(Ed's Note: Bernard and Mary Crummy are my Great, Great, Great Grandparents on my father's side. They are our immigrant generation from the province of Ulster, Ireland, landing in America in 1848. As family notes detail, they entered through the Port of New Orleans and moved up the Mississippi to just north of Lexington, to Georgetown, in Scott County, Kentucky. Around 1852, they moved onto Mount Sterling, Illinois. This pages details their first few years in America.
Bernard Crummy was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland around 1812. Mary O'Callahan was born in 1814 near Newry, also in Northern Ireland. Geographically, Newry is 30 miles southwest of Belfast. They marry around 1837 and emigrate around 1848. Their eldest, Catherine, is born in 1838, Daniel in 1839, Margaret in 1842, Mary in 1844 and Anna in 1846. They are an immigrant family. All made the rigorous trip across the Atlantic, probably through Liverpool, but departure from either Newry or Belfast is possible. From there, they sailed to the Port of New Orleans. Actual date in 1848 of departure has been difficult to determine but census data from 1910 details an 1848 year of arrival. I have no source data for the Crummy journey to America; research is still underway.
Bernard and Mary left Ireland just as millions of others, fleeing from the effects of the Great Potato Famine of the late 1840s, which ravished Ireland. The most serious areas affected by the loss of the potato were located in the southwestern portion of the island, with the effects lessening in the province of Ulster. Bernard was around 36 and Mary, 34, when they left their homeland. They came to the port of New Orleans because of the lower fares compared with entering through New York or Baltimore, even though the distance was greater.
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Dublin to New Orleans, obviously further than the east coast, but the fares were significantly lower. Close to 5000 NM |
From New Orleans, they made their way to Scott County, just north of Lexington, Kentucky. They settled near Georgetown because they had relatives, the Lenahan family, already living there. Some notes passed down through the family details Bernard and Mary owning and operating a plantation using slaves. He eventually gave them their freedom. This sounds like a nice story, but the 1850 census of Scott County details Bernard as a laborer and the slave census does not show Bernard as a slave owner. No record is found of the Lenahan family.
As for locale in Scott County, the family lived in the White Sulphur Post Office Precinct which is in the Southwestern portion of the county. The map below is a photograph of the map above. The detail is greater. It is Beers Map dated 1879 and shows property ownership. I was looking for some detail for the local area and this map was behind a glass enclosure. If you look close enough, you can see the reflection of the camera in the upper left portion of the camera. The main east-west road bisecting the precinct is the Frankfort Georgetown Road, Frankfort just to the west and Georgetown to the east.
This enhanced view of the main road is centered around St.Pius Church, on the north side. Though I do not have any documentation detailing the exact location of where the Crummy family lived during there short stay, some of the research points to this area. Regardless, it should suffice to say they lived west of Georgetown in the White Sulphur Precinct.
Quite possibly, Bernard worked on a farm of someone detailed near him in the census. Further inspection of the 1850 census leads to some possible truths in the notes forwarded by Sister Ceslaus. There were some blacks living in close proximity to the Crummy family, some who possibly had previously been slaves owned by Thomas Thomason (these blacks had his surname).
As for Scott County, the 1882 history is detailed on another page in this chapter. During the nineteenth century Georgetown's cultural and economic life, the latter based on tobacco, milling, distilling, and the rope and bagging businesses, was closely tied to the deep South. While Kentucky remained officially neutral during the Civil War, Scott County's leanings were Southern. The 1850 slave census lists many of the plantations in this precinct with slave populations. Thus, an labor intensive economy. Research of census rolls reveals a heavy Irish labor population along with the slave population. And thus the setting for Bernard and Mary's first stop in America.
One suspects maybe a lifestyle Bernard and Mary were not expecting. Another disappointment for them had to be St. Pius Church. Though the parish was well established, it was in a missionary status in 1850, administered from Frankfort, just to the west of Georgetown. But the beauty of America was in the opportunity available. As in the previous chapter about Joseph Resch and his family, Bernard found that better opportunities for his family lay elsewhere, specifically, northwest to Illinois.
While in Kentucky, Bridget (1848), Bernard Jr (1850) and Elizabeth (1852) were born. Sometime in 1852, they move onto Brown County, Illinois, in the western bulge of Illinois.