, but my luckiest break was connecting with Caryl Darling Hopson at the Herkimer County Historical Society.  She led me to my partner in discovering the Deserted Hamlet of Mexico in the Town of Salisbury, Herkimer County, New York:  Adirondack Guide, Stanley Grose.

It was there, along Mexico Road, that my father’s family established American roots. Stan brought me to the sites of the foundations of the first cabins built by six O’Hara siblings along the Mexico Road during the 1850’s. On Memorial Day Weekend, 2005, Stan led a group of us up Mexico Road for the first time…the beginning of the journey that led to this storytelling.

It’s hard to know where to begin.  But, the first time I felt a passion for this story, we had just come back from our first Herkimer County, Town of Salisbury trip up the Mexico Road. After following what was left of it, watching for the remnants of the stone walls that used to mark the wagon trail, we climbed all the way up to where where Buck Creek falls into Spruce Creek. It was there that our immigrant ancestor, Ann Devine O’Hara, lived in the cabin built by her son, John. We found the 10 by 16 foot foundation, a well, a pristine meadow, a beaver dam, and the creek that changed its disposition every five feet. The soil was so thin that within a generation or maybe two, the entire population of Mexico Road had moved to more arable land or down into Little Falls, to find work in the factories. Nature reclaimed the Mexico Road.

When Bill Reilly and Pat O’Hara met on St. Patrick’s Day at Hibernian Hall in 1951, they brought together two family stories, each of which had two other family stories. Tracing these stories back to the ones that preceded them has proven interesting, informative, heartwarming and heartbreaking. To look at sepia-toned pictures of two crazy flapper era kids in their woolen bathing costumes, knee-sox and all, hugging on the beach, and try to imagine that they are the same people who became your parents is to push the limits of imagination.

I’m going to tell some of our stories. I can’t promise that they will be factual, but they will be true to the memories we keep. If you remember things differently, then tell the story your way when you relate it to your descendants. It will still be true.

The family tree/pedigree information has been gleaned from family records, research done by family members, and folklore. Parts of it may not be accurate. Future research may fill in gaps and correct inaccuracies. Because many of the names have various “official” spellings, I have picked a single one to use in each family’s story. Where the difference in spelling makes a significant difference, an alternative spelling may be used.

All these years later, as the branches of the story have fleshed out, I came to realize that each branch of the family has a river around which the stories grew. For the Albany section, we see the Mighty Hudson and those kills that filled it from the North End to the South End, from Foxes Kill that became Sheridan Hollow to Beaver Kill that shot through what we now call Lincoln Park, to the Norman’s Kill that let us know we were leaving the south end of the City of Albany.

Albany’s Sheridan Hollow was a latrine, a filled-in Foxen Kill, where all sorts of ugly stuff was thrown until the poorest Irish arrived in the mid-1800s. The most humble dwellings were built over it when it was put underground, routing the water to the Canal Basin which must have been a cesspool, to house these Irish immigrants, in crowded flats and basements. The tenants worked wherever they could find employment. Most of ours were tailors, waiters, seamstresses, milliners, laborers and peddlers.

We find this branch of the family, the Donahue/Segrave group, living on Orange Street, Canal Street (that became Sheridan Avenue around 1900), Lark and Monroe, within St. Joseph's and St. Mary’s Parishes.

The McMahon/Murphy branch of our maternal ancestors settled in the South End until shortly after my mother was born, in 1908, at 90 Myrtle Avenue, within The Cathedral Parish. After 1895, Elk Street between Lark and Hawk was developed, and many of the Donahues and Segraves lived and died at 185 Elk, the home that my great-grandmother, Catherine Donahue Segrave, made for every human being she knew who needed a place to die, or live. I think all of them had their funeral Masses at St. Mary’s.