The Search for My Grandparents — Chapter 4 — Why Sarah “Had to Leave” Ireland
Note — This series has been enhanced and republished HERE: http://www.searchformygrandparents.com.
So let’s see…where did I leave this story?
I know we need to return to the original point of this entire narrative — my father’s parents, Frank and Elizabeth dying tragically (sort of) in that 1930s fire.
We left my maternal grandmother, Sarah, standing on the deck of the S.S. Adriatic in Cobh, Ireland on 9 November 1924, waiting to depart for New York.
There’s not a lot of documentation from the 1911 Irish Census through that departure date, but there are some things we can surmise, both from a quick review of this period in Irish history — “the troubles” — and a few family anecdotes. So let’s try and figure out how Sarah came to be standing on the deck of the S.S. Adriatic.
I was at first somewhat confused by the historical context of what happened in Ireland; I know, a bit embarrassing as a history major.
When my Mom initially visited Ireland in the 1980s, she was told by a cousin that “Sarah needed to leave” in 1924 because of her “activities with the Brotherhood.” I also knew in my very sketchy understanding of Irish history that the Easter Rebellion was during Easter (pretty convenient given the name) in 1916. So the timeline was a bit out of whack.
So here’s a short bit of context.
Everyone knows the Irish and their British overlords weren’t exactly buddy-buddy. As Wikipedia notes,
“In the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish Catholics had been prohibited by the penal laws from purchasing or leasing land, from voting, from holding political office, from living in or within 5 miles (8 km) of a corporate town, from obtaining education, from entering a profession, and from doing many other things necessary for a person to succeed and prosper in society. The laws had largely been reformed by 1793, and the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 allowed Irish Catholics to again sit in parliament…Catholics, the bulk of whom lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity despite Catholic emancipation in 1829, made up 80% of the population. At the top of the ‘social pyramid was the ‘ascendancy class,’ the English and Anglo-Irish families who owned most of the land, and held more or less unchecked power over their tenants.”
And highly dependent upon potatoes. About 40% of the population was dependent in some form on the crop.
The potato blight Phytophthora infestans arrived in Europe, most likely in 1844, and most likely originating in the Eastern U.S. Between 1845 and 1849, about one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the island’s population to fall by between 20% and 25%.
Appeals for relief to Parliament mostly fell on deaf ears. And as wikipedia further notes,
“The famine was a watershed in the history of Ireland, which was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The famine and its effects permanently changed the island’s demographic, political, and cultural landscape. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory and became a rallying point for Irish nationalist movements. The already strained relations between many Irish and the British Crown soured further, heightening ethnic and sectarian tensions, and boosting Irish nationalism and republicanism in Ireland and among Irish emigrants in the United States and elsewhere.”
Meanwhile…there had long been a group in Ireland interested in coming to terms with the British and driving toward more of a Home Rule situation for Ireland, albeit within the overall context of still being part of the United Kingdom (like the Scots or the Welsh). These folks pushed unsuccessful attempts in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Parliament to begin to push toward Home Rule.
A variety of groups opposed to all of this conciliation ebbed and flowed, included the Irish Republican Brotherhood (most likely including the McEvoys), although as a woman Sarah would not have been eligible to actually be a member of the IRB, but more likely a sort of women’s auxiliary connected with it, the Cumann na mBan.
Prior to World War 1, Parliament finally passed a Home Rule bill, which would seem like good news. Despite the years of acrimony with the British, once World War 1 was declared, many Irish voluntarily served with the British. Again wikipedia…
“At the outbreak of the war, most Irish people, regardless of political affiliation, supported the war in much the same way as their British counterparts, and both nationalist and unionist leaders initially backed the British war effort. Their followers, both Catholic and Protestant, served extensively in the British forces, many in three specially raised divisions with others in the Imperial and United States armies…Over 200,000 Irishmen fought in the war, in several theatres and either 30,000, or, if one includes those who died serving in armies other than Britain’s, 49,400 died.”
Keep in mind this was out of a population of 4.4 million. If the same percentage of fatalities had occurred in the U.S. during World War 1, the U.S. death toll would have been over 1 million.
And here, as they say in Casablanca, destiny takes a hand.
To make a long story short, Home Rule was postponed during the War. The Northern counties refused to recognize Home Rule and then armed themselves. Those in the South associated with the IRB, the Irish Volunteers, and a small radical militia group, the Irish Citizen Army, did similarly. This all bubbled over in an ill-planned insurrection in 1916, the Easter Rebellion.
