August 1850
Dear Children,
We were the lucky ones. You may have heard of “the luck of the Irish”, well, that describes us. First we were lucky to be from Ireland, that place of misty wonder, but we were luckier to leave our beloved home. Many people would have liked to leave, but they could not afford to. You see, things were very difficult for Catholics in Ireland. It was not until recently that we got some of our rights back that were stripped away by our English oppressors. So having the means to leave was a great blessing for us. One of my great good fortunes was to miss the potato famine, what they called in Ireland, the Great Hunger or in Gaelic, An Gorta Mor. When I came to join my brother, little did I know that it would start in few months.
We were also fortunate to live in the town of Monaghan, in the north province of Ulster, where things stayed prosperous much longer than in the south and west of Ireland. Having crops and goods to sell to finance all our passages was another blessing. We did not come over here all at once. In fact, from the first of the family, until the last, our passages went on for over ten years. Some of the family was lucky that they could stay in Ireland, as the linen industry survived better than most, and there was still a living to be made growing flax and spinning cloth. None of us was forced to come here, as so many Irish people were because they were starving and evicted from their farms.
The first day I walked down Main Street of Sag Harbor in April 1845, I heard so many languages my head was spinning like my mother’s spinning wheel. Later I learned I was listening to Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Russian. In Ireland, everyone spoke the same language and we knew each other for our whole lives. Here, even though we could not understand our fellow newcomers, they still made us feel less alone. It was our blessing that at least we were speaking the same language as the Americans, though they had trouble understanding our “Irish brogue”. While lots of the local people were not exactly friendly, they seemed to at least tolerate us. We considered that a great good fortune, to be left alone for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, especially compared to Irish immigrants in almost any other place else in America. It turns out that in our little corner of this land, being different was more of the same. Could we have found a better spot to stake our claim in the new world?
They say God gave us free will and it separates us from the animals, and it is surely something to be thankful for. Yet sometimes in this world, when it is taken away from a person, like it was from us in Ireland, a body begins to feel like an animal, penned up and hopeless. Now our lungs have sucked the air of freedom and we can hold our heads up again. We see our future and our children’s future as bright and full of promise. At home, there was nothing but loss and more loss, our land endlessly divided and subdivided. We have gone from shrinking to expanding in our hearts, minds and spirits.
Our bustling whaling village is so much more exciting than the town of Monaghan back home. They both have a weekly market, but how much grander and more varied it is here. Folks come from every town in the whole East End of Long Island every Saturday to be a part of it. There is work for any man willing to roll up his sleeves, and folks here like to work hard, even the rich ones. There is no landed gentry like the thieves who stole our land in Ireland, and everyone works for a living. We doff our caps to no man and the constitution says we are all equal. There are no tithes to bleed us dry and the taxes are low.
All in all, God has blessed us so since we set foot on this land and we are indeed the lucky ones. I am so glad to have our own little piece of heaven here in Sag Harbor and Bridgehampton. God willing, they will be ours for a very long time. Until next time, children.
Tá mé chomh mór sin i ngrá leat, tá mé chomh doirte sin duit,
Your mother,
Susan
