Continued from: The Blacksmith’s Son
Fifteen years earlier, Philip Heenan was a different man in a different city.
Dublin, 1805. A city under the British boot but alive with Irish voices, Irish commerce, Irish stubbornness. Twenty-one years old, Philip was a blacksmith, his hands already scarred from years at the forge. Smithing wasn’t a job, it was a life. Dedication, commitment, and years of learning to read the color of hot iron, to judge the weight of a hammer blow, to shape metal without shattering it. Philip had put in those years.
The records don’t tell us whether he owned a forge or worked for a master smith, but he was established enough to marry. Established enough that when Sarah gave birth to their first child in the spring of 1805, they could afford to have the baby baptized at St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Chapel on Westland Row.
The baptismal register recorded it in Latin, the language of the Catholic Church: Eleonoram Henan, daughter of Philipi Henan and Sarah. May 2, 1805. Sponsors: Mala Baker and Marga Anderson. The kind of detail that survives centuries—names in a parish book, proof that these people existed, that they brought their daughter to be blessed in a church on Westland Row.
Ellen. Their first child, their only daughter. In a world where infant mortality was brutal and random, she survived. She thrived. And two years later, in October 1807, Sarah gave birth again.
This time, the baptism was at St. Mary’s Provisional Cathedral. Perhaps the family had moved to the north side of the Liffey. Perhaps St. Mary’s was simply closer to Philip’s work that year, or perhaps they had family near the church. Dublin Catholics used whichever parish was most convenient, and there was nothing unusual about switching from St. Andrew’s to St. Mary’s. Sarah likely gave birth at home, as most Dublin women did, with a midwife attending, and the room cleared of everyone but the women who knew what to do. Jno Michl Heenan, the register said. John Michael, son of Phil Heenan and Serah Heenan. October 11, 1807.
Two children. A trade that fed them. A city they knew.
They might have lived on Marlborough Street, or Moore Street, or Drogheda Street, or any of the lanes that webbed through the north inner city near St. Mary’s. They lived in a grand Georgian home. A tall, elegant townhouse designed as a self‑contained world for a wealthy family and their servants. The strict, classical brick façade and grand front door opened to reveal a deep, two‑story hall with a sweeping, cantilevered staircase rising in generous flights, lit by tall windows. The rich plasterwork around the cornices and ceilings exhibited scrolling foliage, shells, and rosettes.
Of course, that was many decades ago, before their wealthy Protestant overlords shed the city and moved to newer, quieter suburban areas outside the old Georgian core. Before these grand homes were carved and partitioned into apartments for five or six families in a space that formerly supported one. Now, working families rented portions of these once grand homes.
Philip and Sarah were among the lucky with three rooms in a tall brick Georgian house with good bones but too many people. The main room faced the street, its window letting in the north light. A hearth with an iron grate where Sarah cooked everything. Pots hanging on hooks. A table, a few chairs, a dresser for dishes. The second room, smaller, where they all slept, Philip and Sarah in the bed, the children on pallets on the floor, everyone close in the dark. The third space, if you could call it that, was a landing, shared with whoever lived across the hall, where they kept what little wouldn’t fit elsewhere.
You could hear the family below through the floorboards. The family above, their footsteps crossing and re-crossing overhead. The shared stairwell carried the smell of a dozen suppers cooking at once, cabbage, potatoes, sometimes meat if someone had money, mixing with the smell of coal smoke and damp wool, and the particular sourness of too many people in too little space.
Water came from the pump in the yard, two flights down and out the back. Sarah made that trip a dozen times a day—water for cooking, water for washing, water for the children. The yard pump served all the families in their building and the ones in the buildings on either side, so there was always a line in the morning, women with buckets, trading news. The yard itself was packed dirt, churned to mud when it rained, with a shared privy in the corner that serviced more people than it was ever meant to.
