The Tenement Museum's Irish Outsiders Tour

I was so enthralled with my Sweatshop Tour of the day before, which I managed to squeeze in later Friday afternoon, I bought a ticket on Friday to the Irish Outsiders Tour for Saturday at 12:45 p.m.

This was a story I knew quite a bit about before I came. When the Murphy-Brookfield Bookstore was still in business in Iowa City, I had the wonderful experience of being able to stop by, mention a subject I was interested in, such as the Irish famine of 1845-1849, and the knowledgeable owner would immediately escort me to a fascinating nonfiction book, The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845-1849, by Cecil Woodham-Smith, and then hand me a novel about the times, Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine, which certainly rounded out the ambiance and feelings of the time. It certainly wasn’t written in Gaelic, but I ran across English words and phrases I’d never seen or heard before, and of course I found that fascinating. I love to read about the origins of the English language. I miss Murphy-Brookfield a lot.

Moving on, I knew from The Great Hunger that a million Irish peasants died of starvation in the Irish famine of 1845-1849. I knew the potatoes, which were the staple of Irish sustenance, turned to goo in the ground and became inedible. (The potato blight of this time was caused by a fungus still around today.)

I knew that English grain merchants continued to export oats and other grain out of Irish ports and refused to give it away to the starving Irish because such charity might depress English merchants’ grain prices.

Only the Quakers fed the Irish and taught them skills like lace-making, but their efforts were not enough, though the Quakers saved thousands of lives.

Increasingly, the Irish grew desperate enough to leave. The irony was, to board what later became known as “coffin ships,” they had to bring their own food for passage. They left because they were starving, but had to supply their own food. It seemed to be a formula for death at sea. Some of the more rickety ships sank within sight of their loved ones bidding them goodbye.

If you made it to Boston, New York City, Montreal, or Australia, you were most likely quarantined in your ship and not allowed to disembark for fear of “famine fever,” which was actually typhus. If you survived typhus in the lice-infested ship during quarantine, you could disembark.

I spoke to Fodge, one young male descendant of an Irish immigrant in downtown Iowa City, and he said his ancestors were evicted from the Irish estate their family lived on for want of rent in the amount of about $10 in American money.

“No Irish need apply!” is a shout I once heard when an Irish-American at Shakespeare’s, our neighborhood bar, got loaded a few years back. Imagine such a cry persisting after 150 years or more. Yet those words used to be on real job advertisement signs that put Irish immigrants on the defensive.

As a result, domestic servitude, assuming that Irish were allowed to apply, was so common that Irish maids were often referred to as “Bridgets,” a common Irish female name, as in, “I hired another Bridget today,” meaning, “I hired a new maid today.”

Some of the gangs of New York were Irish. The “40 Thieves” were Irish thieves and pickpockets, some young apprentices taught to steal, who were straight out of Charles Dickens. Some gangs were Jewish, like Monk Eastman’s gang.

Name me an immigrant group that faced discrimination that didn’t form some sort of gang to protect themselves and stick it to the ruling class and whoever was vulnerable.

An Irish-American friend told me that there were “lace Irish” and “shanty Irish,” and her mother or grandmother told her firmly that she was “shanty” Irish. Apparently, “lace curtain Irish” were those who managed to become upwardly mobile and took on airs. The “shanty Irish” were less upwardly mobile and so the “lace curtain Irish” enjoyed themselves by looking down on them.

The family the Irish Outsiders Tour focused on was the Moore family. That might be one of my Irish surnames, since the National Geographic Genographic Project only guarantees going back five generations for emboldened, certain family surnames, and names that pop up a lot on DNA matches listed might be yours only going back more than five generations. Some are family surnames that I know are mine through family trees, like Benjamin and Starkweather. Others are not, like Jones and Moore, but they sure do pop up a lot amongst my DNA matches (cousins).

My mother’s father was of British origin. Mom used to deny that she was in any way Irish, but she was a dead ringer for an Irish woman photographed in Ireland in National Geographic. Of course, across Britain, the English, Irish, and Scottish are virtually identical genetically. There is that.

My father’s side is German, German Swiss, and Irish. My paternal great-grandmother was Nellie Maria Hall from the County Down, Ireland. I don’t know when she came over, but it could have been during the Irish famine.

Again, the Tenements Museum tour guides do not allow any photographs to be taken, not even without flashes, although the Fashion Museum did allow photographs as long as no flashes were used. So I provided photographs for the books I used as sources.