Photo Album: An Ocean Away - Irish America irishamerica.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from irishamerica.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
My paternal great-grandmother Violet May Carroll McHale was born in 1906 in Castlebar, Mayo, and raised as a farmer’s daughter. She and her sisters (Delia, Lucy, and Jane) did much of the grunt work that was usually reserved for males, since their father Martin had a bad leg and couldn’t do it on his own. Violet eventually had to leave school completely at about age 10 to help keep the farm going with jobs like cutting peat and bringing in the potato crop.
When Martin died in 1920, their mother Sarah sold the farm, and the women made their way to America under the sponsorship of Bill Elliott, as his part in a marriage arranged between him and Delia (or “Geenie”), the oldest. They settled in Brooklyn on Fulton Street, in a tenement where the subway ran just outside their window. Grieved, homesick, and fragile after a weeks-long voyage in steerage, Sarah did not last long in their new home, and died soon after arriving.