The Dunfey-Keefe Family Website
From Eire to the Acre
Emigration from Ireland skyrocketed during the Famine (1845-52). Like many Irish-Americans the Dunfeys of twentieth-century New England trace their roots in the United States to this period of famine, rural upheaval, and death in mid-nineteenth century Ireland.
The potato blight that caused the Famine in Ireland is now known to be a fungus, “phytophthera infestans,” still the most important single cause of losses in the world potato crop but now controlled by chemicals. The temperate climate, breezes off the ocean, mist-dewed fields, and reliance on the potato for diet in mid-nineteenth century Ireland made the country most vulnerable to the establishment and dire consequences of the fungus. About forty per cent of the potato crop failed in 1845 and virtually the entire crop in 1846. The next year was relatively dry and the blight receded, but few potatoes had been planted because the people had eaten their seed crop. In 1848 close to full planting resumed, but the summer was wet and the fungus destroyed a large percentage of the crop.
The fungus had first appeared in Europe in 1830--the early years of the marriage of James and Alice Phelan Dunphy. The Dunphys of County Waterford lived in the parish of Portlaw/Ballyduff--about eight miles from Waterford Town. They were illiterate: the spelling “Dunphy” was used by the parish priest, Father Ruark, when he recorded family marriages and baptisms. Father Ruark registered the marriage of a youthful James Dunphy and Alice Phelan in February, 1824. At least eight children were born to James and Alice over the course of the next twenty-five years: four of these children, James, Matthew, Johanna, and Margaret, emigrated to the United States in the Famine years while one, Thomas, came later on in 1870. One child apparently died in infancy while the fate of two others (Nicholas and Mary) is currently unknown. The parish had two churches: one was in Ballyduff, still a rural village nestled among beautiful rolling hills; the other church was in Portlaw, a few miles distant from Ballyduff. Portlaw was a town that underwent tremendous changes from the mid-1820s through 1850 as a Quaker family established the largest (cotton) mill in Ireland, eventually employing over one thousand people.
Irish families often sent their children one by one to America. This phenomenon, “chain migration,” occurred with the Dunphys of the Portlaw/Ballyduff area in County Waterford, Ireland. Typically parents in a family identified the oldest child as the first to emigrate with the notion that that child would assist in financing his siblings’ and other relatives’ transatlantic crossings to America.
The first Dunphy to arrive in the States fit this pattern perfectly: James Dunphy, probably arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May, 1847. Emigration of the Irish in the 1840’s and 1850’s occurred for the most part in the spring and summer. After enduring a difficult winter James and his wife, Margaret, probably left Portlaw/Ballyduff in April, 1847, “Black ‘47” of the Famine years, and either walked or went by cart from their hometown to Cobh, the port area of Cork, a distance of sixty-five miles. In the Famine years Cobh became and remained thereafter Ireland’s main port for emigrants departing for England, the United States, Canada, and Australia. There James and Margaret boarded ship for Liverpool: emigration trends of this period suggest the probability of their having departed for America via Liverpool, one of the major shipping cities of England. Cost of passage usually was in the two-to-five-pound range; the trip in the 1840’s and 1850’s would take from three to six weeks depending on the weather and the type of ship. A few years after James’ arrival Johanna, Margaret, and Matthew Dunphy departed from Cobh for America.
Cambridge in the 1840s and 1850s
Twenty years old or so and recently married to Margaret Holley, James and his bride probably arrived in the States in May, 1847. On his application for citizenship many years later James stated that he arrived in the Boston area in mid-May, 1849; however, he remembered the year incorrectly as his first daughter was born in Cambridge in 1848. James and Margaret settled in the northwest section of Cambridge near Fresh Pond--an area dubbed derisively as “Dublin.”
