I’ve just taken a turn from Wikipedia to the Ellis Island search. I did this a few years ago, before there were visual manifest records from the ships that arrived. I entered my grandfather’s name — Thomas Finn — and found him, as I had several years ago. Then I clicked on “Ship Manifest” and got a chilling feeling. There, on an old form, with lots of rows and columns, labelled “steerage passengers”, my Grandfather (who died before I was born, leaving a long trail of myths in his wake, and tears in my Dad’s eyes whenever he mentioned him) was on a list with 4 others arriving from Ireland that day on the Lusitania (before it sank).
There was a check on the line next to his name under the columns labeled “Read?” and “Write?” He listed someone whose first name was unintelligble, but whose last name was “Ronayne” and lived at 153 Pavonia Avenue in Jersey City. (Now I know why that obnoxious drunk Mike Ronayne remained a sidekick of my father’s all those years: his father probably hosted my grandfather when he immigrated from Mitchelstown Ireland on June 25, 1909, the date of the manifest). The manifest indicated that he had $40 in cash on that day. The columns “Whether a Polygamist” and “Whether an Anarchist” were blank. He was 5′-8″, his hair “dark,” his eyes “gray.”
There was a separate sheet where a doctor certified the health of ALL the passengers listed on the sheet with my grandfather, and another where a lawyer vouched for ALL the passengers’ not having been felons in their country of origin (All Irish).
There was a similar manifest for my Grandmother, Margaret Finn, on September 9, 1909, and her daughter (I believe her name was Helen, but it’s not indicated). Helen died of rheumatic heart when my Dad was a little boy, born after Mary, and, in Jersey City. He always told folks he had been “conceived in Ireland.” But the date on that manifest makes that impossible–he was born on October 12, 1910. So his embarassing boast turned out to be a lie afterall.
My Grandmother had $10 in her pocket, and listed “Thomas Finn, 153 Pavonia Ave, Jersey City, NJ” as the relative whom she’d be staying with. It listed him as her husband, and, one line down, as Helen’s father. Her hair was “dark.” Her eyes “brown.” They arrived together on a ship called the Arcadia.
My grandparents had made a go of their own business in Cork, Ireland, eschewing the family’s dairy farm in Mitchelstown. Their bakery, alas, failed, and at the time, migration to the U.S. was increasingly the choice of young industrious types looking for opportunity. They had already lost one child, Nelly (Mary) to childhood disease, and then had Helen. In their late 20s, they had the guts to separate from each other, with my grandfather travelling across to Jersey City to seek work while Margaret stayed with family, waiting to be beckoned to cross over to him.
What courage they had, what fears they must have had in making this dark mysterious choice with their young lives. My grandfather got work as a teamster on the docks in downtown Manhattan. They eventually bought a brick rowhouse at 144 Erie Street in Jersey City. They proceeded to have four more kids: My Dad (Thomas), and his sisters Margaret, Alice, and Cathleen. Cathleen is the only one who remains, and she never left Jersey City. My Dad was the only one who did, and not because he wanted to, but because he had to in order to get work to feed 8 kids.
I sit in my 3500 sf, 4-bedroom house with a ridiculous level of comfort and space. I am scared out of my wits about retreating now to a 3-bedroom apartment with a ridiculous level of luxury and security. I do not anticipate becoming a faceless name on a manifest, with checks and numbers under columns for my height, my health, my political leanings, and other depersonalizing characteristics. But I whine, I complain, I view the whole thing as a terrible inconvenience, and blame my husband for not being more stable, more settled when I married him (as if I didn’t know!).
The reality is, we are merely retreating from a time of conspicuous consumption to a finite 5-year period of middle-class budgeting and frugality. Hardly a trip across the ocean with $10 in your pocket.
Is devolution a fact? It seems to be when it comes to my character. I wish to have their fortitude, Margaret and Tom. I’ll bet she didn’t whine (although I hear she did nag a bit). I’ll bet she just did what she had to do, in true Irish, stoic, Rose-Kennedy fashion: “She never cried in public. What a strong woman.”
Maybe displaying feelings IS overrated. Maybe some things call for restraint, for quiet sacrifice, for giving way of self. I pray for that kind of strength to give way and have faith that motives based on giving a better life to the ones you love will carry you through times of self-deprivation. I pray that is so.
