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Throughout her life, Laura McNamara has carried with her a strong sense of Irish American pride. Her family roots are embedded in centuries of Irish American history. I’m lucky enough to be her granddaughter, and when I interviewed her about our ancestors it brought us closer together and made me more aware of my Irish heritage. Together we traced our lineage to the nineteenth century back to County Cork, Ireland, to when our ancestor Richard McNamara and his wife Mary Ann came to America.
Born approximately 1830 to parents Francis and Eliza, Richard McNamara lived a humble life in County Cork, Ireland. He married his wife Mary Ann Stapleton and worked, like most Irishmen, as a farmer. However, between 1845 and 1850, a fungus destroyed Ireland’s potato crop. Potatoes were the primary food source for an entire class of people, and year after year of a failed crop wreaked devastation on Irish farmers and their families. An estimated one million people died from starvation and related disease, and approximately double that emigrated from Ireland. Richard and Mary, like a record number of people, left Ireland and the famine behind to find better opportunities.
Irish immigration to America during the famine was either by transatlantic voyage to the east coast ports (primarily Boston and New York) or by land or sea from Canada, then called British North America.
The “Famine Irish” were the first large wave of poor refugees to arrive in the United States.
Throughout the famine years, close to one million Irish came to the United States. Richard and Mary came in through a port in Boston, Massachusetts, where they settled temporarily.
Boston was an Anglo-Saxon city with a population of about 115,00 English Puritans, who could all recite their lineage back to the Mayflower ship in the 1620s. In 1847, which was the first year of significant famine emigration, 37,000 Irish Catholics came to Boston. They were mostly unskilled and forced to work low paying jobs. Irish immigrants were in “the lowest rung of society.” Rivalry developed between the Irish and working class Bostonians over the limited unskilled jobs available, especially because Irish immigrants were willing to work for less pay. Xenophobic sentiment led to “No Irish Need Apply” signs posted in shop windows and written into employment advertisements.
The song “No Irish Need Apply” was written to protest discrimination against Irish immigrants by employers. The lyrics, especially in lines “your ancestors came over here like me / to try to make a living in this land of liberty,” point out the hypocritical nature of NINA signs hanging in America.
Conditions in Boston for Irish immigrants were brutal. Boston landlords divided homes and warehouses into cheap housing, and overflow lived in gardens, yards, and alleys. As was common in the mid-1800s in America, there were no sanitary regulations or safety codes to protect people. Diseases like cholera often broke out, and the mortality rate for immigrant children was high. Despair in the immigrant population led to an increase in crimes like aggravated assault, which was up 400%.
Public opinion of the Irish didn’t begin to improve until after their populations began to sway politics in the 1900s. Their places in the workforce also improved with the ride of labor and trade unions and increased involvement in the police and fire services.
Richard and Mary knew this wasn’t where they wanted to start their family. They wanted to live in a community with other Irish people, where they were free to be themselves and have religious freedom without being hated by a Protestant Anglo-Saxon population. They finally settled in Bennington, Vermont, which was a highly Irish neighborhood.
Quarry in South Dorset, Vermont
Vermont was undergoing a small industrial revolution at the time, based on railroad construction, textile production, and quarrying. This changing economic landscape was appealing to the incoming Irish coming from the Great Famine. According to Vincent E. Feeney, author of Finnigans, Slaters and Stonepeggers: A History of Irish in Vermont, “the Irish constituted the largest ethnic minority in the state, slightly ahead of French Canadians. In places like Burlington and Rutland they were an overwhelming presence.”
Being an Irish immigrant was difficult in Boston, but in Bennington it was more of a norm. Richard and Mary were able to settle down and raise a family in a town that respected them. Richard and Mary went on to have seven children, who all grew up in this Irish American community as second generation immigrants.
Richard’s brother, William, also came to America after hearing of Richard’s success in finding a new life in America. Even after the famine years were over, many emigrated from Ireland to be with their families and to seek the opportunities America presented. Between 1820 and 1975, 4.7 million Irish settled in America.
Irish Americans are the country’s second-largest ethnic group currently.
Richard and Mary, my great-great-great-grandparents, are buried in the same cemetery as the rest of my ancestors in this Irish American lineage.
Richard and Mary’s third child and first son, John McNamara, was born in 1864. He’s referred affectionately to as “Grandpa Mac” by my grandmother.
Laura McNamara with her Grandpa Mac
He worked as a farmer like his parents, and also picked up carpentry. At age sixteen, he built a home with help from his siblings and the community. The house was large enough that his parents moved in with him after he built it. It also stood alone on the hill it was built on, so when it came time to name the streets in the town, it was entitled McNamara Road.
Grandpa Mac had five children, one of which was John Lewis McNamara. He left Vermont for New York to seek more opportunity. The search for consistency is what drove his grandparents to Vermont in the first place, but John Lewis saw the appeal of New York. He married his wife, Glennie, and they traveled between Vermont and New York regularly. In Brooklyn, he worked for a gas company. John Lewis and Glennie had two daughters, my grandmother Laura and my great-aunt Janet.
Janet and Laura
My grandmother grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, but during the summer they would take trips to the family home in Vermont. Her sister, Janet, was actually born in the house her great-grandfather built.
“We would go up there for the entire summer. My mother was afraid we would get polio in New York during the summer, so we would take the train up to Vermont.”
Society in the 1950s was defined by a fear of polio outbreaks. There was a polio epidemic every summer in the United States. 1952 was considered the worst outbreak of polio, with 3,000 people dying. Glennie’s fear of polio reflected the fear of the greater society.
Laura is full of stories about Vermont summers with her family.
“There was no electricity or anything, and we had a kerosene lamp in the kitchen but it was expensive to light, so once the sun set, you either went to bed or you looked for bats.”
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- Laura and her father John
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- Laura McNamara
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- Laura and her mother Glennie
The house sits alone in a very rural area, and quiet nights tend to exaggerate fears. One summer night, her mother Glennie’s paranoia got the best of her. “My mother heard a car come up to the house a night and she ran to get us and hid us behind the door. When she heard a car door slam, she yelled out for them to hear, ‘They better get out of here before they wake your father up and he gets that gun!’ I looked at her like, ma. But it was so funny because she was petrified. And she would never touch that gun!”
The house is also so old that she jokes about who must be haunting it. “We used to joke that Grandpa Mac was in the house rattling a chain.” This joke terrified my uncle’s fiancé, and even my mom recited it back to me like the truth. But my grandma didn’t buy it. “Oh please, I never believed in that stuff.”
Though Vermont was an escape, her life moved forward in Brooklyn. It was there that she went to school, worked, and met her future husband Ricardo.
Laura married my grandfather Ricardo Ramos, and together they had five children. They all grew up in Brooklyn, though they’ve all moved out to different parts of New York now.
Laura with her daughter Susan
Family trips to Vermont are still a peaceful escape from the city. Knowing the hard work my family has put in over generations to build and keep this house only makes it more precious to be in.
Throughout my family’s history, we’ve had the privilege of naming everywhere from County Cork to Brooklyn as “home.” I’m forever grateful for my family’s struggles at coming to America and chasing the opportunities it offered, from Boston to Vermont and New York, and to wherever else life may take us.
Christina Ramos
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