Dublin Street became the residential center of an area of Cambridge that featured ice houses, brickyards, slaughter houses, tanneries, railroad yards, streetcar barns (for horses), and carriage factories. With the arrival of the first groups of Irish men to work in this area and live on Dublin Street, the residential part of the area became known generically as “Dublin.” As late as the 1830’s an area of ponds, swamps, and farms, northwest Cambridge changed rapidly in the 1840’s because of the need for an area on the “urban fringe” that could respond helter-skelter to the new industrial demands of a rapidly evolving economy. The Fitchburg-to-Boston Railroad opened in 1843 and established a stop near Porter Square in northwest Cambridge. This, combined with the demand for bricks made out of the glacial blue clay of the area, helped to transform northwest Cambridge into a bustling industrial center by 1850. James and Margaret Dunfey settled in this area of recently vacant land that now featured offensive odors, the noises of railroads and start-up industries, cluttered shop yards and polluted water. James and Margaret were two of many recently arrived Famine Irish desperate to find work and a place to live among fellow countrymen--Dublin became the neighborhood for unpleasant industrial activity and a home for poor Irish like the Dunphys.
The Dublin neighborhood formed immediately (1844) after the arrival of the railroad and the opening of the brickyards. The laborers in the brickyards were primarily Irish Catholic immigrants, destitute refugees from the Potato famine and social outcasts in Protestant Cambridge. Before 1847 the earliest Irish laborers in the area lived in tents and shanties constructed haphazardly in and near the brickyards. As the brickyards flourished the owners of the land and brickyards became small-scale real estate developers. After 1847 Solomon Sargent, a local farmer turned developer, created a “workers’ cottage district” with Dublin Street (now Sherman Street) and the adjacent brickyards as its geographic center.
In 1848 James and Margaret’s names appeared for the first time in public records as the parents of a child, named appropriately enough, Catherine Dunphy. Catherine, like Catherine Manning Dunfey born later in the century, was born in late August, baptized in early September (in St. John’s Church in East Cambridge), and nicknamed “Kate.” Her godparents (Bridget Keefe, James Brennan) do not appear to be related to either parent--an indication that neither parent had siblings or cousins living in Massachusetts in 1848.
Two years later, though, a second daughter was born to James and Margaret Dunphy. This child, named Ellen, was baptized at St. John’s “mission” church in northwest Cambridge, St. Peter’s, by a well-known priest of the Boston diocese, Father Manasses P. Daugherty. Ellen’s godmother was Johanna Dunphy, James’ younger half-sister. It is likely that she arrived in 1849 or 1850, possibly married already to Thomas Kelley. The “chain migration” of the Dunphys had begun.
In the 1850 United States Census James and Margaret appear as living in Cambridge and having been born in Ireland. They are illiterate. Their daughter, Catherine, is listed as is another child, Ann Granger, age seven. Ann probably was an orphan in their temporary care as her name does not crop up in any subsequent record. Margaret Holley Dunphy was pregnant at the time the census was taken in late spring, 1850.
James’ younger half-brother, Matthew Dunphy, his wife Elizabeth (Eliza) Powers Dunfey, and their baby, John Matthew, arrived in America in 1852 or 1853. (In the United States Census of 1900 both Eliza and her son, John, cite 1852 as their arrival date in the States though this memory of arrival too may be incorrect). The first record of their living in Cambridge appeared in 1854 with the birth of their second child, Alice. Alice was born in mid-December, 1854, and was baptized by Father Daugherty in St. Peter’s Church. Alice became the first Dunphy to die in the United States as she lived only a brief time. She probably was buried in the Catholic graveyard on Kidder’s Lane (now Rindge Avenue) in the Dublin neighborhood: the land had been purchased in 1846 for this purpose. The location of the cemetery epitomized the marginal status of the Irish immigrants who lived and died in “Dublin”--next to a brickyard, near a swamp, alongside a railroad.
Matthew did not appear in the Cambridge City Directory until 1856 when he was listed as a laborer living on North Avenue (now Massachusetts Avenue) in northwest Cambridge. Like James, his older half-brother, Matthew probably worked initially in the brickyards that remained the main source of employment in the area for unskilled laborers.
