So Far From Home

This is the story in letters of two Irish families, the Donovans of Dreenlamane, Ballydehob and the McCarthys of Ballinlough, Leap. Both homes were in south-western County Cork. They were ordinary farming families in 19th century Ireland. The usual tools of genealogy provide us with the bare bones of the individuals in the story. We can learn about births, family names, marriages, and deaths. But, by a series of unexpected coincidences, we have been given flesh for those bones. The names and dates provided by genealogy have been given personalities and voices and individuality. We know their words and ideas, joys and fears, the inner concerns and shared touches of humor, because the Donovans and the McCarthys wrote letters to their family in America. And one Donovan and one McCarthy saved the letters.

These 200 letters have much in common, though the families who saved them did not. They were written in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, many of them in Ireland, others by immigrant friends in America. The recipients in all cases were Irish immigrants, with the vast majority of the letters being sent within the first five years of their arrival in America. The two major recipients, Dan Donovan and Nora McCarthy resided in Haverhill, a shoe manufacturing center in the northeast corner of Massachusetts.

Combined, they offer a rare retrospect of the daily rural life west of Cork and the Irish perception of life in America.