William Mulcahy left his wife and son in Co Kerry for America in the late 1800s. He was never seen in Ireland again, but he didn't quite disappear without trace, as his great granddaughter, Fionnuala Mulcahy,discovers on a journey in his footsteps
I'M DRIVING INTO a blizzard of multicoloured butterflies. They're flapping and slapping into the windscreen, as light as rose petals, each leaving a faint smudge behind. I must be killing hundreds every second that I forge ahead in the Ford Mustang on Highway 90. But I can't stop. I have to get to the southern Texas town of Brackettville as soon as possible.
I'm travelling across the US, trying to trace the route that my great grandfather, William Mulcahy, a baker, took in the late 1800s. I know from his letters that he left Tralee in 1879, leaving his wife and son (my grandfather) behind, temporarily, he thought at the time, to make a better living. The last letter that I've seen from him was posted from San José in 1901. He never returned to Ireland, but he left behind a trail of unanswered questions.
"You might like to know am I happy?" he wrote to his wife from Brackettville (then known as Brackett) in 1883. "I can answer you no, nor never will be till I'm reunited with my wife . . . If I had all the money that the United States could produce I would not be happy."
It's the first dated letter from him. But where had he landed in the US? Unable to find any passenger ship list with his name on it, either in books or online, I had started my journey from one of the most likely places he would have arrived: New York.
Castle Garden (now Castle Clinton) was the state immigration station from 1855, prior to Ellis Island opening in 1892. Castle Clinton is perched at the tip of Manhattan, and is now the departure point for trips to Ellis Island. Although there isn't an area for genealogical research in Castle Clinton, you can look up its passenger arrivals online (see panel). No sign of my great grandfather there. Nor on the Ellis Island website. However, I found that his brother, James, and family had arrived at Ellis Island in 1898, and I visited the museum there looking for anything that could throw light on my great grandfathers journey.
You stand in the Baggage Room, a vast entrance hall at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, and face a huge wall of baskets, trunks and other luggage that has become one of the iconic symbols of this immigration port. You catch snatches of German, Russian, Japanese and French among the Adidas- and Gucci-wearing tourists, while the exhibition around you builds a contrasting picture of the throngs who arrived here over the years. You imagine their relief as they left the ship behind, but also their apprehension about facing the immigration process, in their best clothes and clinging on to precious possessions - an accordion maybe, a prayerbook, some photographs.
The American Family Immigration History Centre at the museum allows you check if any of your ancestors arrived here. I get a copy of the manifest of the ship that brought my great grandfather's brother and his family to New York (but there is nothing relating to my great grandfather). Each manifest shows the names of passengers, as well as where they were coming from and where they were going.
About two-thirds of the 12 million immigrants who came through Ellis Island headed on to other parts of the US, while the rest stayed in New York, and you get a sense of the city life that would have awaited them - the overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and poverty - in the preserved tenements at the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side.
THERE GOES THE train whistle: two long blasts, one short and one long blast again, as it heaves slowly through a level crossing. It sounds like long G flat, a sad, lonesome call from somewhere deep in the old Wild West. I'd flown from New York to San Antonio in Texas and was taking the early morning train to Del Rio, by the Mexican border, to hire a car to get to Brackettville. When I reached my destination, just off Highway 90, the car grill was speckled with the dead butterflies, a couple of bright yellow wings left almost whole.
I stayed at Fort Clark, built in the 1850s to protect travellers moving westwards. My great grandfather had worked on a Texas railroad as a baker, according to a fragment of an undated letter, probably written before he arrived in Brackettville. Maybe he came to this town to find work on the railroad that had been scheduled to run through it? But due to a local dispute, the line never ran to Brackettville.
In the courthouse in the town, the court clerk welcomed me in to go through official records in search of some trace of my great grandfather. In a storeroom-cum-office I turned page after page of birth, marriage and death indexes, and read through old leather-bound ledgers of handwritten district and county court minutes from the early 1880s. There were horses and cows stolen, the odd murder, and plenty of gambling and "disorderly houses". A James Connell and a John OConnor are among the Irish names mentioned - but no Mulcahy.
Local historian William F Haenn told me that in those days gamblers would come to town to target soldiers and other workers on wage day. Maybe my great grandfather had lost his earnings there? Haenn pointed to a rectangular building on the town's main street, now a gallery, which would have been the post office where my great grandfather posted his letter home. The shelves of local libraries yielded first-hand accounts of life in the town at the time, but the local newspaper, the Brackett News, though still going strong, has none of its editions from the 1880s.