City directories often failed to cite Irish heads of family or listed them sporadically due to the transience of accommodations for many working-class Irish immigrants. The Dunphys well exemplify this phenomenon in Cambridge and later on in Lowell.
Many Irish immigrants of the Famine Era chose to live in East Coast towns and cities. Drawn to a communal form of life, the Irish by and large shunned the possibilities of living in rural America and elected to cluster initially in the growing industrial cities, small and large, in the Northeast. There, though unskilled and frequently illiterate, Irish men could seek entry-level laboring jobs in construction, foundries, brickyards, railroads, and streetcar barns. Single women could find employment as domestics in middle-class households or work in the textile and other mills sprouting up in New England. One by one the Dunphy siblings settled in Cambridge. Like many illiterate and unskilled Irish immigrants in America, they lived hardscrabble existences, moving often from one set of rented rooms to another within Cambridge and later elsewhere in Massachusetts. For this generation of Dunphys life in the States was harsh and difficult. They resembled most Famine Irish in the Northeast in that they never achieved independence as defined by a comfortable self-sufficiency, but instead lived and labored in impoverished, insecure circumstances.
The fourth sibling in the Dunphy “chain migration,” Margaret, arrived in the early to mid-1850’s with her husband, James Healand. Margaret crops up in official records for the first time in 1857. She appeared as godmother to the fifth-born daughter of James and Margaret Holley Dunphy, christened Mary Dunphy. Her brother, Matthew Dunphy, appeared as Mary’s godfather in the baptismal records of St. John’s Church in Cambridge in late December, 1857.
By 1860 three of the Dunphy siblings had children. James and his wife, Margaret, had six daughters: Catherine (8/18/1848); Ellen (10/23/1850); Margaret (9/23/1852); Sarah (7/15/1855); Mary (12/27/1857); and Johanna (1/29/1860).
Matthew and his wife, Eliza, had four living children in 1860: John (2/1851); James (3/22/1856); Catherine (8/18/1858); and Nicholas (9/6/1860).
Margaret and her husband, James Healand, had at least one daughter, Mary (circa 1855). The Dunphy brothers and their families all were living in the Cambridge/Somerville area at the time of the 1860 census. Their sister, Margaret, and her family moved to Lowell in 1858 or 1859.
Matthew and Eliza Dunphy’s naming of their children demonstrates the Irish pattern of honoring and remembering parents and siblings. Their eldest, John Matthew, was named for his maternal grandfather, John Powers, and his father, Matthew. Their next-born, Alice, was named for her paternal grandmother while their third-born, James, was named for his paternal grandfather and uncle. Catherine may have been named for a James Dunphy’s first wife. Nicholas and Thomas, born in 1862, the two youngest children, were named for uncles: Nicholas had uncles by that name on both sides of the family, while Thomas was named for a paternal uncle who emigrated to Lowell in 1870.
Upon arrival in the States the Dunphy men worked as laborers. In the 1850 census James listed himself as a laborer, but by 1860 he had worked as a hostler in Cambridge and adjacent Somerville. Matthew too began his work life in Cambridge as a laborer--probably, as stated earlier, in the brickyards of the Dublin neighborhood. In 1856 he appeared in the Cambridge City Directory as Mathew Dunfay (a spelling used on his death certificate eight years later), a laborer living on North (Massachusetts) Avenue. Three years later, in the 1859 Cambridge City Directory, his listing stated that he lived on North Avenue near Porter’s Hotel (now Porter Square) and worked as a hostler.
Worcester in the Civil War Era
In late 1861 or early 1862 Matthew and his wife Eliza moved from Cambridge to Worcester. The reason for moving remains uncertain though one clue suggests that members of Eliza’s family had settled in the city. Church records indicate that a Kate Moore (Eliza’s maiden name) becomes godmother to Matthew and Eliza’s youngest child named Thomas, born in Worcester in 1862. In any case they departed Cambridge after having lived there for eight or nine years.
