Rivers Run Through Them

The Mighty Hudson, at Albany, was fed, in the old days, by streams that flowed out of the hills, to the left and right of the town, and often, right through the place. Seeking its own level, the water gouged out hollows that were uninhabitable, and were used as drainage ditches for all kinds of unmentionable stuff. No one would live on those creeks. Until the time of the Great Hunger in Ireland. That drove destitute Irish refugees, often starving, often sick, to find family and maybe the way to fortune, in Albany, along Fox Creek, toward the northern edge of the city. Epidemics were frequent in the 1830’s and 1840’s. At least two of our recently-arrived ancestors died in 1849 in Albany, of Cholera…John and James Segrave, who belonged to a family of Tailors. By the time my great grandmother, Catherine Donahue, married Thomas Segrave, Fox Creek ravine was known as “Sheridan Hollow.” We still call it that, today.

Farther south, at the other edge of Albany, Beaver Creek ate its way through what used to be a tar-paper shack shanty town, but became Beaver Park (now Lincoln Park). The natural creek was buried in a tunnel under the park and the less than humble homes were razed. By the 1850’s, the area was filling up with homes built by and for tradesmen and newly middle-class folks. My great-grandfather, Patrick McMahon, was one of those people. Arriving with his parents in 1839, he got himself a cart and connected with a farmer in Glaway, outside of Saratoga, and made enough money to own a home on the newly-built Myrtle Avenue, by 1960. He was only about twenty years old. That is where his granddaughter, my mother, was born, in 1908…90 Myrtle Avenue. The produce business continued to operate through his sons until I was in high school, in the Lyons Building, in Market Square, on Hudson Avenue.

The heart of my Albany life will always be 185 Elk Street, a row house behind the Armory on Washington Avenue. My great-grandmother started renting it around 1912, and died there, in 1942. It was to this house that her sisters, sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, daughter, grandchildren and great grandchildren came when they need a place to live. She rented two floors in a three-story house. The O’Callahans lived on the top floor, and took in one of the relatives when all the rooms were full in Gram’s spaces. Our two floors were known as "Principal and Basement.” We spent all our time in the basement area, which had a bay window at the front, with the sill at street level, and a bay window at the back, where the kitchen looked out over a long, fenced back yard. Between these two bright spaces, other halls and rooms depended upon a single bulb hanging from a ceiling fixture for light. We slept in the upstairs, where there was a bathroom and no heat, except for the grates in the floor letting in what floated up from the basement. But, the front room was our real Parlor, with beautiful furniture and drapes and rugs and curio cabinets and it was where the most special guests would be brought. And it was where we laid out my great grandmother for her wake.

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Herkimer County

Frankfort Town

Haggerty, O’Hara, Devine/Devin/Davin

Four-Mile-Grocery, Harbor and Mohawk

Little Falls Town and City

O’Hara, Kelley, Davin, Dinneen

Salisbury and The Mexico Road

Fairfield, Middleville, Danube, Manheim, Paradise, Indian Castle

The City of Little Falls

John Street. St. Mary’s Church and Grandma and Grandpa’s last home,alone.

Family Houses on East Main Street, Garden Street West Monroe and High Street

Otsego County

Town of Essex (Milford, Cooperstown and Fly Creek)

Kelley and Dinneen

School District No. 8 Records

The poor Irish immigrant farmers who arrived in the rich Mohawk Valley during the 1840’s had no chance to buy fertile farms. They worked as laborers on farms or the canal or in factories until they had enough saved to buy a poor patch of earth up the mountain a bit. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of them had raised a large family and used up every nutrient in the soil they owned. They moved on to the next township and bought better land, or went into the cities to find work. I have found no records of land sales to indicate that they made a profit when they left their first American homes. It seems that they walked away with what they could carry, and the woods did what woods will do, left to themselves. By the 1920’s, people who were born along The Mexico Road in the Southern Adirondacks could not find anything but foundations of those early cabins.

The City of Little Falls, in its heyday, was the cheese capital of the world. In the first decades of the Twentieth Century, it was bustling! Leather and Paper industries provided jobs, and the City was culturally rich, with entertainment houses and restaurants and a plethora of churches. President Lincoln’s Funeral Train went slowly through the City as residents lined up to pay their respects. Today’s residents are certain that their glory days are still ahead.