“On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, a group of Irish nationalists proclaimed the establishment of the Irish Republic and, along with some 1,600 followers, staged a rebellion against the British government in Ireland. The rebels seized prominent buildings in Dublin and clashed with British troops. Within a week, the insurrection had been suppressed and more than 2,000 people were dead or injured. The leaders of the rebellion soon were executed. Initially, there was little support from the Irish people for the Easter Rising; however, public opinion later shifted and the executed leaders were hailed as martyrs. (https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/easter-rising)
Per John Dorney in The Irish Civil War — A brief overview, here’s what happened next.
“In 1918, Sinn Fein won a general election on the basis that it would withdraw from the British parliament, declare an Irish Republic and secede from the British Empire — rejecting earlier offers of Home Rule or limited self-government for Ireland. For the following three years, but especially from the middle of 1920 until the summer of 1921, both IRA insurgency and British repression, in what is now called the War of Independence, produced about 2,000 deaths in Ireland.
In July 1921, a truce was arranged between British and Irish republican forces, negotiations were opened and ended in the signing of the Treaty on December 6 1921. The Treaty gave the 26 southern counties of Ireland — now the Irish Free State — a considerable degree of independence — the same within the British commonwealth as Australia and Canada. The British military garrison was to be withdrawn and the RIC police disbanded.
However the settlement dissolved the Republic declared in 1918 and pledged Irish TDs or members of parliament to swear allegiance to the British monarch. The British retained three naval bases along the Irish coast at Cobh, Bearhaven and Lough Swilly. It also confirmed the partition of Ireland between North and South, which had already been instituted under the 1920 Government of Ireland Act.”
For all of these reasons, the Treaty was viewed as a step backwards by many Irish Republicans and nationalists, apparently including Sarah McEvoy and some of my relatives. And this precipitated a Civil War that would last until March 1924.
So back to Sarah. I know many, likely including my sister June — who has long objected to my interest in history and will likely feel that the above narrative was just as painful as the time we made her go to Gettysburg on a family vacation — will say FINALLY.
There is a family story that my Uncle Michael (Sarah’s brother) and Uncle Martin Hennessy (eventual husband of my Aunt Elizabeth) were involved with Sarah in various plots to blow up police stations during this period. Of course, we knew none of this while they were all alive — no one talked about any of this — it only surfaced many years later at funerals and wakes.
As the story goes, Martin and Michael were warned by a priest during Mass that they were about to be arrested and ought to leave Mass out the back door and hide out for a bit. They eventually shipped off to Canada, supposedly to work in the wheat fields of Alberta, only to abandon this plan during a train stop somewhere halfway across Canada and slip into the United States.
I thought this was perhaps a bit of romantic hyperbole until I found this record of my Aunt Elizabeth’s petition for naturalization, which shows some of the background of her husband. And sure enough, there’s Uncle Martin entering the U.S. on 7 June 1924, at Detroit — right across the border from Windsor, Ontario.
I also found out that there were attacks on the RIC barracks (Royal Irish Constabulary, the policy force in Ireland from the early 18th century until 1922) in both 1920 and 1922 in Clonaslee, which likely could have precipitated the rapid departure of Sarah, Michael and Martin to North America after the end of the Civil War in 1924 — and likely the rounding up of the usual suspects who were on the losing side thereafter.
Sooooooo….. I think that’s how Sarah wound up on the deck of the S.S. Adriatic in 1924.
Sarah arrived in the U.S. on November 17, 1924, travelling with her sister Elizabeth.
She was identified as British in nationality, which she definitely would not have liked.
Elsewhere in the record, it noted the she had $50, was coming here permanently, was 5 foot 4 inches, had a “ruddy” complexion, and brown hair and grey eyes.
And now you know the rest of the story. Well at least up till 1924.
Other chapters in the series:
The Search for my Grandparents — Chapter 1 — The Starting Line
The Search for My Grandparents — Chapter 2 — Meet the Brady Bunch!
The Search for My Grandparents — Chapter 3 — Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Sarah McEvoy!
The Search for My Grandparents — Chapter 4 — Why Sarah “Had to Leave” Ireland
The Search for My Grandparents — Chapter 5 — Where We Reconnect with Frank and Elizabeth
The Search for My Grandparents — Chapter 6 — The Story of Ne’er-do-well Grandfather Number One
The Search for My Grandparents — Chapter 9 — Ancestry and our WTF Moment
The Search for My Grandparents — Chapter 10 — And the Death Certificates Arrive
And not technically in this series, but related — The Pushmi-Pullyu Impact of Technology Innovation on Information Preservation