They settled in 1862 at 23 Blackstone Square in downtown Worcester and lived at this address with their surviving four children, John M. (11), James (6)Catherine (4), and Nicholas (2). Again Matthew found employment as a hostler
and worked in this capacity for three years in Worcester. Matthew and Eliza lived for at least three years on this small street in downtown Worcester near the Common, the cathedral, and another Catholic church, St. John’s. In October,
1862, their last child was born and was named for Matthew’s youngest brother, Thomas.
Two years later, in 1864, catastrophe struck: Matthew died of a “fit” on August 14 and was buried in the Catholic (St. John’s) Cemetery in south Worcester. Like most poor urban Irish who died in New England before 1890 no cemetery
records or headstone exist to identify the whereabouts of his grave in the cemetery. The great Boston preacher and abolitionist, Theodore Parker, remarked in the 1850’s that he had never met an Irishman with gray hair: a bit of
hyperbole, but his point was that many of the Irish-born men in Massachusetts worked themselves to death before they were forty. Matthew Dunphy’s age at death: thirty-six. Eliza became a widow at age thirty-one or so.
Lowell in the 1860’s and 1870’s
At some point after Matthew’s death in 1864, but before 1868, his widow, Eliza, and her four children left Worcester to settle in Lowell. One by one the Dunphy siblings had drifted to Lowell in the late 1850’s and into the mid-1860’s. One City Directory placed Margaret and her husband, James Healand, there in the late 1850’s while baptismal records placed Johanna in Lowell in 1861. James Dunphy moved from Somerville to Lowell in 1865. In December, 1865, James’ wife, Margaret, died of consumption in Lowell: James became a widower with six daughters ranging in age from five to seventeen.
Eliza Dunphy arrived in Lowell in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death and the end of the Civil War. In the 1868 Lowell City Directory she appeared as living at 84 Lowell Street in the Acre (originally the area was known as the “Paddy Camp Lands” and a bit later as “New Dublin”), the eastern edge of old Ward Five and one of two principle centers of Irish settlement in Lowell. The 1870 United States census suggests that Eliza was a typical Irish-born widow of her era: she was listed as Eliza Dumphy, age 40 (probably inaccurate), “keeping house,” and living with her five children. The oldest children, John (18) and James E. (14), worked as a machinist and as an employee in the “cotton mill” respectively. Children of Irish immigrants in Lowell, as had been the case in Ireland, were still regarded as an economic “asset,” which allowed many families to survive the untimely death of a father or live a bit above a level of abject poverty. Irish-born widows in Lowell seldom worked if they had children old enough to be employed in the mills: this was true of Eliza Dunphy and her two oldest sons in 1870. For Eliza Powers Dunphy and others of her generation the birth and survival of children formed a sort of disability and life insurance in American cities.
The Irish had arrived in Lowell at the very beginning of the city’s industrial history. At the request of Kirk Boott, agent of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, Hugh Cummiskey, a labor contractor, had led a march of thirty Irish laborers from Charlestown to Lowell in April, 1822, to widen and build arteries of the Pawtucket Canal, which was now to be put to use as a conduit of water power to run the soon-to-be-built mills. The Yankee owners of the project had envisioned a work force of young men and women from rural (Yankee) New England; but for the hazardous construction of canals and roads, the owners found only pre-Famine Irish immigrants willing to undertake the work. No provision was made for these Irish men to stay on in Lowell. Soon enough, though, the demands of construction required a permanent work force of Irish laborers. The “Paddy Camp Lands,” within walking distance of the canals and mills, became the site where hundreds of Irish, following the lead of the original thirty, constructed rude huts and cabins made of rough boards and slabs of cast-off materials.
In the 1830’s and 1840’s Lowell’s success as a model of a new form of industrial organization soon led to the establishment of other industrial cities that competed for the now-shrinking pool of laboring men and women from the failed farms of rural New England. Despite their vision of a Lowell that would rely on an indigenous labor force of men and women who would devote only a few years of life to work in the mills, the millowners now needed to employ any available men and women who would devote a lifetime of work to the mills. The Famine Irish arrived in eastern Massachusetts just as the demand for low-skilled workers in Lowell was peaking. The 1850’s and 1860’s became a boom period for Irish settling in Lowell.
In this context the young widow, Eliza Powers Dunphy, and her five children arrived in Lowell. Eliza had a wide acquaintance of Irish-born family and (probably) friends too in Lowell in 1870. Her brother-in-law, James, and his second wife, Ann Maxwell Dunphy, lived nearby at 62 Dutton Street in the Acre. Her brother, Nicholas Powers, a wheelwright and widower, lived with his son, John (13), in a boardinghouse at 18 Railroad Alley in the downtown area. Her sister-in-law, Margaret Dunphy Healand, lived nearby with her husband and five children on Lowell Street in 1870. Her husband’s other sister, Johanna Dunphy Kelley, had lived in Lowell in the 1860’s, but seems to have moved elsewhere by 1870.
Life was difficult and precarious for these Famine-era Irish immigrants and their children in Cambridge, Somerville, Worcester, and Lowell. Working conditions led to early death in Matthew’s case, while living conditions and availability of health care caused the deaths of at least one child in virtually every Dunphy family in the first two generations. Matthew and Eliza’s first-born child in the States, Alice, died in Cambridge; James and his second wife, Ann, lost two of their children, Ann and Roseanna, within a year of birth; Thomas Dunphy and his wife, Honora Sullivan, lost two of their three children, Alice and Cornelius, soon after their marriage (and his emigration to the States in 1870) in the1870’s in Lowell; Margaret and her husband, James Healand, also lost two of their children, Julia and Nicholas, in the 1870’s in Lowell. Later, in the 1880’s and 1890’s, more children, this time the sons and daughters of first-generation American-born Dunphys, died at early ages in Lowell.
For various social and economic reasons women far outnumbered men in post-Civil War Lowell. This proved not to be a deterrent for Eliza Powers Dunphy!!! Eight years a widow, she took a second husband in the summer of 1872. Though Immaculate Conception Church in downtown Lowell opened officially in the late 1870’s, some baptisms and marriages took place in the church’s basement as early as 1872. Eliza’s wedding to William Clark was one of the earliest ceremonies in the large stone church that was under construction in 1872. Civil records indicate that Eliza and William Clark married on July 6, 1872; church records confirm this by citing a religious ceremony in August, 1872, that occurred after civil marriage. In the civil record William Clark stated that he was 23; Eliza listed her age as 27--her oldest child, John, was 20 in 1872--so we can’t trust this citation of age!!! In fact, Eliza was around 40 at the time of her second marriage and certainly at least twelve to fifteen years older than her second husband.
William Clark had emigrated from Maine, where he was born and raised, to Lowell circa 1870. Clark worked as a mill “operative” in the early 1870’s. Later, though, like Matthew Dunphy, Eliza’s first husband, William worked with horses--listing himself as a teamster in the 1880 census and as a stable keeper in the 1900 census. Eliza crossed a boundary of age but also one of ethnicity and religion when she wed William Clark: he was a Maine “Yankee” and a Protestant. From their marriage in 1872 through the end of the century Eliza and William lived in at least twelve different homes in Lowell. In the 1870’s they lived on Market, Thorndike, Tremont and Phillips Streets. In the 1880’s they lived on Phillips Street, Pawtucket Boulevard, Fourth Avenue, North Street, and C Street. In the 1890’s they lived on Broadway, N. Franklin Court, and at three different addresses on Merrimack Street. As mentioned previously these frequent moves again reflect the economic marginality of Eliza’s life through 1901, the year of her death. As noted earlier the great majority of Famine emigrants, usually unskilled laborers and servants, seldom rose from the bottom of American urban society. Though Eliza lived for just shy of fifty years in Massachusetts--in Cambridge, Worcester, and Lowell--she died in 1901 in the City Farm, Lowell’s hospital/jail/orphanage for the impoverished. Her husband, William, had worked in the stables at the City Farm in the mid- to late 1890’s and they resided in a building at the rear of the property from 1895-1901. Eliza was buried in an unmarked grave (in St. Patrick’s Cemetery), seemingly purchased by the city in the mid-1880’s for Catholics who died at the City Farm.
Eliza’s was one of many weddings for the Dunphy’s of Lowell in the 1870’s. Thomas Dunphy, the youngest sibling and the last to emigrate to the States, married Honora Sullivan of Lowell on Independence Day, 1871, in St. Patrick’s Church in the Acre--just a year after his arrival in the country. American-born Dunphys of the first generation, daughters of James and Margaret, took husbands. The first to marry was Sarah whose husband, George Weeks, also was a Maine Yankee: he hailed from Castine, Maine, but had come to Lowell for work. Sarah was unusual in two respects: she married as a teenager (just 17) and was the only child of the three Dunphy brothers to move from Lowell (to Castine, Maine). Sarah’s sisters and cousins married most typically in their mid-twenties and occasionally in their thirties: again the older generation’s financial interest, as the historian Albert G. Mitchell states in his study of Lowell, was to discourage their adult children from early marriages. Two of Sarah’s older sisters, Margaret and Ellen, married in 1875 and 1878, respectively. Margaret married Daniel J. Redding at St. Peter’s Church in Lowell, while Ellen married Frederick Kelly in the same church three years later. The Reddings and their children would become pillars of St. Patrick’s Church through the early decades of the twentieth century.
John M. Dunphy, the oldest child of Matthew and Eliza, wed Jennie Harding in Fall River in June, 1878. Scanty evidence suggests that they had met in Lowell, but returned to her hometown, Fall River, for the marriage ceremony. In any case, they lived all of their married life in Dracut and Lowell.
In the late 1870’s too the spelling of the name appeared more frequently in the public records in Lowell as “Dunfey.” The older Dunphy brothers, James and Matthew, and their wives were illiterate when they arrived in Massachusetts around 1850. Whenever they encountered a civil servant, a census-taker or a town clerk, that individual would need to interpret the brogue and spell the name. Myriad spellings abounded!!! A few examples: Dunfrey, Dunphy, Dunfay, Dumphy, Dumphey, Dunfee, Dunfey, and so on. By 1870 the oldest children of James and Matthew were adults with a sixth-grade education: they were literate. In 1870 too Thomas Dunphy had emigrated to Lowell: both he and his wife, Honora, could read and write. Born in 1846, Thomas was eighteen years younger than Matthew: that age difference was significant as the literacy rate for young people in Ireland in the 1850’s was dramatically higher than was the case in the 1830’s. From 1870 to 1900 “Dunfey” became gradually the spelling of choice in marital, baptismal, and census records. Even into the early twentieth century, though, variant spellings would occur in public records.
For Matthew Dunfey the most common spelling of his name was “Dunfay.” Examples are as follows: Matthew’s first listing in the Cambridge City Directory (1856) used this spelling; in Worcester the name on his youngest child’s birth certificate (1862) and on his own death certificate was “Dunfay.” Yet this was not the spelling that appeared in his widow’s first listing a few years later in the Lowell City Directory (1868) or in her listing in the 1870 census. As mentioned previously Eliza appeared in the 1870 census as “Eliza Dumphy.” Even within the same year spellings would differ depending on the record-keeper’s own decision on how to list the name.
First-Generation Dunphys in Lowell: 1875-1901
Eliza Dunphy and her second husband, William B. Clark, lived on Phillips Street at the corner of Sargent in the Acre, in St. Patrick’s Parish, in the late 1870’s. Her unmarried sons, James J. and Nicholas, boarded with Eliza as they had begun their work lives in Lowell’s mills, just a short walk away from their home. Nicholas, for instance, appeared for the first time in the Lowell City Directory in 1877 as an “operative” -- a mill job that did not pay as well as a spinner, the job that his older brother James had in that year. Born in 1860, Nicholas probably had begun work in the mill at the age of thirteen. The Lowell School Department issued certificates to those children who had completed sixth grade as proof of eligibility to work in the mills of the city.