For me, as a child, it was a place I rarely visited, but imagined that, if I lived there, I would be happy. I thought it was magically wealthy and healthy and peaceful and perfect. I had close cousins in Albany, but I envied the hordes of cousins in Little Falls who got to grow up with one another, near to Granpa and Grandma. I feel blessed that I have lately come to be close to the cousins who grew up in Little Falls. A curious thing has happened. A descendent of the Murphy tribe who also settled along The Mexico Road in the 1850’s married my grandson who was raised in Albany. They live there now, near the top of a steep hill, with their children, the eighth generation of O’Haras and Murphys in Little Falls.

Ballyhest, Waterford, Ireland

Ballyhest, Mothel, Waterford is the townland in Ireland where Bill’s paternal grandmother, Catherine Connolly (Reilly) was born, in 1874. It and its next-door townland, Feddens, have been sibling townlands for centuries, floating in and out of one another’s boundaries, natives maintaining fiercely their identity with their birth townland. The beautiful River Suir just a mile or so to the north separates them from Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, where we have gathered with cousins who found us through Ancestry.com. The family church was a few miles to the east of Ballyhest, in Clonea Power…The Church of Ss Brogan and Coan??…, and the graveyard that straddles the church is bordered by the River Cloddiagh, famous in the old days for its blue pearl oysters. Church records provided us with dates of family weddings and baptisms, through the gracious research of Marie Cox, who seems like family, now.

Following the death of their baby brother, Nicholas, and their mother, Bridget Godfrey Connolly, Catherine's two older brothers followed their father, Nicholas, to Albany, New York when they came of an age to work. James returned to Ireland and provided the cousins we now cherish visiting, but Thomas remained stateside to welcome his sister after their grandmother died. Their father, Nicholas had remarried to Mary (Julia) Powers with whom he had a son who died at age 19. Thomas remained living with his stepmother after Nicholas died, until she passed away, in ……. Catherine never lived with her father and his new wife, going into service in other people’s homes until she married William Josephy Reilly, The First!

When Helen Zoll Reilly moved to live with Bill and me after we were married, she brought with her a little black tin box. My sister, Maureen O’Hara, lived with us, too, a good part of the early years. She and I would sit on Helen’s bed and ask her about her life, and she showed us the black tin box, but not what was in it. When she died, I inherited the box. Inside, I found locks of Helen’s and her sister, Bertha’s hair, saved by their mother, Mary Lewis Zoll. There was a prayerbook, inscribed for “Katie" Connolly by “her old teacher” to remind her of the good times they’d had in Clonea. There were two passport pictures for Catherine Connolly, one when she was about twenty, and one when she was in her sixties. The passport gave her place of birth as “Ballyhest.” And that is how we have come to know from where in the world Bill Reilly’s Irish blood flows.

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Ardee, County Louth, Ireland, is a small city in the smallest county in Ireland, known since at least 1414 as the market town for rich agricultural and riparian gifts. It is about halfway along the ancient highway from Dublin City to Letterkenny in County Donegal. There, in 1790, Ann Devine, matriarch of our O’Hara family, was born. She died three days after Christmas in 1856 and was buried in Old St. Mary’s Cemetery in Little Falls, New York.

We knew she was in Old St. Mary’s, because she was on a cemetery list, but none of the Little Falls family knew where her grave was. With first cousins once removed, I walked the steep hills there, looking for O’Haras, and found loads of them, but not Ann. We would separate, each of us taking a different route, trying to find her. One day, alone, I stood not far from the caretaker’s old stone cottage, up the first hill to the right, and turned around to my left to see, just where the hill dipped into a steep incline, a rounded stone with the name “Ann” near the top. Minding my step on the rutted earth, I came close enough to see that, under her Given Name was a line of letters that was unreadable. We think it must have said, once, “Wife of” because below it was “Michael O’Hara.” Then, “Died December 28, 1856, Aged 66 years. Native of the Parish of Ardee, Co. Louth, Ireland.” At the very bottom, once the weeds were torn away, I could read a prayer that she might rest in peace. I took careless photos of the stone that day in 2003 or 2004, and several times on later visits, thank God. Because this year, on my most recent visit, most of the letters have become undiscernable. I believe she called to me that day I found her. She wanted us to know where we came from. Ardee.