Mary Harris was born in Cork city in late July 1837 and was baptised on August 1st by Father John O’ Mahony in the local Cathedral of St. Mary and St. Anne (known to generations of Cork people as the North Chapel), which stands on the north side of Cork city, close by the historical Shandon area. The cathedral archives contain her baptism details in the baptism registry books. These baptism archives date back to 1731.

It was a busy morning for baptisms, as Mary Harris was just one of five on that day. Mary’s baptism is listed as the third on the registry for 1^st August 1837. The beautiful baptism font in which Mary Harris was baptised, remains in everyday use to this day, it has been relocated close to the western entrance and can be seen by visitors to the Cathedral. The southern entrance water font dates from 1799.

Very little remains of the original North Chapel. The construction of which began in 1799 and which was eventually dedicated in 1808. This original church stood for just over a decade when in 1820 it was very extensively damaged by fire as a result of arson. Only a shell remained after the fire, but it was completely refurbished by architect George Pain and was reopened again in 1828. Mary Harris was baptised here just nine years later.

Although the beautiful imposing and impressive Cathedral structure with its towers is far removed from the structure in 1837, it stands on the same site. The nineteenth century church has been largely incorporated into the present day structure. 

Mary’s parents were Ellen Cotter and Richard Harris. Ellen was born in Inchigeelagh about 1811, she was nine years younger than her husband Richard. They had been married on February 9th 1834 in Ellen’s local Catholic church, which was then located in the centre of the village to the rear of the present day Creedon’s Hotel.

Mary’s baptism sponsors were Ellen Leary and Richard Hennessy. Inchigeelagh is located in the barony of Uíbh Laoghaire….or land of the O’Leary’s in West Muskerry. Hennessy is also a common Cork family name.

The present day Catholic Church in Inchigeelagh dates from 1842 and there are many Cotter headstones in the nearby graveyard. Local historian Joe Creedon believes Ellen Cotter was born in the local townland of Carrignacurra, which is a hilly rural area comprising about 445 acres to the south of the village.

Little is known of Richard Harris, although the baptismal records at the North Chapel show that a Richard Harris was baptised there on September 7^th 1802 which corresponds to the 1861 Toronto Census where his age is given as 58.

As with the story of hundreds of thousands of the poor in Ireland at the time, very little is known about Mary’s life in Cork, in her autobiography she simply says “my people were poor”. There are few if any civil state records available from this period, few church records and given the upheaval and uprooting of families arising from the Famine period, it is unlikely that other records have survived. The poor leave few recorded traces of their lives…

According to the National Archives of Ireland website, the very first census of Ireland was taken in 1821. There were further censuses carried out at ten year intervals from 1831 through to 1911.  The censuses from 1851 to 1911 were taken under the supervision of the Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages. Unfortunately for historians, the original census returns for 1861 and 1871 were destroyed shortly after the censuses were taken. During the First World War, the censuses for 1881 and 1891 were pulped, probably because of the paper shortage.

The census returns for 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851 were, for the most part, destroyed in 1922 in the disastrous fire at the Public Record Office in the Four Courts in Dublin in the opening battle between the pro and anti treaty factions of the Irish Civil War. The census records for 1831, 1841 and 1851 would have been especially relevant for research into the early life of the Harris family.

Irish civil registration began in 1845 with the recording of all weddings (civil and religious), with the exception of those performed in Roman Catholic churches. Therefore the civil records exclude the Harris family.

From 1st January 1864, all births, marriages, and deaths (BMDs) had to be registered by the civil authorities. Records of BMDs of Catholics in Ireland prior to 1864 are based on registers/books maintained by the local Catholic clergy at the parish churches.

Attempting to link these basic Irish records to those of emigrants to other countries is largely a matter of getting the disparate segments of individuals lives to connect in both the country of birth and the country of destination. 

The third sentence of Mary’s autobiography mentions her ancestors and states

“For generations they had fought for Ireland’s freedom. Many of my folk have died in that struggle”.  

During the previous generation, Ireland had witnessed the rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798. This rebellion included some incidents in West Cork such as the Battle of the Big Cross near Shannonvale, close to Clonakilty in West Cork. The site of this battle is just 41 kilometres (25 miles) to the south-west of Inchigeelagh.

However, far more widespread in the early 1800s across rural parts of Munster, in the south west of Ireland, were the “agrarian outrages” against landlords by the Whiteboys and the Rockites, both secret organisations. Terror, shootings, burning of property and hangings were common as the planter and the dispossessed fought for supremacy. 

Diarmuid Ō Murchadha in an article on Uíbh Laoghaire in the Seventeen Century, contained in the publication of Cork, History & Society commented,

“It is hardly a coincidence that from this one remote upland parish emanated some of the most notable of what might be termed anti-establishment personages and events throughout succeeding generations, incidents which in Gaelic folk-memory have always had a symbolic impact far above and beyond their historical significance.”

Diarmuid Ō Murchadha

The death of local folk-hero, Art Ō Laoghaire in 1773 at the hands of English soldiers left the legacy of a poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire.

