Johanna Phelan Family History
Johanna’s Fahy Great Uncles and Aunts
John Fahy
≥ 1775 - 1850
Mary Dalton
???? - 1840
Nicholas
1802 - 1879
Thomas
1807 - ????
Mary
1811 - ????
David
1817 - >1850
Patrick
1804 - ????
Joan
1814 - ????
John Fahy and Mary Dalton had 6 children based on surviving church baptismal records from Templeorum parish.
Nicholas inherited the farm and was Johanna’s grandfather. No further records have been found for Mary or Joan Fahy – there are no records of a marriage in the parish, so they may have emigrated or died young.
Patrick is the only Patrick Fahy recorded in the baptismal records for the county between 1800 and 1820. He appears to have married Mary Lynagh of Waterford in Newfoundland in October 1825. However, their children have family names that are not typical of our Fahy family, so further information would be required to confirm their identity.
Thomas
Thomas married Margaret Dowling in Owning in February 1838 when he was 21 years old. Their first son John was born later that year, and they subsequently emigrated to Newfoundland about 1840.
Thomas Fahy
1807 - ????
Margaret Dowling
????
John
1838 - 1858
Anastatia
1844 - 1872
Nicholas
1846 - 1879
Ellen
1850 - ????
Mary
1842 - 1863
Margaret
1848 - >1930
Sometime around 1845 they emigrated south from Canada to Lawrence, Massachusetts.
According to Wikipedia, Lawrence is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States, on the Merrimack River. The town was incorporated as part of the project to build the Great Stone Dam to harness the Merrimack River's water-power in the 1840s. Irish immigrants arrived in Lawrence at its birth. The Great Stone Dam was largely built by Irish laborers. The first Irish immigrants settled in the area south of the Merrimack River near the intersection of Kingston Street and South Broadway. In December 1848, the Reverend James O'Donnell erected "old" St. Mary's Church. In 1869, the Irish were able to collect sufficient funds to form their own church, St. Patrick's, on South Broadway.
Lawrence became home to large groups of immigrants from Europe, apart from the Irish beginning in 1845. Germans arrived after the social upheaval in Germany in 1848, Swedes fleeing an overcrowded Sweden, and French Canadians seeking to escape hard northern farm life from the 1850s onward. The Irish community in Lawrence is still large.
Living and working conditions must have been hard. Thomas and Margaret successfully travelled from Ireland to Canada and then Lawrence, and the family appear in the census from 1850 onwards. According to the census information Thomas was a carpenter, his sons John a labourer and Nicholas a plasterer. Vital statistics for Massachusetts at the time show that tuberculosis was rife, and four of their six children died as young adults from it.
David
David Fahy, the youngest son, married Anastatia Deady in Owning on 14th April 1845 and shortly afterwards followed Thomas to Newfoundland where he had 2 children –
Mary Alice
and
William.
In May 1849 they migrated to Maryland in the USA aboard the Osprey.
David Fahy
1817 - >1850
Anastatia Deady
????
Mary Alice
1846 - ????
William
1848 - 1849/50
Anastatia
1850 - ????
They settled in Cumberland, Allegany where David worked as a carpenter, and had another daughter Anastatia. William does not appear on the 1850 census, so it is likely he died young.
Based on census information Mary and Anastatia were living with their Deady cousins in Connecticut from 1860 onwards, so it is likely that one or other of their parents died during the 1850s.
When David married Anastatia Deady in 1845 the Deady family were living in the townland of Beatin adjacent to Kilmanahin. Anastatia had seven brothers and sisters. Her father died sometime in the 1840s and in May 1850 the whole family (apart from Anastatia), but including her mother Alice (aged 60), emigrated to the USA and settled in Southington, Connecticut. David’s children Mary and Anastatia were living with them at the time of the 1860 census. Anastatia was still with the family in 1870, but there are no records of the two girls after that, so it is unclear if there are any descendants of David and Anastatia. Anastatias’s mother Alice survived into the 1870s – she must have been a courageous woman emigrating with her family at that time.
Emigration Patterns
Both David and his in-laws settled away from the main centres of migration. David and his family settled in Cumberland – a significant city in Maryland in the 19th century and a key road and rail junction (Wikipedia). There are no other Fahy families from Kilkenny listed in the 1850 census.
Southington, where the Deadys settled, was a small rural farming community in Connecticut. In the 1900s it developed a manufacturing centre but its population remained around a couple of thousand until the 1960s. The census results for Southington in the 1850s (population 2135) shows that the vast majority of the residents were born in Connecticut, and most of the family names are English, not Irish. The number of residents that were born in Ireland is less than 200. Why did the Deadys pick Southington? There are no other Fahys or Deadys listed in the census. There is a family named Walin from Ireland. One possibility is that this family were Whelan/Phelan. Alice Deady’s birth name was Alice Phelan.