Beginning March 2nd, 2020 the Mailing Lists functionality on RootsWeb will be discontinued. Users will no longer be able to send outgoing emails or accept incoming emails. Additionally, administration tools will no longer be available to list administrators and mailing lists will be put into an archival state.
Administrators may save the emails in their list prior to March 2nd. After that, mailing list archives will remain available and searchable on RootsWeb
All my Chesney line, please take note that I'm shutting down my Juno
account and changing all my mail to
RevLKMC(a)nvi.net. Please change your address book.
I will still be the administrator of this list -- just from a new
address.
Linda
________________________________________________________________
GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO!
Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less!
Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit:
http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj.
I'm not sure this link will work if you're not signed up with the New
York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/11/national/11IRIS.html
So here's a cut and paste copy as well.
My Chesneys were in Baltimore a century before the Irish mentioned in
this article, but this may be of interest to others of you, whose Irish
Chesneys immigrated in the 19th century.
Linda
Baltimore Journal: Shrine Reconstructs a Lost City of the Irish
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
BALTIMORE, March 7 A century's
intrusion of wild trees and impenetrable
bramble has cracked and toppled the
gravestones of Finnegan from Galway,
Murphy from Cork, and thousands of other
urban pioneers resting all atumble in St.
Peter's once grand Irish immigrant cemetery.
"Their descendants moved out to the suburbs,
and when they hear how bad things are here
they get excited and promise to do
something," said Thomas Ward, touring the
woeful burial ground of a once vital
working-class throng. These 19th-century
Irish built and ran the old Baltimore & Ohio
railroad and made a lilting ghetto of southwest
Baltimore.
"But families looking for their roots are more
likely to fly to Ireland to search the cemeteries
rather than come here into the city where their
old ones are," Mr. Ward added sardonically.
The suburban Irish-Americans will of course
be journeying in by the vanfuls as celebrators
in the city's annual St. Patrick's parade. But this is
small comfort for Mr. Ward, a
74-year-old retired judge and son of a B&O railroad man. He
fears the power of
time to obliterate his people's 150-year- old traces.
Mr. Ward and a group of city preservationists are
ambitiously restoring five
working-class row houses on Lemmon Street, an alley block
behind the railroad's
old engine roundhouse where the immigrant Irish once
teemed. Mr. Ward wants the
Irish Shrine at Lemmon Street, as it is called, to be a
more impressive tribute to the
true past of his people than the usual display of
parade-day Irishmen in green plastic
derbies and fishermen's sweaters.
Through a glass-wall vista from the backyard, near the
outhouse that is to be
restored, Mr. Ward plans for visitors to see a three-floor
diorama of an Irish
immigrant family of two parents and eight children. He
plans a scene of hope,
humility and accomplishment in depicting refugees from the
Irish famine of 150 years
ago who built an American future for such as Mr. Ward.
"A hundred years from now, I want tourists to know about
the people who lived,
worked, worshiped and died here, the people who built the
railroads," said Mr.
Ward, more mindful than most Irish-Americans of how their
history is fading.
Census figures show a 45 percent drop across 20 years in
the number of Americans
currently 22 million who claim some Irish heritage.
Those who identify
Irish-American history with clichés about "the troubles"
back home are missing an
entirely positive swath of contributions, including "the
tremendous Irish presence," as
Mr. Ward puts it, in the earliest history of American
railroading and southwest
Baltimore.
The old neighborhood of Lemmon Street attracted many of the
66,000 Irish
immigrants who poured into the city during the famine. St.
Peter the Apostle Church,
built with the help of volunteers from the railroad,
reigned supreme with its
abstinence movement, the Society of the Divine Thirst. The
parish is still active, a
few blocks up from Rowley's pub, which was opened in 1847.
Rowley's made a
point of closing every year on St. Patrick's Day because
"the family didn't want to
see an Irishman drunk and reeling in the streets," said
Patrick Rowley, descendant of
the founding publican.
Mr. Rowley currently tends the pub's original bar, a city
treasure on Pratt Street
where locals no longer send their children around to "rush
the growler" for take-out
tins of beer. These days, as affluent young professionals
seek old worker housing to
rehab, the pub is called Patrick's and is billed as
"Baltimore's finest Irish cappuccino
and wine bar."
"And this year, for the very first time in history, we'll
be open St. Patrick's Day," said
Mr. Rowley, breaking into laughter as he explained why,
"because we want the
money."
No one is more pleased by this adaptation than Mr. Ward, a
former city councilman
who can measure the retreat of the city's "disenchanted"
Irish precinct by precinct.
The Lemmon Street houses were built in 1848 and the last of
the old Irish lived in
them until a generation ago. They were to be torn down
until local preservationists
won possession.
The B&O roundhouse is now a museum in a neighborhood tinged
with
daguerreotype charm, from St. Peter's to the old Hollins
food market.
"It was the church, the pub, the market, the railroad and,
of course, the workers
who made it all work," said Mr. Ward, speaking across a
glass of Harp lager at
Rowley's.
The pub's old wood bar gleamed, more upright than the
tombstones of St. Peter's.
Lately, Mr. Ward noted, a group of nuns has begun hacking
away at the cemetery
overgrowth in hopes of restoring the memory of the old
Irish. "The neighborhood
will be the shrine," he said.
________________________________________________________________
GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO!
Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less!
Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit:
http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj.