Ballincurry Memories

Continued from: Dublin

What follows is a fictionalized reconstruction. The facts are few, but the story they tell through informed speculation is rich, shaped by what is known about Irish emigration in this period and what meager facts are known of the Heenan family and the people that once lived, and breathed, and loved, but are now lost to time. Where the records speak, I say so. Everything else is the story I think is most likely true.

The last record of the Heenan family in Dublin is the birth of their son William, in 1809. The next sight of them is a single line in the 1814 Directory of the City of New York: Henen Philip, smith, 7 Hague. Between those two facts, a baby born in Dublin and a blacksmith established on a street in lower Manhattan, lies a crossing that no known document records. No passenger list. No ship manifest. No port of arrival notation. Nothing but silence, and the certainty that somehow, between 1809 and 1814, they made the passage to America.

The Atlantic during the first decade of the 1800s was not yet the well-worn emigrant highway it would become later in the nineteenth century, when the wars had ended, and the traffic swelled to a flood. In those early years, the ocean was a war zone. Britain and Napoleonic France had been tearing at each other since 1803, and their conflict had swallowed the sea lanes whole. The Royal Navy controlled the North Atlantic with an iron grip, stopping and searching merchant vessels at will, and pressing into service any man they judged to be a British subject, including, according to the King, every Irishman alive. You could be a blacksmith from Dublin with a wife and children, but if a British naval officer decided he needed hands, you were in the King’s navy, and your family could wait forever.

The Americans had tried to stay out of the conflict, but failed. British actions against American ships and a series of retaliatory trade laws had strangled commercial shipping across the Atlantic, which in turn almost completely shut down passenger travel. A pair of bills passed in 1809 and 1810, intended to bolster American shipping, opened a small window for emigration until that door slammed shut with the declaration of war in June of 1812. Most likely, Philip took advantage of that window. The records don’t tell us exactly when he left Dublin, but it was surely in late 1810 when passages became slightly easier or 1811 before the war started. If he did leave in 1810 or 1811, he caught a narrow window. The worst of the American trade restrictions had eased. The War of 1812 hadn’t started yet. The Napoleonic Wars still made every crossing a risk, but the risk was manageable

Even though he was a skilled tradesman, given that they were Catholics in a city heavily oppressed by British rule, it was unlikely they had the resources for the entire family to make the journey. Shipping had increased, and there were more berths available for transport, yet it was still significantly more expensive during those years than it was prior to the wars, or after.

That historical reality, as well as the pattern of Irish emigration in this period, suggests that he most likely went alone. This was how it was usually done. The husband crossed. He found work, found a room, found his footing. And then, when he could afford the passage and had a place to put them, he sent for his wife and children. It was the practical, economical choice. What Philip and Sarah didn’t count on was America declaring war on Britain, and the withering impact that would have on all Atlantic travel, and the years of separation that came.

He would have made his way to the Dublin docks and then to Liverpool. Many Dublin emigrants took a coastal vessel or a packet across the Irish Sea to Liverpool first, then booked their Atlantic passage from there. It added days to the journey and shillings to the cost, but Liverpool was the great funnel of emigration, with more ships, more departures, more options. If Philip took this route — and the odds favor it — what he found there was chaos. The docks stretched for miles along the river Mersey, a forest of masts and rigging, the air thick with coal smoke and tar and the smell of the river. Emigrant agents worked the streets near the waterfront, booking passages on cargo vessels that carried human beings as a profitable sideline. The ships were not designed for passengers. They were merchant vessels — brigs, barques, sometimes small full-rigged ships — that had been fitted with rough wooden bunks in the lower decks to squeeze in as many paying bodies as they could alongside the cargo. Steerage. That’s what they called it, because the cheapest berths were near the stern, close to the rudder mechanism, in the darkest and most airless part of the ship.