On washing days, Sarah heated water over the fire and scrubbed clothes in a wooden tub right there in the main room, hanging them to dry on lines strung across the space. In summer, the windows stayed open and things dried fast. In winter, everything stayed damp, and the rooms smelled of wet linen and smoke.
Philip maintained his forge away from their home. He would have worked elsewhere, possibly a back lane off Moore Street or somewhere around City Quay, in those pockets of the city where smiths gathered to work their trades. Moore Street itself was chaos—market stalls selling vegetables and fish and secondhand clothes, crowds pushing through, street vendors shouting prices, carts struggling through the narrow space. But the forge lanes were working places, the air thick with heat and the constant ring of hammers on anvils, the whoosh of bellows, the hiss of iron meeting water.
Most mornings, Philip left before dawn. The streets were just waking up, the night soil carts making their rounds, bakers lighting their ovens, and the first market vendors setting up. He’d walk through the dim streets to the forge, fire it up, and work until dark, or even later if there was a big job. His hands knew the work without thinking—the weight of the hammer, the color of the iron as it heated, the exact moment to strike. He shod horses, mended cart wheels, forged hinges and hasps, and the hundred small pieces of ironwork that kept the city running. The work was hard and brutally physical, the heat and smoke relentless, but it was steady. People always needed a smith.
Sarah’s day was different but no less punishing. Up before Philip left, rekindling the fire from the banked coals, heating water, getting the children dressed and fed. Ellen was old enough to help—fetching things, watching John Michael, and learning the work of keeping a household together. But Sarah did most of it. The endless hauling of water. The cooking. The cleaning of soot and coal dust that settled on everything. The mending. The trips to the market with a baby on one hip and Ellen clinging to her skirt, navigating the crowded streets, counting pennies, bargaining with vendors who knew exactly how desperate you were.
The rooms were never quiet. Children crying or laughing or fighting. Neighbors’ voices through the walls. The street noise rising up—carts rattling on cobbles, horses’ hooves, hawkers crying their wares, church bells marking the hours. Even at night there was sound. People coming and going on the stairs. Babies waking. The constant low murmur of a city that never fully slept.
But there were good moments too. Sundays, when they walked to Mass—the whole family in their best clothes, which wasn’t much, but clean at least. The church was the center of everything that wasn’t work. Where you met people. Where you heard news. Where the children were baptized and you felt, for an hour, like you belonged to something bigger than your cramped rooms and your constant worry about money.
And sometimes Philip came home with a bit extra. A customer who’d paid in full, or a job that went faster than expected. Sarah would buy meat for the pot, and the children would smell it cooking and know this was a good day. Philip might sit by the fire after supper, too tired to talk, but Ellen would climb into his lap anyway, and he’d let her stay there until she fell asleep.
Those moments were what kept you going. But they didn’t change the fundamental arithmetic.
Philip was a skilled smith, but he was Catholic, and that meant things would never be better. The guild system was only for the Protestants. Catholic blacksmiths could work. They were tolerated, even needed, but they operated on the fringes. They were admitted as “quarter brothers” if they paid fees, allowed to practice their trade, but excluded from the full privileges and protections that Protestant guild members enjoyed. There were contracts Philip couldn’t get. Customers who would take their business to a Protestant smith, even if Philip’s work was better. Civic positions he’d never hold. Property he couldn’t own.
And it wasn’t just him. His sons would face the same world. His daughter would marry into that world. Ellen would likely end up in service, if she was lucky. The boys would learn a trade if they could, but they’d hit the same ceiling Philip had. This was it. These rooms. This work. This level. No matter how hard Philip worked or how skilled he became, they could go down, but they could never go up.
He could feed his family. That was something. More than casual laborers could say. But he couldn’t give them more. Every day, he saw Protestant tradesmen moving up, buying property, securing their children’s futures. Catholic families like his, working just as hard, harder even, were lucky to stay in place.