The Battle of Keimaneigh in Jan 1822 took place at a nearby pass between Whiteboys and the Yeomen. A plaque on the site lists the names of four Whiteboys and a Yeoman killed during and after this confrontation. Some reports say the legendary Whiteboy leader, Captain Rock was present. It is remembered today in a song the Battle of Keimaneigh, Cath Chēim An Fhia.

There is a further Inchigeelagh connection in relation to Irish nationalism. An tAthair Peadar Ō Laoghaire (1839-1920), who was one of the most prolific writers in the Irish language, a Land League activist and a noted Gaelic Nationalist scholar, claimed descent from the Ō Laoghaire’s of Carrignacurra Castle.

Cotter is an old Norse name. A famous Irish legal case involved a James Cotter of an Old Catholic Jacobite family of Anngrove who was hanged in Cork City following a conviction for rape back in 1720. This led to rioting on a national scale due to what many people considered to be discrimination against Catholics (Penal Laws). Many Cotters from East Cork moved west to the Inchigeelagh area. However a more likely Cotter connection may relate to blacksmith James Cotter, a Whiteboy from Brosna in Kerry who was hanged at Shinnagh Cross in 1822 for the murder of an English officer Brereton near Rathmore. This location is about 48 kilometres (30 miles) north of Inchigeelagh. Was Mary Harris’ mother, Ellen Cotter related to any of these?

Illiteracy and use of the Irish language were synonymous in the 1840s. In 1841, it is estimated that 52% of the Irish population could neither read nor write. Thousands of local ‘hedge schools’ run by teachers and men of wisdom and a growing number of private schools had originally operated all over Ireland, the Irish language was then used in many of these schools which were attended by upwards of 500,000 children.

However with the establishment of the State National School system in 1831, which used only the English language and did not teach Irish, ensured the language went into decline especially in urban areas, and with only emigration in prospect for many, knowing, speaking and writing in English became essential skills for survival in their new countries. The 1861 Toronto census, indicated that neither Richard Snr nor Ellen Harris, could read or write. On the other hand, Mary in Ireland and Canada and William in Canada and probably the other siblings received good schooling through Catholic Church run schools.

Harris on the other hand is probably of English origin. In the 1851-53 per Irish Ancestry there were 62 Harris families in Cork. St Anne’s Shandon had six families and interestingly there were two Harris families in Inchigeelagh. However. available records suggest that many Harris families in Co. Cork were reasonably prosperous Protestant families. Richard seems to have been a poor Catholic. There are no immediate records available of Harris patriots for the late 1700s, early 1800s.

Mary would have learned and spoken the Irish language (Gaelic) in everyday life as a young girl, certainly Ellen Cotter who came from the Gaelic speaking Inchigeelagh was a native speaker and the Irish language (caint na ndaoine) was known among many ordinary people in Cork at the time. Had the children visited relations in Inchigeelagh, Irish was then the everyday spoken language in the rural areas.

1.1 Early Life.   

Mary may have lived locally amidst the tenements in the narrow lanes which dotted the hills of the Shandon area. Most likely she spent time with her mother’s relations in rural Inchigeelagh. Her schooling in Cork City may have been in the local Presentation Sisters convent school. The school was founded by Nano Nagle, which dates back to 1813 and was located less than a hundred metres from the Cathedral. This school provided free education for those children living in the crowded streets and laneways nearby. Unfortunately no school records have been traced to date for that period.

The main butter road from Killarney, Co. Kerry, in the west along with a number of market roads, from Macroom in county Cork, ran eastwards towards Cork City. These roads were used by farmers to bring their agricultural produce and animals to the market epicentre at Shandon. The butter roads linked Inchigeelagh to Shandon just over 48 kilometres (30 miles) away while facilitating the connections between the then Cork based Harris family and their Inchigeelagh relations.

Cattle, sheep and pigs were sold at nearby fairs and markets, slaughtered locally at various shambles and exported through the nearby port of Cork. Local shops, pubs and stores benefitted from the general commerce and the trading. The nearby Shandon Street with its warren of smaller streets had almost twenty pubs, ten bakeries, many shops and provision stores, wool merchants and victuallers, while even today, local streets in the area such as Cattle Market Street, Cattle Market Square, Fair Hill and Fair Lane resonate of a major bygone agricultural market activity, it was a very busy place at this time!

1.2 The Great Famine 1845-1852.

The Act of Union 1801 had transferred all major political and economic decision making relating to Irish government affairs from Dublin to London. This resulted in the political, social, land and economic structures in Ireland becoming even more dysfunctional and remote from the people of Ireland.

The landlords, many of whom were descended from earlier planters in previous centuries had further consolidated their large holdings. The larger farmers in turn were extremely comfortable in their land holdings. Below them, small tenant farmers were struggling as their holdings of marginal land became smaller with every generation, being sub-divided within families (A legacy of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws). With the huge growth in population many thousands of cottiers and labourers were dependent on tiny holdings for food to exist. They were dependent on employment in the larger estates and farms to enable them to pay their rent to the landlords. The emigration to English speaking countries had already commenced.

