The O’Regan & Lowney story
As the O’Regan family, we stand today on the shoulders of our ancestors. Because of courageous decisions made in 1852 by Patrick O’Regan and Honora Lowney of Greenane, Bere Island, County Cork, Ireland, we, their descendants, are Americans.
Patrick O’Regan was born on March 18, 1808, to Denis and Ellen O’Regan. At the age of 26, Patrick married Honora Lowney from Greenane, Bere Island on February 2, 1834. Honora, the daughter of Cornelius and Julia Lowney, was born in 1819. At the time of their marriage, Honora was 15 years of age. Patrick and Honora had 11 children together. Eight children were born on Bere Island, and another three were born in Lowell, Massachusetts.
In 1852, at the age of 44, Patrick departed for Lowell and left behind his wife Honora, 33 years old and six months pregnant with their eighth child.
It does not appear that Patrick and Honora intended to emigrate at first. In an 1852 survey conducted for the sale of Bere Island in order to pay off the landlord Lord Bantry’s debts, Patrick O’Regan was reported to have a farm in Greenane of 9 acres, 3 roods, 14 perches, with a rent of 6 pounds and 4 shillings. The following year, 1853, Patrick had doubled his farmland to 18 acres, 3 roods, and 33 perches, with a rent of 9 pounds and 16 shillings. If the family were planning on emigrating and sent Patrick ahead to raise the funds for his family to follow, why was money spent on renting additional farmland instead of saving for their passage? The family did eventually emigrate, reuniting with Patrick four years later.
Patrick departed from Liverpool, England, and arrived at the port of Boston on November 26, 1852, on a ship named the “Clara Wheeler.” Given the travel pattern of the time, he would have departed Bere Island on a coastal boat called a “hooker” and made his way to Queenstown, now Cobh. From Queenstown, Patrick would have caught a boat to Liverpool.
When Patrick arrived in Lowell, there were ten mill complexes, powering 10,000 looms, processing cotton from the South into a million yards of cloth a week. Lowell was America’s first planned industrial town, and Irish immigrants were the first to come, displacing Yankee female workers. The Irish settlers in Lowell lived apart from the Yankees in an area referred to as The Acre or The Paddy Camps. Patrick and later Honora and their married children made their homes in The Acre.
It is easy to imagine the cultural shock Patrick must have experienced, coming from an isolated rural fishing and farming island to the hallmark of the Industrial Revolution, Lowell, Massachusetts. Patrick had to give up country life with its connections to the natural and seasonal rhythms of nature, to working long hours indoors, six days a week, responding to bells, and working past nightfall.
Additionally, he had to cope with living in the cramped and poor housing of The Acre, without his wife and children. By 1856, the family was reunited and living in The Acre.