Philip would have paid his fare — perhaps three to five pounds, a significant sum for a blacksmith but not ruinous — and been assigned a berth. A wooden shelf, six feet by two, with a straw-filled mattress if he was lucky and bare boards if he wasn’t. He would have been told to bring his own provisions for the voyage, or to buy them from the ship’s stores at inflated prices. Oatmeal, hardtack, dried peas, maybe some salt pork. Water from casks that grew foul within a week. A tin cup and a wooden bowl.

The crossing took four to eight weeks, depending on the wind, the weather, and whether the ship was stopped, searched, or diverted. Westbound crossings were slower as the prevailing winds blew east, and winter crossings were brutal. The steerage deck was dark, the air heavy with the smell of unwashed bodies, vomit, and bilge water. Seasickness was universal and unrelenting for the first days. The food was monotonous and often barely edible. There was no privacy, no quiet, no escape from the constant rolling of the ship and the groaning of the timbers and the retching of the people around you.

But the ship moved west. Day by day, it moved west.

New York Harbor. After a month or two at sea, the flat line of Long Island appeared to the north, then the Narrows, then the wide mouth of the harbor itself, and suddenly the city — small by the standards Philip’s grandchildren would know, but startling after weeks of empty ocean. Church steeples and ship masts. Wharves running along the East River, crowded with vessels of every size. The noise carrying across the water — hammers, shouts, the creak of cargo cranes, the screaming of gulls.

There was no Ellis Island. No Castle Garden. No immigration station of any kind. Those institutions wouldn’t exist for decades. In 1811 or 1812, an arriving emigrant simply walked off the ship onto the wharf and into the city. No one checked your papers. No one asked your name. No one cared, particularly, whether you lived or died, as long as you didn’t become a public charge.

Philip stepped onto the wharves of lower Manhattan with his tools, his clothes, and whatever money he had left after the passage. He was a blacksmith in a fast-growing city that needed blacksmiths. That was his advantage, and it was considerable. New York in 1811 was a city of roughly 100,000 people, expanding in every direction, building constantly. The waterfront hummed with shipbuilding and repair. The streets were full of horses that needed shoeing, carts that needed mending, and buildings that needed iron hardware. A skilled smith who was willing to work could find employment within days.

Philip found it. We don’t know the details — whether he worked for another smith at first, or rented forge space, or found a patron who set him up. But by the time the city directory was compiled in late 1813, Philip Heenan was listed at 7 Hague Street, a smith with his own address. Hague Street sat in the tangle of lanes just north of the waterfront, in the Fourth Ward, the kind of neighborhood where tradesmen and artisans clustered because the rents were affordable and the customers were close. The docks were a few blocks south. The construction trades were everywhere. It was exactly where a blacksmith would plant himself.

Hague Street is gone now. The Brooklyn Bridge buried it in the 1870s, its massive stone anchorage planted directly on the ground where Philip’s forge once stood. But in 1813, it was a working street in a working neighborhood, and Philip was on it, established, listed, real.

He may have been ready for Sarah and the children as early as 1812, but the war had closed off that option, and all they could do was wait and hope. Letters home were certainly attempted. But given wartime logistics, it’s doubtful how many were able to be exchanged. Costs were high. The War sharply reduced transatlantic sailings. Reliability was poor. Ships were captured, delayed in port by embargoes, or avoided sailing altogether. Transit times varied widely. In peacetime, letters typically took 4–8 weeks. During 1812–1814, delivery commonly took 2–4 months and could be much longer, with many letters simply lost.

Philip was settled. He had a forge. He had an address. It was time for the family to come, but there was no way they could make the trip. Sarah would have known of the problems. She would have known of the war. The docks at Dublin were full of stories about ships taken, cargoes confiscated, crews imprisoned. The war dragged on through 1812, 1813, 1814. It must have been agonizing.

News of the Treaty of Ghent reached New York in February 1815. By spring, the Atlantic was opening again — not safe, exactly, but no longer an active battlefield.

