Hi Kerry,
It’s good to hear from you and good to be told that you find the postings on Thomas McNamara interesting. I’ve come to thinking of Thomas McNamara as a metaphor for something larger - just haven’t found the word for it yet! The contributions from Jimbo - for instance the recent ones on the Ahish McNamaras - provide great examples of the close network between families and friends in America (and this must be true also of the Irish in Australia), a network* which was essential for survival, no doubt, and which made the whole emigration thing work. Emigration has been such a constant in Irish life, that it has been taken for granted as a kind of backdrop to everything else that was going on, and so very often is barely mentioned. If we look at accounts of the period of the war of independence and the civil war, for example, we find very little mention of the continual flow of people, some of them people who had enlisted in the Volunteer companies, out of the country. So I’m finding “Seeking Thomas McNamara” a good education that I would otherwise have missed - it is the title of the module on emigration.
* In
The Land for the People: The Land Question in Independent Ireland, by Terence Dooley, the author recounts a story told by Horace Plunkett and adds his own perceptive comment (page 135):
‘Recently [c1904] a daughter of a small farmer in County Galway with a family too ‘long’ for the means of subsistence available, was offered a comfortable home on a farm owned by some better-off relatives, only thirty miles away, though probably twenty miles beyond the limits of her peregrinations. She elected in preference to go to New York, and being asked her reason by a friend of mine, replied in so many words, ‘because it is nearer’. She felt she would be less of a stranger in a New York tenement house, among her relatives and friends who had already emigrated, than in another part of County Galway.
Kerry, I hadn’t realized that your ancestors - at least your grandmother - was such a recent arrival in Australia. It’s interesting to hear that she lived so close to the action (of the Rising) in Dublin.
I was interested to hear of the collection of funds for "the Cause." So much money was collected over the years, yet never enough, it seems.
Sheila