The Blaney (McHugh) story

​My grandmother, Rose (McHugh) Blaney, was a small but formidable and strong woman. Toothless and crippled in the 1950s, when I knew her as a boy, she still dominated the little thatched cottage in the Donegal townland of Gortward, where she had lived since 1903.

​She came from a family of McHughs in Donegal’s spectacular Blue Stack Mountains. As a child, I knew very little about the McHughs. My mother would say, “Granny’s people were from Shanveen, up above the Gray Mare’s Tail,” a prominent waterfall visible, on a clear day, from Gortward. That was all we knew.

​It was from this remote location that she set out on foot to walk the 50-odd miles to Derry to pick up a steamship to take her to New York. She probably bade goodbye to her neighbors at Donegal’s “Bridge of Tears,” the traditional spot en route to Derry where families parted. She was one of thousands experiencing “the curse of emigration” as the west of Ireland emptied in the last quarter of the 19th century. All told, over the centuries, about 10 million emigrated from Ireland. Since 1600, when Tudor Queen Elizabeth I sat on the throne, more than three million are thought to have emigrated to Britain, half of them in the 20th century. It is estimated that 120,000 people left through Derry for England, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and the United States in the last half of the 19th century. Both Granny and the man she was to marry, Patrick Blaney, were among these travelers from Derry.

​Meticulously detailed records on Ellis Island reveal that in 1892 she landed in New York at the age of 18 on an Anchor liner, the Furnessia. The manifest of “alien passengers” disembarking on Ellis Island showed that she was able to read and write in both English and Irish.

​After that 1892 arrival, she went to work for a New York City family as general household support—cleaning, cooking, and taking care of children. In the summer, when the family went to the Catskill Mountains to escape the city heat, she accompanied them. Years later, she recalled these experiences for me with affection and some pride. She had seen something of the larger world, she seemed to say. And she liked what she had seen. She enjoyed living in the United States.

​But if she had liked New York, the same cannot be said for my grandfather, Patrick Blaney. At the age of 28, he arrived at Ellis Island years after my grandmother, again on the Furnessia, which must have made a decent profit running back and forth from Derry to New York. He was to stay only a few years. My brother Ted believed that my grandfather, whom we knew as Grangy, went to New York to bring his love, Rose McHugh, back to Ireland. That appeals to the romantic in all of us.

​In the abstract, it sounds plausible enough today, but I think it was far less likely more than a century ago. Irish men and women were accustomed to potential mates emigrating. It was part of the reality of Irish life. Without a farm of your own, there was no way to earn a living in rural Ireland of the time. When potential spouses left for the New World, there was nothing to be done about it. The likelihood of ever seeing one’s paramour again was slim, a reality driven home by one sentimental Irish ballad, “Slievenamon,” after another, “Rose of Mooncoin.” A sort of dogged fatalism settled in. In the words of Johnny Cash, “I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way.” No one had the wherewithal to go traipsing off to the United States on what was likely to be a wild goose chase to persuade potential mates to abandon whatever lives they had made there.

​While they may have met in Donegal, I think it is more likely that Patrick Blaney and Rose McHugh fell for each other after meeting in the New York Irish diaspora. But unlike Rose McHugh, who liked living in the United States, with the income and sorts of freedom that weren’t available to young women in Ireland, Patrick Blaney loathed the regimentation of a working man’s life in the United States and the loss of his autonomy. He worked as a laborer of some kind, but I never heard the details. Still, it looked like he was stuck. Like tens of thousands before and after him, lack of work and opportunity had forced him out of Ireland. There was nothing to go back to.

​And then, like a deus ex machina from a Greek drama or Dickens’ novel, events took a turn of their own. First, in 1902, Patrick’s father, James Blaney, died, leaving Patrick as his principal heir. It was a striking change in status. Having left, because there was no way to earn a living without a farm, Patrick suddenly found himself the proud owner of a beautiful 15-acre farm fronting on the Atlantic Ocean’s Donegal Bay. Fortune had surely smiled on him.
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​Working out how James Blaney got his hands on this farm is difficult given the destruction of many official records over the years. Just three percent of farmers in Ireland in 1870 owned their own land. James Blaney was not one of them. An official 1876 publication reveals that across the island of Ireland, just 32,000 people owned an acre or more, many of them absentee landlords, living in England. No Blaneys are cited among the 32,000. Yet the 1901 census clearly indicates that James Blaney, my great-grandfather, did not just live on, or rent, the farm he left to my grandfather; he owned it.