It is possible that Sarah’s mother, Jane Dempsey, traveled with her. Jane was living at the Heenan household address in New York at the time of her death in 1828. She may have crossed the Atlantic with her daughter and grandchildren, an older woman providing the practical help and the social standing that a lone mother with small children would have needed on a voyage of several weeks. Two women and three children were a family. One woman and three children was a vulnerability. Whether Jane came with Sarah or followed later, we don’t know. But her presence in the household suggests she was part of the story, not an afterthought.

The journey Sarah faced was the same journey Philip had made, and worse. The same steerage berths, the same foul air, the same weeks of rolling darkness. But now add the children who were frightened and seasick and bored and hungry and unable to understand why they were living in the belly of a ship. Add the constant vigilance — making sure no one fell, no one wandered, no one ate something that would make them sick, no one caught the fevers that swept through steerage decks. Add the loneliness of being the only person responsible for keeping everyone alive.

Sarah did it — with Jane’s help or without, before the war ended or after. She got them across. She brought them to New York, to Philip, to Hague Street, to whatever rooms he’d arranged in whatever building he’d found near the forge.

They stayed at 7 Hague Street for three years until moving to Gold Street where the 1819 City Jury Census finds them at number 29. Five persons. Three males, two females. All aliens. Almost certainly Philip, Sarah, Ellen, John Michael, and William. The family, together. Settled. Five people in a city of immigrants, in a neighborhood of tradesmen, in rooms that were probably no bigger or grander than the ones they’d left behind in Dublin.

But the ceiling was gone. The invisible ceiling that had pressed down on Philip in Dublin, the Penal Laws, the guild system that shut Catholics out, the contracts he couldn’t get, the property he couldn’t own, the civic life he couldn’t join, none of that applied here. In New York, a Catholic blacksmith could work for whoever would pay him. He could own property. He could become a citizen. He could build a future his children might actually inherit.

However they made the journey — together or in stages, before the war or during it, through Liverpool or direct from Dublin — the Heenans had bet everything on New York. Philip had walked away from the only city he’d ever known, crossed an ocean in wartime, and built a life from nothing in a strange country. Sarah had followed him into the unknown, with children clinging to her, trusting that the man she’d married had made the right decision. They had risked it all.

And by 1819, New York City’s juror census confirms to us that they were all together. Five Irish immigrants in lower Manhattan, with a forge and a trade and a future that Dublin would never have given them. But it was a future in which fate’s twists would prove cruel.

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.

This story is built from what survives: death certificates, baptismal records, city directories, census records, and newspaper articles. Where the documents speak, I listen. Where they fall silent, I reconstruct what I can from the patterns of Irish immigrant life in nineteenth-century New York and Dublin. What follows is both history and imagination, both fact and inference—an attempt to resurrect human lives from archival fragments.

December 19, 1820 – New York City

The coffin was small. That’s what struck the people watching the funeral procession move slowly down Gold Street toward the cemetery. Not the December cold, though it cut through every layer of the wool clothes the mourners wore to keep it away. Not the father’s face, though Philip Heenan looked ashen and broken, decades older than his thirty-six years. The coffin. William’s coffin, barely longer than his father’s outstretched arms.

He had turned twelve in the autumn. Dark-haired like his father, quick with numbers, the one who could make his mother laugh even when money was tight. The fever took him in less than a week. One day, he complained of a headache. Six days later, his fever was gone, and his body lay still and cold. Sarah washed him one last time, remembering when she bathed him as a child. That other life, that other bright and endless life.

It was Tuesday afternoon, two o’clock. Cold enough that breath hung in the air like smoke. The family gathered outside number 29—Sarah rigid and silent, Ellen pressed close to her mother’s side, the boys trying to stand like men and failing.

Philip, Martin, and John Michael stood with their father. They were old enough to understand death, young enough to be shattered by it. Philip was trying to hold himself together the way he’d seen other men do at funerals. Martin’s hands were clenched so tight his knuckles had gone white. John Michael kept looking at the coffin and then looking away, as if looking away could make it not real.

