Moving On: The Irish Who Came and Went

Not all of the Irish who came to Belleville stayed. A number of them moved on.

In 1850, 18-year-old Francis Glancy, whose occupation is listed in the census as “laborer”, was living with the William Glancy family in Bloomfield.  William, Mary, and their son Michael had emigrated from Ireland between 1843 and 1848. They may have come from County Sligo, since a Mary “Glacey” travelled to America in 1851 with the Thomas Connolly family of County Sligo, and a 40-year-old Sarah Glancy, along with 9-year-old Edward, presumably her son, are listed as cousins in the household of Bridget Connolly McEnery in Belleville in 1900.

Francis Glancy married Sarah McCormack on 19 November 1856. Their first three children, Mary, Sarah Anne and John Francis, were baptized at St. Peter’s in 1857, 1860 and 1861, respectively. By 1862, the family had moved to Wisconsin, where their son Michael would be born. At the time of 1870 census, there were living in Gale, Wisconsin, where Francis was farming. By 1880, they were in Beadle, in Dakota Territory.

Some of the Irish who had settled in Belleville saw an opportunity for improving their lives when gold was discovered in California. This discovery led to a mass migration to the gold fields. Some were single men, but others were married, and either took their family with them, or sent for them later. There were three Irish families from Belleville living in the Gold Rush town of Timbuctoo, California, in 1860. Not much is left of Timbuctoo today, just the Wells Fargo building, and it is on the verge of collapse. But at the time of the Gold Rush, Timbuctoo was a bustling town, filled with miners who were there to try their luck at gold mining, hoping to make enough money so that they would be set for life. One of the miners there was John Murray, who had married Catherine Haley at St. Peter’s.  Catherine was one of eight brothers and sisters who came from the little town of Rahara in County Roscommon, and settled in Belleville, beginning about the mid-1830s through the late 1840s, with her sister Bridget coming over only after the death of her husband, bringing with her her two young children. During the 1850s and 1860s, several of the brothers and sisters left New Jersey to try their luck in California. One of the brothers, Hugh, even spent some time in the gold fields of Australia, writing home and sending money to his wife back in New Jersey, and sending greetings to his daughter, obviously unaware that she had died of cholera six years earlier.

        Among the other residents of Timbuctoo in 1860 are found a couple of other families made up of parents who had been born in Ireland, whose first children were born in New Jersey. John Shields, son of Irish-born parents, was baptized at St. Patrick’s in Newark. Mary Ann Smith’s parents were born in Ireland, and she herself was born in Bloomfield. And James Conroy, born, like the others, of Irish-born parents, was baptized at St. Peter’s.

Some moved on to parts unknown. For many years several newspapers carried “Information Wanted” columns, in which family or friends posted requests for information about lost family members or friends. The “Missing Friends” column of the Boston Pilot of February 6, 1869, includes an ad placed by Patrick Farraher of Belleville seeking the whereabouts of his sister Mary Walsh, née Farraher, a native of the parish of Ballahally, townland of Killore, county Mayo, and his brother Michael. Mary had left Ireland about 15 years before.

Hanora Parker (maiden name Byrne) advertised in the December 6, 1873 issue of the Irish American Weekly of New York, seeking information on William Parker, a native of Dublin, or his brothers-in-law Peter and Michael Byrne, natives of Dunode, County Wicklow. When last heard from, five years before, they were all in Belleville.