Nicholas’ name appeared erratically in the Lowell City Directory in the next fourteen years. He continued to live at home through the late 1880’s and apparently worked in the mills through 1887. From at least 1885-87 he worked as a mulespinner, a higher-paying job for a man in the mills that required him to oversee the efficient functioning of a number of machines. Very often men would introduce their sons to the requirements of this job as it was well-paying in comparison with other types of employment in the mills. Many years later Nicholas’ son, LeRoy William Dunfey, would work as a mulespinner as a young man.
In 1888 Nicholas and his younger brother, Thomas, moved from Pawtucketville, on 4th Avenue (near Mt. Grove Street), to North Street, a couple of blocks away from the South Common. There they opened a small grocery and liquor store--the first “entrepreneurial” effort of the Dunfey family since emigrating several decades earlier. Nicholas was responsible for the “grocery” end of the business, while Thomas was responsible for the liquor trade. Both Nicholas and Thomas lived at 46 North where their small retail shop was located on the ground floor. Their mother and step-father lived at 46 North as well. Perhaps matrimony prompted the opening of their store!!! Both Nicholas and Thomas married in the summer of 1888. Nicholas wed Eleanor J. (Nellie) Smith/Smythe in August at Immaculate Conception Church in Lowell. Eleanor had moved in the mid-1880’s to Lowell from Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she was born and raised. She worked as a weaver in a Lowell mill where Nicholas probably met her. Witnesses at their wedding were friends, Thomas Hennessy and Myrtle Bishop (who was to give her name to Nicholas and Eleanor’s first child, Myrtle Dunfey). Earlier in the summer (June 6) Thomas had wed Elizabeth (Lizzie) Gray in St. Patrick’s Church. Lizzie and her family had emigrated from Ireland to Lowell in the mid-1860’s: she was born aboard ship near the coast of Scotland on the trip to the States.
The brothers’ venture was short-lived. In 1889 Thomas decided to work as a life insurance agent and established a home elsewhere (58 Adams) in Lowell. In the mid-1890’s he and his wife would operate a small restaurant on Merrimack Street; in the late 1890’s Thomas would work as a carpenter, possibly in concert with his brother John.
Nicholas’ mother, Eliza, and her husband also moved from 46 North. Nicholas struggled on with the small business through 1890. In 1891 he established a different store, Dunfey & Wilson, with a new partner at 18 Palmer Street in the heart of downtown Lowell. This partnership also fizzled and later that year Nicholas, Eleanor, and their one-year old daughter, Myrtle, re-located to New York City. Their second child, LeRoy William, would be born and baptized there in December, 1891, shortly after their arrival in the city.
The struggle for security also posed a challenge to all other Dunfeys in the 1880’s and 1890’s. The most secure seemed to be Nicholas’ oldest brother, John M. Dunfey, who worked as a policeman in Lowell through 1896 and then established a successful contracting/real estate business in Pawtucketville for the next dozen years or so. In Catherine Manning Dunfey’s memoirs John M. Dunfey is referred to as the “mayor of Pawtucketville.”
The last of the four brothers, James Dunfey, worked for McQuade Liquors on Market Street in Lowell for many years and was active in Democratic politics in the city’s old Ward 1. James, who never married, experienced emotional problems which required at least one lengthy stay in Danvers State Hospital in the 1890’s. When released he lived for over ten years with his brother Nicholas and his family and then for the last dozen years of his life with his widowed brother, John. The grinding poverty of the lives of immigrant working people often would result in placement in the burgeoning Victorian hospitals and other institutions designed for those who had fallen “beneath the wheel.” A cursory glance through census records reveals the numerous immigrants who wound up in hospitals or poor houses. James Dunfey apparently was one who required such a placement.