But Willie was dead. And grief cracked through their composure like ice breaking.

The neighbors came. More than Philip expected—forty, fifty people, forming a line that stretched down Gold Street. Irish Catholics from the surrounding blocks, women who knew Sarah from church, men who worked alongside Philip or bought his ironwork or simply understood what it meant to bury a child in this city. They came because that’s what you did. They came because someday it might be their child in the coffin, and they would need Philip Heenan to walk behind it.

Someone began the prayers. The procession started moving.

Philip walked directly behind the coffin. His hands, blacksmith’s hands, scarred from forge work and strong enough to shape iron, hung useless at his sides. What good were strong hands? What had he built that mattered if he couldn’t keep his son alive?

They walked slowly through the narrow streets. Funeral pace. The kind of walking that leaves too much room for thought. Philip’s mind went to places he didn’t want it to go—to Ireland, to the crossing, to the thousand small decisions that had brought them here. To the weighing of one life against another, and the hope that leaving Dublin would give them better lives. To his son’s hands, learning the weight of a hammer. To the boy reading, or laughing, or running with his brothers. To ordinary moments he’d thought would last forever. To William, who was all of those moments, and now was none. To William. To William.

Sarah walked behind, eyes fixed, staring at a future she did not want to face. Ellen held her arm, afraid her mother might simply stop walking and stand there in the street forever. The girl had washed her brother’s body. She had seen death before, of course, but not like this. Not her little brother. Not Willie.

The cemetery gate appeared ahead. Michael O’Connor stood waiting, the sexton, another Irishman in a city full of them. The grave was ready. St. Patrick’s Cemetery, the Catholic ground, the place where Irish families buried their dead when they couldn’t take them home.

Home. Dublin was home once. A place where Philip’s family had lived for generations, where Sarah’s people were rooted, where the children had been born into something that made sense. But you couldn’t go back with American children and empty pockets. Home was here now, whether they’d chosen well or not. These streets. This city. This frozen ground was home now.

They lowered the coffin into the earth.

Sarah made a sound—not a cry, just a small broken noise escaping from the part of her that had died with Willie. Ellen tightened her grip on her mother’s arm. The boys stood frozen. The prayers continued, Latin words washing over them like water, meaning nothing, and everything.

And then it was done.

The mourners began to leave, one by one, touching Philip’s shoulder as they passed. Words of comfort, barely heard. Promises to stop by the house. The slow unwinding of community back into individual lives and troubles.

The family stood there longer. No one wanted to be the first to turn away, to leave William there alone in the frozen ground. The rooms they shared on Gold Street would feel different now—too quiet and too crowded at once, Willie’s absence everywhere. His voice, missing from the supper table. His pallet on the floor, empty. The space he’d occupied in their small, jumbled, cramped life, now a hole in the world that nothing would fill.

Philip looked at Sarah. She looked back. There was nothing to say. They had crossed an ocean to give their children better lives. They had worked and sacrificed and built something from nothing. They had done everything they knew how to do. And Willie was still dead. He was twelve years old, and the earth was frozen, and New York didn’t care.

There was tomorrow and the day after and all the days of their lives stretching forward without Willie in them. They turned and walked back toward the city.

Continued: Dublin

I have been trying to break through a Brick wall for many months (or has it been years). I tracked my Heenan line back to William born 1831-1834 in New York City and Mary Ann Reilly born 1836 in Ireland, and there I got stuck.

Serendipitously, just after Christmas 2018, I was sitting in a Starbucks in Sarasota Florida with my laptop when I happened on a Facebook post from a genealogy group I follow. The person mentioned New York City directories being online at the NY Public Library. Between sips of my mocha latte, with nothing more pressing to do, I took a half-hearted stab at seeing if I could locate some early Heenans.

I reasoned since my GGGF William was born in the early thirties, perhaps there were Heenans in NYC in the early twenties. I brought up the 1920 directory, and viola, there was one Heenan – Philip. Now that was interesting since William’s son, my GGF, was also Philip. Hmm, could be nothing, but at least it wasn’t a James, or Patrick, or Michael!

