A South Roscommon Emigrant

Emigrants were a common sight in nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland as they left their family farms to make their way to the boat at Queenstown or Liverpool en route to a new, and hopefully more prosperous, life in a strange land. Much is known about these people in aggregate but their individual and local experiences and poorly understood. Even less well understood are the stories of those who later returned from America to their own homes bringing with them money, the...
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Emigrants were a common sight in nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland as they left their family farms to make their way to the boat at Queenstown or Liverpool en route to a new, and hopefully more prosperous, life in a strange land. Much is known about these people in aggregate but their individual and local experiences and poorly understood. Even less well understood are the stories of those who later returned from America to their own homes bringing with them money, the latest New York fashions and a different experience if life. This study analyses the experience of~emigration and return through the life of Margaret Brennan of south Roscommon who emigrated to Boston in 1902 and returned home to marry in 1911. Using a unique combination or oral testimonies and documentary evidence this work recreates the experience of Margaret and some of her contemporaries in the different worlds in which they lived. It paints a vivid picture of the realities of the world that the emigrants left, the experience of emigration itself, the world they made for themselves as maids, navvies and policemen in American and finally their return to their homes to settle.