In a fragment of a letter, my great grandfather had mentioned the railroad he worked for, laying track into the prairie, and as I moved on from Brackettville, taking the train from Del Rio, the Mesquite trees and deer-shooting huts of the prairie whipped past me as day slipped into night and I left Texas behind.
The railroad wends west through El Paso and Tucson to Los Angeles. The route has changed little since 1883, when the line was completed, and the vastness of the country, as you trade prairie for cactus and New Mexico desert, is as awe-inspiring today as it must have been then. Today's Amtrak train takes 27 hours; it would have been a much longer journey in my great grandfather's time. On from LA northwards, then, to reach San José in the verdant Santa Clara county.
Even at the start of the 20th century, San José was a prosperous place. A letter my great grandfather wrote to his sister from the town in 1901 said he was working for the National Bakery after spending seven years at sea, until shipwrecked off the coast of China in about 1897. Most of the crew were killed, and he lost the savings that he had planned to use to go home, or bring his wife and son out to him.
"I lost everything but my life, and I assure you I did not care much about my life at the time," he wrote.
The National Archives and Records Administration in San Bruno, near San Francisco - one of many regional archives throughout the US - holds, deep within its vast collection, records of shipwrecks. Joseph Sanchez dug out old handwritten ledgers detailing the misfortunes of San Francisco-registered ships. From the coast of California to the coast of Japan, the books catalogue a litany of disasters, with many Irish names among those lost. No record matches my great grandfather's description of events. But then, it may be that he sailed from another port - another day's work.
IN SAN JOSÉ, I stayed on the street of his bakery, woken by the sound of a tram bell. City Hall told me that the address of the National Bakery - 308 South First Street - no longer existed. The chamber of commerce for Silicon Valley now covers the site. A meticulous researcher in the nearby Dr Martin Luther King library dug out plans of the building from 1901, showing even the ovens for the bakery. I looked up the 1901-02 city directory for San José, which lists people working in the town, and found, with a thrill, that it listed my great grandfather as working for the National Bakery, giving also his home address (another building that no longer exists). But in the directories before and after that year, there was no trace of him.
I scrolled through microfilms of death records in the San José clerk recorder's office, and Santa Clara County Library. There was no one with his name on the records. Was he one of the "unknown" dead? Or was he the William Mulcahy whose name I found in old local San José newspaper reports, charged with vagrancy and being drunk? Many Mulcahys drifted in and out of the local records from year to year. Had he moved on - gone back to sea, or moved north, or south - while back in Co Kerry, his wife grew old, his son grew up and married, and my father was born.
From San José I have taken home with me a vivid picture of the places my great grandfather stayed, but I've also a bag full of books, a purse full of contacts, and many more questions than I had started out with.
People ask if I found what I was looking for. The answer is, not yet. But I found something else: people who extraordinarily went out of their way help me with my research, from the Hertz employee in Del Rio who drove me around and gave me research tips, to the station guard with a collection of old railroad recipes who followed me off the train to tell me where I could get a taxi, to a cousin of John F Kennedy who stayed behind when all her colleagues in the archive had gone home, to point me in the direction of further sources to investigate.
And why all those butterflies? It seems they were migrants, heading south in their thousands to Mexico for a warmer winter, sharing their brief swirl of colour along the way.
Routes to the past Researching your ancestors here and abroad
National Archives, Bishop Street, Dublin 8, 01-4072300, www.nationalarchives.ie.
Resources include 1901 and 1911 census records, which you can view on microfilm. The Dublin section of the 1911 census is also searchable online at www.census.nationalarchives.ie
Tracing Your Irish Ancestors, by John Grenham (Gill Macmillan)
The local library in an area where your ancestor lived
The National Library of Ireland, www.nli.ie
The Irish Times ancestry section at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor
www.rte.ie/tv/whodoyouthinkyouare/
tracing_index.html
www.theshipslist.com
www.ellisisland.com (immigration to New York from 1892 - it closed in 1954)
www.immigrantships.net
www.castlegarden.org (immigration to New York, 1855 to 1890)
www.archives.gov/genealogy - National Archives and Records Administration (US)
www.cyndislist.com
www.familysearch.org
www.ancestry.com
fmulcahy@irish-times.ie