I spent a bunch of hours searching all the directories from the 1780s until 1886 for any Heenans. Philip was the first and only to appear for the first ten years, and his first entry was 1820. I guess I got lucky.

Do You Feel Lucky? Well, Do You?

Now that I had a possible father’s name for William I began digging…well more like foraging for anything related to Heenans, particularly Philip, in the first two decades of the 1800s. I eventually did a search for Philip Heenan of that time period on the site findmypast.com.  There were two records. Both were transcriptions of Catholic Church parish marriage registers. I opened the first with a rising sense of excitement. It was the marriage of Philip Heenan to Mary Ann Neil in 1831 in St Patrick Old Cathedral. Nothing firm, but pretty interesting.

As an aside, dedicated on May 14, 1815, St Patrick Old Cathedral was one of the first Roman Catholic churches in New York City. John Connolly, an Irish Dominican friar, became the city’s first resident bishop. It became the spiritual home for many of the city’s burgeoning Irish immigrant population. It was the terminating point of the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. In 1836, it was the subject of an attack after tensions between the Irish Catholic population and the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, nativist “no-nothing” movement boiled over into riots. The Ancient Order of Hibernians established its headquarters across the street from the church cementing its importance to the nascent Irish community.

I knew Philip’s son William was married to Mary Ann Reilly in New York City, and I knew they were likely married around 1856 or shortly before as they started having children every few years starting in 1857. Could I be this lucky? I tenuously typed William’s name into the findmypast search boxes and hit enter.

There were eight results with the fourth one being William Robert Heenan married 1856. Steeling myself for the inevitable disappointment, I selected the record. Goldmine!

William Robert Heenan (I already knew him as William R Heenan) married Mary Ann Reilly 27 Apr 1856 in St Alphonsus church. But unlike Philip’s marriage register, this one provided parent’s names…both sets! I now had Philip Heenan and Mary Ann O’Neil as well as Michael Reilly and Catharin Brady. The record also provided Mary Ann’s residence as “Cavin” which I assume is Cavan, Ireland. I now had a full new generation as well as the marriage register entry for one of the sets of parents.

A Tale of Two Philips

Talk about getting  lucky. I am feeling pretty confident that Philip Heenan and Mary Ann O’Neil are my GGGF William’s parents, and therefore my GGGGparents. But interestingly, I have come to believe that the Philip that started me on this quest is not my GGGGF.

The directories that led me to Philip had some things that never completely added up to him being William’s father. Philip first appeared in the directories in 1820. He then appeared in every directory from 1823 through 1828 and then disappeared. In 1832, there was a Sarah Heenan listed as widow of Philip.

I assume the Philip who disappeared just prior to a “Sarah widow of Philip” appearing was Sarah’s husband. Since I am pretty sure William’s mother was Mary Ann, it implies that this was not my Philip

An peripherally related anomaly was that in 1829 (the year Philip disappeared) , there was a John Heenan listed in the directory. John’s addresses for both work and home were the same addresses as Philip. Also, in 1830, there was a Heenan, widow of John. And in 1831, a Sarah Heenan, widow of John.

Here are the entries:

1820 Heenan Philip, smith 29 Gold
1823 Heenan Philip, smith 11 New h. 25 Exchange Place
1825 Heenan Philip, smith 11 New h. 25 Exchange Place
1826 Heenan Philip, smith 11 New h. 25 Exchange Place
1827 Heenan Philip, smith 11 New h. 25 Exchange Place
1828 Heenan Philip, smith 11 New h. 25 Exchange Place
1829 Heenan John, smith 11 New h. 25 Exchange Place
1830 Heenan widow of John 67 Exchange Place
1831 Heenan Sarah widow of John, 67 Exchange Place
1832 Heenan Sarah widow of Philip, 12 Marketfield

I guess anything’s possible, but it seems likely that this Philip died sometime between 1828 and 1832 and was married to a Sarah. While our Philip was married in 1831 to Mary Ann O’Neil. But the first Philip sent me on the path to eventually find mine. I guess it’s true, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than to be good.

