Irish America

Photo Album

Great-aunt Mary O’Toole’s Amazing, Trailblazing Life

Submitted by Jimmy O’Toole, and Paula Mulhall, Mary’s grandniece and grandnephew.

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Her first seal of office needed to have the word “his” crossed out and replaced by “hers” in pen as she was the first female to hold a municipal court appointment in the US.  From Irish immigrant working as a child minder to becoming the first woman judge of a municipal court in the United States, was the unique and outstanding achievement of Mary O’Toole. Born in Ireland, a … [Read more...] about Great-aunt Mary O’Toole’s Amazing, Trailblazing Life

Photo Album: The Wealth of the World

Summer 2021

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At rest, this picture belongs to a wedding album from 1966. Plain, awkward even, it was composed by the photographer whose job it was to snap the parents of the groom. It doesn’t speak of small Galway farms disappearing over shoulders, the ride over the sea, their names. They are Edward Donohoe and Winnie, who was first Una Ryan, then Winnie Donohoe and, for an afternoon, Jane … [Read more...] about Photo Album: The Wealth of the World

Photo Album My Great-Grandmother Discovered

December/ January 2021

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Submitted by Robert F. Lyons, Kennebunk, Maine It was the accidental discovery of a vintage photograph, which enabled me to meet my first Irish-American relative, my great grandmother, Ellen Whelan Lyons of Co Waterford, Ireland.  At a family reunion in South Dakota, my cousin, John Maloney, had tossed out on the table a bushel basketful of old photos. … [Read more...] about Photo Album My Great-Grandmother Discovered

Photo Album:
4th of July Picnic

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After the Civil War, Philip Cummins, a coal miner from Loon, Clogh, Co. Kilkenny, took his wife Mary Smith (Rakenny, Co. Cavan) and family from the troubling times of the Molly Maguires and Schuykill County, Pennsylvania, and settled in western Massachusetts to work at the Richmond Furnace factory and try his hand at farming. The photo is of the family of Philip's oldest son, … [Read more...] about Photo Album:
4th of July Picnic

Photo Album: An Ocean Away

By Mary Gallagher, Assistant Editor
October / November 2019

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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 … [Read more...] about Photo Album: An Ocean Away