REFERENCES
- Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), Mic 333/1/62; Centre for Migration Studies Irish Emigration Database (CMSIED), Document No, 8812045–
- References to objects of this kind are not prominent in the literature. An example is given in the autobiography of Thomas Mellon (1813–1908), who emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1818. He refers to a 'cane' or walking stick in his possession, which, according to family tradition, belonged to his earliest known ancestor, Archibald Mellon, who emigrated from Scotland to Ulster in the seventeenth century: 'the cane has been carefully handed down as a relic from father to son; and was delivered to me, as the present head and representative of the family, by my uncle Archibald Mellon, shortly before his death. It is rather a plain looking article, but not less valuable as a relic or memento on that account. This Scotch ancestor was the first to build and reside in Castletown after its depopulation in 1641' (Thomas Mellon, Thomas Mellon and His Times, University of Pittsburgh Press and Centre for Emigration Studies, Ulster-American Folk Park, 1994, pp. 4.10—II). An example of an object being brought more recently by an emigrant from Ireland and passed down through the family is kindly provided by Professor Elizabeth Malcolm, University of Melbourne: 'I inherited what my father and his family brought from Co. Fermanagh when they arrived in Sydney in 1925. Among other things, there was actually a piece of turf from their farm, which I still have.' There may be an echo here of the ancient practice of land conveyancing known as 'livery of seisin' by which the exchange of land between tenants was symbolised by the transfer of a piece of turf (or 'sod and twig'). There also may be an echo of beliefs about the importance of a symbolic piece of turf in relation to the home hearth recorded by John Healy in Nineteen Acres, Galway: Kennys, 1978, pp. 114–16. Interestingly, the expression 'the old sod', as well as referring to Ireland, could also refer to the home farm in Ireland: 'I regret to hear by your letter that Mrs Hagan . . . is unable to pay the rent. . . . It would be a sad thing to see the old sod leaving our hands. . .. with God's help I wont let it go' (James Hagan, New York, writing to his sister in Dugannon, Co. Tyrone, 20 October 1882: Ulster-American Folk Park, CMSIED, serial number 9706206).
- Patrick O'Sullivan (ed.), Irish Women and Irish Migration, vol. 4, in Patrick O'Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity, London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1995, 1–22; Breda Gray, 'Gendering the Irish Diaspora', Women's Studies International Forum, 23:2, 2000, 167–85; Bronwen Walter, Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women, London: Roudedge, 2000; Louise Ryan, 'Irish female emigration in the 193os: transgressing space and culture', Gender, Place and Culture, 8:3, 2001, 271–82.
- Kathleen Curtis Wilson, Textile Art from Southern Appalachia: The Quiet Work of Women, Overmountain Press, 2001.
- www.magni.org.uk
- Brian Lambkin and Patrick Fitzgerald, 'Townland Diasporas', in The Heart's Townland: marking boundaries in Ulster, ed. by Brian Turner, Ulster History Trust, 2004, pp. 88–91.
- Arthur Mitchell, 'McGee, Thomas D'Arcy', in The Encyclopaedia of the Irish in America, ed. by M. Glazier, Notre Dame Press, 1999, pp. 582–83. Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney referred to McGee in the eulogy he gave at the funeral of Ronald Reagan, citing his poem 'Am I remembered in Erin', Irish Times, Saturday 12 June 2004.
- Catherine Nash, 'They're Family!: Cultural Geographies of Relatedness in Popular Genealogy', in Sarah Ahmed, Claudia Castalieda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller (eds), Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, Oxford, New York: Berg, 2003, pp. 179–203, p. 180. See also Mark McCarthy, 'Writing Ireland's historical geographies', Journal of Historical Geography, 28:4, 534–53.
- Lindsay Proudfoot, 'Landscape, place and memory: towards a geography of Irish identities in colonial Australia', in Ireland Abroad: Politics and professions in the nineteenth century, ed. by L. Proudfoot, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003, p. 174.
- Catherine Nash, 'Genealogical Identities', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 20, 2002, 27–52.
- Heather Crawford, Needlework Samplers of Northern Ireland, Crawfordsbum: Allingham Publishing, 1989.
- Accession Number to84.
- L. M. Ballard, 'The Textile Collection at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum — A Short History', in The Use of Tradition, ed. by Alan Gailey, Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, 1988.
- Linda Ballard, 'Needlework and the New World', Familia: Ulster Genealogical Review, 2: 5, 1989, 70–72; for colour illustration, see Linda Ballard, Ulster Needlework: A Continuing Tradition, Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, n.d., p. 4.
- Brian Lambkin, 'Charles Gavan Dufry's "The Irish Chiefs": diasporic trajectories of a Young Ireland text in the United States and Australia', in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, forthcoming 2005.