The political talk was everywhere. In the forge lanes, in the taverns, in the streets. The Act of Union in 1800 had dissolved Ireland’s Parliament, folding the country into Britain proper. Catholic leaders had supported it, believing emancipation would follow. The promise was full rights, full participation. But George III blocked it. The promise had been broken. By 1805, everyone knew they’d been lied to. The Union had happened. Emancipation hadn’t. And Catholics were still second-class in their own country.
Philip heard it all. The anger. The frustration. The talk of O’Connell and what might come next. But he couldn’t afford to be too political. He had Protestant customers. Protestant landlords. Men he depended on for work and housing. He had to be careful. Deferential when he needed to be. Silent when silence was safer.
It was exhausting. Not just the physical work, but the constant calculation. The awareness that one misstep—one word to the wrong person, one Protestant customer offended—could mean disaster.
And for what? So his children could do the same thing? So Ellen could scrub Protestant floors, and John Michael could work someone else’s forge and never own anything? So another generation could live in subdivided Georgian houses, hauling water from shared pumps, counting pennies at the market?
There had to be something else.
The talk about America started slowly. Someone at the forge had a cousin who’d gone to New York. Someone else had a brother in Philadelphia. Letters came back. Passed from hand to hand, read aloud in taverns. The work was hard, they said. The crossing was hell. But once you got there, if you had a skill, you could make something. There were no guilds keeping Catholics out. No laws saying where you could live or what you could own. You could vote once you became a citizen. You could buy property. You could build something and know your children might actually inherit it and do better than you. It sounded impossible. It sounded like a fairy story. But the letters kept coming, and the people who’d gone kept not coming back.
Philip started listening more carefully. Asking questions. How much did the passage cost? What kind of work was there for smiths?
He didn’t tell Sarah at first. Not until he was sure he was serious. Not until he’d done the arithmetic a hundred times in his head, how much they’d need for passage, what they’d have to sell, what they could carry, what they’d be leaving behind.
And then, sometime around 1809, William was born. Another son. Another child who would grow up Catholic in Dublin, hitting the same walls Philip had hit, living in the same cramped rooms, watching Protestant families rise while his own stayed stuck.
Philip looked at William, this new baby, and he looked at Ellen and John Michael, and he made a calculation that thousands of Irish families were making in those years.
He told Sarah they were leaving.
The exact reasons they abandoned their Dublin home for a far-off, unknown shore are lost to time. We don’t know if there was a final straw—a customer who cheated him, a landlord who raised the rent, a specific moment when Philip decided enough was enough. We don’t know if Sarah argued or agreed, if she was terrified or relieved, or some complicated mixture of both. We don’t know how they told the children, or what they said to the family they were leaving behind, or what they kept and what they sold to raise the passage money.
But we know the forces that shaped the decision. We know the pressure—the volatile Dublin economy, the competition squeezing margins, the sense that things were getting harder, not easier. We know the ceiling, the guild system that kept Catholics perpetually outside, the civic positions they couldn’t hold, the property they couldn’t own. We know the pull. The letters from America telling of riches and freedom, a chance for the children to rise. We know the calculation, that staying meant condemning another generation to the same narrow prospects, while leaving meant risking everything on the hope that America would be different.
We know they made the decision. And we know that sometime after William’s birth, they began to prepare.
They would have gathered what they could carry. Clothes. A few tools, if Philip could manage it. Whatever money they’d saved or could raise by selling what they couldn’t take. They would have said goodbye to family—Sarah’s people, Philip’s people, whoever was left in Dublin to say goodbye to. They would have walked away from the forge lanes and the crowded streets and the shared pump in the yard and the church where their children had been baptized.
They would have made their way to Dublin’s docks and found a ship. Not a passenger ship, but a cargo vessel with a dark, ugly space in its belly for emigrants who could only pay the lowest fares. Steerage. The cheapest berths, in the deepest parts of the ship.
And then, with all their children—Ellen and John Michael and William and Martin and probably young Philip too, they stepped aboard. The Dublin life was over.