The brothers had one surviving sister, Catherine (Katie), living in Lowell. Married in 1881 to Daniel Wholey, Katie D. Wholey appeared to have enjoyed a more stable life in that her family lived in the same house on White Street in Pawtucketville for decades while her husband worked as an operative and eventually as a foreman in one of the mills. Katie and Daniel also were the parents of eleven children born over a twenty-year span from 1883-1903. The Wholeys also sustained the old Irish tradition of naming children for their grandparents and other relatives. Three examples suffice: Elizabeth, their first-born, for Eliza Powers Dunfey Clark (Katie’s mother); Matthew, for Matthew Dunphy (Katie’s father); and Alice, for Katie’s long-dead sister.
Nicholas’s aunts, uncles, and cousins struggled in Lowell through the end of the century as well. His younger uncle, Thomas Dunfey, a mason for most of his life, died abruptly in 1892 at the age of 47. Thomas’ life was both brief and harsh--only one of his three children survived to adulthood. He and his wife, Honora, helped to raise his sister’s (Johanna Dunfey Kelley) son, Thomas Kelley. Thomas, Honora, and their son, James T., lived on Little Street in the Acre.
Nicholas’ older uncle, James Dunfey, had worked as a hostler, blacksmith, and laborer for all of his forty-odd years in the States. James lived on Broadway, Dutton, and Dummer Streets in the Acre. He died in his late sixties in April, 1895, the first of his generation to arrive in America and the last of the Dunfey siblings to die. Survivors included his second wife, Ann (Maxwell); six daughters by his first wife, five still living in Lowell; and only one daughter (of four born) by his second wife, seventeen-year old Teresa, who died three days after him in St. John’s Hospital of typhoid fever. Teresa worked in the “woolen mill” at the time of her death.
Nicholas’ older aunt, Johanna Dunphy Kelley, returned to Lowell in the late 1880’s to be near her only child, Thomas. Johanna, a widow at this time, worked in the mills and lived in mill-owned housing. Very little information about her survives with one important exception: she was the only Dunfey of her generation to leave a will. In the late 1880’s she filed a will, signed the document with an “x,” and left her estate to her son, Thomas Kelley. (Witness to the will was her sister-in-law, Honora Sullivan Dunphy, who could sign her name.) Johanna apparently left a will because she had taken out a $1000 life insurance policy - a not uncommon practice for thriftier Irish immigrants. The original will is in the Middlesex County Courthouse in Cambridge. Johanna died in January, 1895.
Nicholas’ younger aunt, Margaret Dunphy Healand, died in Lowell in July, 1888, at the age of 55. She was the first Dunphy to settle in Lowell--in the late 1850’s. The mother of at least eight children, Margaret lived at a number of different addresses in the Acre with her family. For the last fifteen years of her life she lived in two different houses on Jefferson Street.
In 1897 Nicholas and Eleanor Dunfey returned to Lowell from New York City. They and their two children, Myrtle and Roy, lived for a time with Nicholas’ mother, Eliza, and her husband, William Clark, at the City Farm on Merrimack Street. The City Farm was a unique creature of the Victorian era in that one floor served as a hospital, another as a jail, and the last as an orphanage. William Clark worked in the stables there, but his step-son Nicholas resumed work in the mills as a mulespinner. For the next several years Nicholas and his family (and, after 1900, his older brother James) lived on Hall Street in the Acre. His other two brothers, Thomas and John, and his sister, Katie, lived across the river in Pawtucketville. Nicholas’ numerous cousins also lived in these two sections of the city.
The first year of the twentieth century marked the end of an era for the Dunfey clan. The last surviving Dunfey to emigrate from Ireland in the Famine years, Eliza Powers Dunfey Clark, died at the City Farm in 1901 and was buried in St. Patrick’s Cemetery (no headstone survives). Her generation of Dunfeys had experienced all the challenges of being uneducated, poor, and Irish in urban America.
Chapter II: Lowell in the Early Twentieth Century
-- Overview--Beginning of the Decline-- Census Figures, etc., in 1900-- St. Patrick’s Church: the era of the O’Briens-- St. Patrick’s Cemetery: its origin, Dunfeys there, etc.-- Pawtucketville and the Acre-- Employment-- Births and marriages-- Death of Thomas DunfeyBy: Will Dunfey (Written in the 1990's)