- The canvas, which is ideal for cross-stitch, is characterised by a stiff, open weave tabby structure with paired warps (probably) and spaced wefts (probably) making wide and narrow spaces in the warp direction. The reverse of the object and possible selvages was inaccessible at time of publication, however, comparison with other similar canvas shows that the paired yarns are likely to be warps. It is likely that the canvas was originally made in Britain rather than in Ireland.
- The ribbon on the upper edge of the sampler measures 3.8 cm, not including the weft extension loops, and on the stretcher about 4 cm, not including weft extension loops.
- 'The whole thing is lovely because it isn't often that you get something which has been framed for such a long time. It doesn't look as if it was ever opened before. It looks as if Dorcas made it with so much care. The little stitching of the ribbon to the edge of the canvas is beautifully done. Also at the ends of the four pieces of wood for the stretchers there are nice little wooden dowels to put through the holes. It has been very carefully put together' (Cliodna Devitt, pers. comm.).
- Patrick O'Farrell, The Irish in Australia, New South Wales University Press, 1986, p. 206. On the icon-ography of 1798 in particular, see Kevin Whelan, Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and 1798, Cork University Press, 1998. Duffy remembered seeing as a boy in the sitting room of his guardian, the parish priest of Muckno, Co. Monaghan, 'portraits in rude woodcuts of O'Connell and Shell, and of some Irish ecclesiastics', My Life in Two Hemispheres, p.
- Robert Sloan, William Smith O'Brien and the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000.
- John Newsinger, Fenianism in mid-Victorian Britain, London: Pluto Press, p. 16; Sean Beattie, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, A Commemoration 1998: Recalling the escape of D'Arcy McGee to America September 1848, Tremone Historical Society, 1998; John A. McLaughlin, Carrowmenagh: History of a Donegal Village and Townland, Letterkenny: the author, 2001, pp. 93, 104. Maginn was Catholic bishop of Derry from 1845 to 1849. In gratitude, Thomas D'Arcy McGee wrote the Life of Edward McGinn, Coadjutor Bishop of Derry, Montreal, 1857.
- Whether the association with St Valentine's Day was deliberate or accidental is not clear.
- (ttp://proarchives.Imagineering.com.au/index_search_results.asp, accessed 22/10/03; www.geocities.com/mepnab/ships/tandvy.htm, accessed 24 September 2003; www.prov.vic.gov.au;immigration.museum;vic.gov.au, Fiche 34, p. 8.
- The Wexford Independent from July 1852 was reporting weekly on the attractions for emigrants of Australia and its goldfields.
- A 'tent city' that sprang up on the south bank of the River Yarra to accommodate the thousands who flooded into Melbourne because of the gold rushes. The population of Melbourne trebled between 1851 and 1854, and in the latter year Canvas Town housed about 5,000. It did not disappear until the 186os. See Don Garden, Victoria: A History, Melbourne: Nelson, 1985, p. 96.
- Little Lonsdale Street, which is north of the city centre, was known in the nineteenth century as 'Little Lon' and noted for prostitution.
- Emerald Hill is in south Melbourne, just south of where Canvas Town was.
- Bourke Street is now one of the main business streets of Melbourne, on the north side of the river, run-ning parallel to Little Lonsdale Street. See Andrew Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1998. We are grateful to Elizabeth Malcolm for these references.
- Letter of 30 September 1843, Thomas D'Arcy McGee to Aunt Bella, Thomas D'Arcy McGee Collection, Concordia University Archives and Records Centres, Canada, P03o, B0xHA254, Folder 28.
- Letter of 3 October 1846, Concordia, Box HA256, Folder 8. The years immediately preceding the Great Famine of 1845 witnessed a large amount of return migration to Ireland. For example, John Anderson in Ohio wrote to his brother at Lisnamuck, Aghadowey, Co. Derry, on 30 September 1842, that 'on seeing Mr Cathcart I had a great deal of Conversation with him about the old country. He thinks there is a great change in this Cuntry since he was here Before. He says there was hundreds of passengers returned back to Ierland this summer and hundreds in New york and Philadelphia that cannot find imploy' (PRONI, D 1859/ 5; CMSIED, 9403029). Charles Hagan wrote to James Laughlin in New York on 8 January 1843 that 'we understand that the country you are in is not as good as it was some time past and if you are not in a prosperous way of doing we advise you to return, and we shall receive you with open arms and you will all three be more welcome than if you had never left us' (PRONI, T3682; CMSIED, 9309119).
- Mount Alexander Mail, 31 March 1882.
- The area of Fitzroy, on the northern fringe of the city centre, has been 'gentrified' and is now very fashionable, but in the nineteenth century it was a working-class area.
- The death of Christopher Joseph McHugh, son of Thomas and Mary Skelly, was registered at Hotham West (Digger Index Births, Deaths and Marriages for Victoria). The Benevolent Asylum, located in north Melbourne, was established in 1850 as a charitable institution for the 'deserving' poor, the elderly, the chronically ill and disabled. See Mary Kehoe, The Melbourne Benevolent Asylum, Melbourne: Hotham History Project, 1998.