I am not sure who the first Philip is. Perhaps he is the father or uncle of my Philip, but I tip my hat, and a pint of Guinness to him.

This is from a collection of folklore compiled by schoolchildren in Ireland in the 1930s. Ballincurry is the Townland that my grandmother was born and raised in. 

Lots of Irish folklore can be found at:

www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4701705/4694400

Athough the picture below is just a cool picture of the relocated Old Dutch Cemetery, if you click on it it will take you to an interesting history of the earliest Catholic cemeteries of New York City. 

The article was published in1900 in Historical Records and Studies, Volume 1
By United States Catholic Historical Society 

Handwritten notes from my grandmother from 1966.

This is a picture I restored a number of years ago. It is my grandfather’s Irish football team in New York. He is the one in front holding the ball. 

A bit of a brick wall with my 2nd GGF William R Heenan. I am pretty sure he was born about 1834 in New York City. So I decided to start looking at Catholic churches that were in existence at that point hoping I could perhaps at some point locate a baptism certificate.  Here is what I found:

Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village – St. Joseph’s Parish was founded by Bishop John Dubois in 1829. The church was built in 1833–34.  Early church records indicate that St. Joseph’s first congregants were predominantly Irish-Americans.

St. Mary Church (Grand Street, Manhattan) – Established in 1826 to serve Irish immigrants living in the neighborhood. The church itself was built in 1832-33. Before their sanctuary was built, services were held in a former Presbyterian church on Sheriff Street. The original portion is the second oldest Roman Catholic structure in the city, after St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, which was built in 1815.

St. Paul Church (New York City) – Located in the East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. Bishop John Dubois decided to establish a parish on 117th Street and asked Rev. Michael Curran to take charge. His knowledge of Gaelic served him well among his widely scattered parishioners. The cornerstone of St. Paul’s church was set June 29, 1835. St Paul’s Parish began its existence in 1834 embracing the whole upper area of old New York from New Rochelle to downtown Manhattan. At that time Harlem was little more than a wilderness.

Church of the Transfiguration, Roman Catholic (Manhattan) – The church was built in 1801 in the Georgian style of architecture for the Zion English Lutheran Church, a Lutheran congregation. The building was sold in 1853 to the Roman Catholic Church of the Immigrants parish, which had been founded in 1827 by the Rev. Felix Varela y Morales to minister to the poor Irish in the Five Points.

St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral – Built between 1809 and 1815. The cornerstone of St. Patrick’s was laid on June 8, 1809. Construction took just under five years, with the sanctuary being dedicated on May 14, 1815. In 1836, the cathedral was the subject of an attempted sack after tensions between Irish Catholics and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing nativists led to several riots and other physical confrontations.

St. Peter Catholic Church (Manhattan) – The original church was built in 1785-86. It was used for worship until 1834 when it was replaced by the present structure. FatherWilliam O’Brien was the first pastor. In August 2015 the St. Peter’s parish mergedwith Our Lady of the Rosary.

Side Note: The first New York chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians was established in 1836 at St. James Church.

Although my maternal grandmother was a Stenson from the Tubbercurry area, I have not found a connection to this John Stenson.

Book sheds light on Riverstown’s ‘Ranch War’

“ON THE outskirts of the village of Riverstown stands a statue, a monument to a 19-year-old man from Tubbercurry named John Stenson.

He was shot at that spot in October 1908 while among those involved in what was known as “a cattle drive”.

Cattle drives were part of an effort at the time to force landlords to relinquish untenanted land for distribution among those in the locality.

Orchestrating this campaign in and around Riverstown was the United Irish League, the activities of which were covered in detail by the local newspapers, including The Sligo Champion.”