​The Blaneys are first identified as Donegal tenants in the tenant rolls of the enormous Conyngham estate in 1818. Donegal historians note that the Conynghams were a family from Ayrshire, Scotland. In the struggle between King Malcolm of Scotland and Macbeth in the 11th century (yes, that Macbeth), Malcolm sought refuge in Conyngham’s Ayrshire fields. Conyngham saved the king’s life by hiding him in hay, telling his workmen, “over, fork over,” which became the family motto. By 1821, a Conyngham wife helped the family sleep its way to the top. Elizabeth Denison, who married Francis Conyngham, became a mistress of King George IV of England with the apparent tolerance of her compliant husband, upon whom the king heaped honors.

​The elegant script recording the 1818 tenant payments fails to record this Blaney's first name. Some years he is recorded as D. Blaney, in others it is hard to read—either Daniel or Donal Blaney. But he’s listed on Conyngham’s 1818 rental roll for Gortward as paying a half-year rent of £2.16.10 (two pounds, sixteen shillings and ten pence). This Daniel or Donal was my great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side.

​Doubtless, James Blaney and great-grandparents on both sides of the family tree were able to take advantage of major British programs of land reform designed to encourage landholders to sell to their tenants. The last enactment was called the Wyndham Act, passed by Parliament in 1903. These programs offered tenants the opportunity to purchase their property with mortgage payments lower than their rental costs, with payments extending for periods of up to 60 years. It’s highly likely that Granny and Grangy Blaney not only inherited the farm, but they also inherited the right to the low-interest loans provided by the Wyndham Act and its predecessors.

​Granny’s first actions upon taking possession of the farmhouse? According to my cousin Rosaleen, it was unpacking the fancy cutlery with her initials on it provided as a wedding gift from the family for whom she had worked in New York. Next, according to my sister Rosemary, she took ten dollars she had brought back from the United States to have the cottage's mud floor covered with concrete.

​Once settled, Granny and Grangy produced six children: Margaret and Mary, who emigrated to the United States in the 1920s; Cassie, who married Mick Driscoll from County Cavan, an employee on the shipyards on Glasgow’s Clyde River; my mother, who married Edward John Harvey and moved to London; Theresa, who married Hugh McNern and moved with him to Belfast, where he worked at the Harland and Wolff shipyard that had built the Titanic; and James, after whom I was named and who remained on the farm. The sixth child, Josephine, died a crib death within 12 months of her birth.

During the two years I lived with her in the early 1950s, she could be very affectionate. She’d take me on her knees in her wheelchair and calling me a stór (my treasure) while combing out the lice in my hair. Sometimes in one of these sessions, she would sing Brahm’s “Lullaby” in a lovely soprano voice, certainly learned while she was in the United States, with the higher and longer notes now quavering in her old age.

​She taught me lessons for life: “I cried because I had no shoes, till I met a man who had no feet.” She may never have heard of Rabelais, but she clung to one of his dicta: “Tell the truth and shame the devil.” And of course, she was a firm believer in the old adage, “The devil finds work for idle hands.” She protected my brother Ted and me. She worried about the two of us. She loved me. And I loved her.

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Read James Harvey's own Irish story here: https://americaeire.org/stories/donegal-to-washington-cf51

You can find 14 years of vivid memories of what life was like in the rural west of Ireland in James Harvey’s memoir, Grappling. With. Ghosts: Childhood Memories From Postwar Ireland and London. Midwest Book Review describes the book as "a deftly crafted and inherently fascinating memoir . . . Exceptionally well written, and thoroughly 'reader-friendly.’ ”

You can order the book at this link: https://tinyurl.com/bdzrhbur