- Letter of 9 January 1912, Slattery Family Papers.
- Isabel Skelton, The Life of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Canada: Gardendale, 1925; Alexander Brady, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Toronto: Macmillan, 1925; Josephine Phelan, The Ardent Exile: The Life and Times of Thomas D'Arcy Magee, Toronto, 1951; David A. Wilson, The Life of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, forthcoming, 2007.
- Letter of 28 March 1842, Concordia, Box HA254, Folder 21.
- Letter of 21 March 1841, Box HA254, Folder 19. See also Martin McDermott, Songs and Ballads of Young Ireland, London, 1896, p. 367.
- Carl Wittke, The Irish in America, New York: Russell & Russell, 1956, revised 1970, p. 81.
- Mary Anne (Mrs James) Sadlier (1869), (ed.), The Collected Poems of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, London, Montreal, Boston: D. and J. Sadlier; P. H. Brady, 1869, p. 577; on-line version at http://www.canadiana.org. Thomas's mother died in 1833, his sister Mary (b. c. 1815) died on 31 March 1839 and his sister Betsy (b. c. 1817) died on 14 March 1841.
- Sadlier, 1869, p. 578.
- Sadlier, 1869, p. 16.
- Mitchell, 1997, p. 582.
- McDermott, 1896, p. 367.
- Mark Wyman, Round-Trip To America: The Immigrants Return To Europe, 1880–1930, Cornell University Press, 1993, p. II.
- Letter of 3 August 1845, Thomas to Bella, Concordia, P030, Box HA256, Folder 7.
- Phelan, 1951, PP. 32, 45.
- Sadlier, 1869, p. 20.
- Thomas Keneally, The Great Shame: a story of the Irish in the Old World and the New, London: Chatto & Windus, 1998, p. 167; Michael Doheny, The Felon's Track, or History of the Attempted Outbreak in Ireland, repr. Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1951, p. 290.
- His childhood home at Dernaved, Co. Monaghan, has been relocated to the Ulster-American Folk Park.
- Keneally, 1998, p. 254.
- Ironically, this was the New York version of the paper that McGee had returned to Ireland to work for in 1845.
- Wittke, 1970, p. 82.
- Phelan, 1951, P. 94.
- Charles Murphy, D'Arcy McGee 1825–1925: A Collection of Speeches and Addresses, Toronto, 1937, p. 339.
- Keneally, 1998, p. 254.
- Phelan, 1951, p. 89.
- Nicholas Flood Davin, The Irishman in Canada, with an introduction by D. C. Lyne, 1877, repr. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1968, p–649.
- Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 338, 360, 336. By the time the New York Nation stopped publication in June 185o, McGee has moved away from his revolutionary republicanism towards a position that was roughly the same as that of Charles Gavan Duffy. His conversion to ultramontane Catholicism came quite suddenly in May 1851, although there are indications that he had been grappling with the issue since his arrival in Boston in the summer of 1850 (David Wilson, pers. comm.).
- Although Meagher had escaped and arrived in New York in May 1852, before the Tantivy sailed for Australia in December, Mitchel had not yet escaped from Tasmania, arriving in New York in November 1853.
- We are grateful to David Wilson for this clarification. According to his obituary (Slattery Family Papers), his half-brother John came to Canada 'at the instance' of Thomas.
- We are grateful to an experienced needlewoman, Mrs Elisabeth Dyas of Musselburgh, Scotland, for this advice.
- Crawford, 1989, p. 96.
- Her brother Thomas wrote a poem for his wife, Mary, on St Valentine's Day of the previous year, 1849, called 'To Mary's Angel: A Valentine', when he was in New York and she was still in Ireland waiting to join him, as she did that May; Sadlier, 1869, p. 423.
- For illustration, see inside cover of Phelan, 1951.
- Interview, io November 2003.
- On the importance of the 'dresser', see Henry Glassie, Passing The Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, p. 361: 'I [informant] have taken such good care of it [dresser], and I hate to think of it after me.'
- Interview, 10 November 2003.
- Photograph in Slattery Family Papers. Bernard and Pat Slattery also called the dresser a 'chiffoniere': 'When Bernie was doing the dishes this morning he remembered where our big table that you sat at, came from. It belonged to Kathleen McHugh/Slattery and it used to be covered with a red cloth in the same room that the tapestry [sic] hung in at the house in this photo. The chiffoniere with the big mirror on it that is in our lounge room also came from that room. The table came to us when Bernie's mother moved from the big house at Glen Iris to a smaller one at Burwood after Francis Xavier died in 1966 and we had a big family. We used to have it in the dining room. Isn't it amazing what an old photo will trigger off in the memory!' (email, P. Slattery to J. Meegan, 24 July 2004
- He was born at sea en route from Perth, western Australia, two days before arriving in Victoria.
- Built in 1858, a Casdemaine Football Club was founded at a meeting in its saloon on 15 June 1859. It was de-licensed in 1913; see www.heronsgallery.com/building.htinh, accessed 7 June 2004.
- Kathleen Currie’s parents are buried at Edendork, Co. Tyrone. In Australia she married a great-great-grandson of John McCutcheon, a Wesleyan Methodist and editor of the Tyrone Constitution, whose son, Robert, had emigrated to Australia in 1869.
- The conventional idea of 'ethnic fade', whereby immigrants are seen as distancing themselves from all things 'ethnic' in order to effect the quickest route out of the 'ghetto' and into economic success and assimilation, is explored by Roy Foster in 'Marginal Men and Micks on the Make: Uses of Exile c.1840-1922', in his Paddy and Mr Punch, London, 1995, pp. 281–305. John Belchem discusses this in 'Class, creed and country: the Irish middle class in Victorian Liverpool', in The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension, ed. by Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, Four Courts Press, 1999, pp. 191–92. It is further explored in The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. by Donald M. MacRaild, Irish Academic Press, 2000, pp. 4, 24, 131–32. See also Paul O'Leary in Irish Migrants in Modern Wales, Liverpool University Press, 2003; and O'Leary, Immigration and Integration: The Irish in Wales, 1798–1922, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2000, pp. 6–10.
- Sadlier, 1869, pp. 444–45.
- On the matter of her brother's clerical dress, Dorcas did not succeed in getting her message across to Charles Gavan Duffy, who wrote later: 'in the dress of a priest, with his breviary in his hand, he got on board a brig at the mouth of the Foyle, and sailed for America. . . His adventures on the voyage were afterwards a constant source of pleasantry; for there were Irish emigrants on board, who wanted his reverence's assis-tance in the most embarrassing contingencies. One pair were so impatient to be married that it was heartrending to resist their entreaties, but he assured them that his "faculties" were suspended at sea' (Four Years of Irish History, 1883, p. 774
- O'Farrell, 1986, p. 137.
- James Newman of 'Lismore', 406 Albert Street, East Melbourne, who died sometime before 9 January 1912, wrote to Dean Phelan of Melbourne on behalf of Kathleen in order that she might have 'five minutes conversation with the chaplain'; letter of 28 October 1908, Slattery Family Papers.
- Letter of 9 January 1912, Slattery Family Papers.
- The connection is evidenced by the inscription on the gravestone of Thomas's and Dorcas's mother, Dorcas Catherine (d. 1833), in St Selskar's, Wexford, which was 'erected by her children in Ireland, America and Australia' (transcribed by Brian J. Cantwell, June 1982).
- Bernard Slattery reports that the Canadian connection was maintained by a Catholic priest 'who was sent to Canada and used to write to my grandmother. He told them all about what D'Arcy McGee was doing' (interview, io November 2003).
- Murphy, 1937, pp. 230, 356.
- Murphy, 1937, pp. 360-601.
- Interview, to November 2003.
- Interview, io November 2003.
- O'Farrell, 1986, p. 206.
- Interview, ro November 2003.
- Interview, io November 2003.
- Interview, so November 2003.
- Interview, an November 2003.
- O'Farrell, 1986, p. 206.
- O'Farrell, 1986, p. 208.
- Nash, 2002, p. 29.
- 'Very many samplers found today lack any family background which would tell us about the makers and their lives. This lack of interest in provenance continues today, although there are some notable exceptions. Many families have disposed of samplers where they can discern no obvious finally connexion but this may be erroneous as the pattern of inheritance of small portable objects is still only vaguely known' (Naomi Tarrant, 'Samplers made in Scotland', History Scotland, May/June 2004, p. 28). Tarrant also comments that 'mention of samplers in documents or memoirs are almost impossible to find', p. 30. For a notable exception, see Margaret K. Hofer, 'Cross-Stitched History: Artistry and Ambition in Christina Arcularius's Tree of Knowledge sampler', Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, 2004, accessed at http://www.common-place.org/yol-o4/lessons, 21 July 2004: 'In 2003, Christina's masterpiece was featured in the New York Historical Society's exhibition "Home Sewn: Three Centuries of Stitching History" as one of the many hand-stitched items mined for the stories they could tell about their individual makers and the milieu in which they were produced.' We are grateful to Patrick O'Sullivan for drawing this to our attention.
- The Mellon 'cane' referred to above, which was passed down through generations of the Mellon family, first in Ireland and latterly in the United States, is now on display in the Ulster-American Folk Park, Omagh, Northern Ireland. It remains to be seen whether or not the McGee sampler, now back in Ireland, returns to Australia.