In the urban areas, a prosperous Protestant gentry, military officers and a professional class ran the administrations. The growing middle classes and professions serviced the needs of the prosperous few, while the poor lived in various stages of survival and destitution.

This precarious economic structure and relationships depended on the potato to feed the struggling classes. The partial failure of the crop in 1845, triggered terror among the people, who were dependent on the potato for food. The ongoing potato blight in the autumn of 1846 and 1847 smashed all their fragile, unfair and unequal economic and social relationships.

In spite of some exceptions, many absentee landlords began evicting the starving tenants who could no longer pay rents. The poor and destitute either died of fever in their hovels and ditches or of starvation and those who could walk headed for the cities or emigration.

The political policy makers in London became the source of a massive governmental failure and inertia which insisted on the pre-eminence and maintenance of market forces over the needs of human beings. The “relief” consisted of soup kitchens, the provision of workhouses and paying pennies to starving men to construct high walls around landlords estates and employment on creating infrastructure, much of which was pointless.

Britain’s armed forces in Ireland were used to assist in the mass evictions by landlords and their agents or to control urban disorder by the starving people.  At some of the Irish ports, food products and cereals, produced in Ireland filled the export ships heading east to Britain at the same time as destitute families packed the coffin ships heading west to America. While aid did eventually arrive from Britain and elsewhere including America, it was often too little and too late for many of the famine victims.    

The Irish countryside grew silent, became deserted, whole families died or emigrated, people became land obsessive and emotionally stagnant. Many landlords prospered, some larger farmers consolidated their farms in the empty and largely abandoned countryside. The urban elites, with the exception of some brave doctors and nurses who helped the famine victims, remained largely indifferent to the suffering in the poorer city areas.

In the fallout from the famine, many labourers, small farmers and the cottiers disappeared from rural Ireland and in urban Ireland hundreds of thousands of poor working class people died or emigrated. In earlier Cromwellian times (1641 to 1653), during which almost forty percent of the Irish population had died in the wars and plantations, from starvation and from disease, it was either “to hell or to Connaught”.

Two hundred years later in the famine times the options for many were either “to the workhouse or the coffin ship”.

Daniel O’Connell, the Irish leader, known as the Liberator, after he had created a mass movement encouraged by the Catholic Church had achieved Catholic Emancipation by 1829, died in Rome in 1847. Emancipation ensured the formal end of the Penal Laws against Catholics. These laws had been enforced sporadically over the previous century and a half. In the political vacuum after the Famine, with a frightened traumatised people and a moribund state apparatus, the Roman Catholic Church seized its opportunity and at the Synod of Thurles in 1850, the newly appointed Archbishop Paul Cullen (later appointed Ireland’s first cardinal in 1866) began the formal restructuring of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

The new Church infrastructure, physical, organisational and hierarchical was obsessed with control of the laity, especially of women and with the elimination of dissent. The introduction of religious orders of brothers and sisters and the regular education of conservative clergy began to take shape. It assumed power over the people and proceeded to create an active, almost hybrid Roman/Irish culture which exerted total control over community, social, educational and religious provision within an increasingly oppressive political state.

This power structure lasted more than 150 years. Even after Irish Independence was achieved in 1922, most politicians continued to defer to the Church Hierarchy in social policy. From the late 1930s onwards, the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid practiced an effective veto over legislation for the next 30 years. Democratically elected governments in Ireland “consulted” in private with him before the legislation could progress. Socially liberal legislation, if it existed, rarely progressed beyond this church veto and there was no appeal against the decisions. This arrangement suited both the church and many conservative elements in the state structures.

The Famine changed Ireland forever. By 1891, four out of every ten people who had been born in Ireland had emigrated. Seventy percent of these had departed from Ireland to either America or Canada. Many emigrants carried a bitterness towards their British rulers. Later in America, many emigrants from Ireland also faced discrimination and exploitation, but they had survived to get there for a better life. For many of these immigrants and their families, their subsequent lives were to be spent working in the poor conditions of the mines, mills and railroads during the emerging American Industrial Revolution.      

1.3 The Great Famine: Impact on Cork.

By the winter of 1845, the ominous signs of the impending failures of the potato crop, on which many Irish people were dependent, resulted in an influx of starving country people to what were then the outskirts of Cork City. This led to major social problems within the city itself. By 1846, thousands of starving and fever infected country people, were roaming the local streets and the contagion spread all around the distressed city.

Richard Harris and his son had decided, like so many others to emigrate to Canada. They departed sometime in the late 1840s, probably 1847 leaving Ellen and the rest of the children to follow. Once they became established in their new country, they transferred remittances to Ellen to enable the entire family to cross the Atlantic to bring the complete Harris family back together again.

(Plaque at a site of famine plot at St. Joseph’s Cemetery, Cork City.)

During the Irish Famine, Cork experienced the death from hunger, disease, epidemics and illnesses of many thousands of its residents who passed away in the slums and tenements and bothāns of the city and county.

Many bodies were collected on the streets by the death carts or taken from the small rooms where they had died to be buried in mass graves in the city cemeteries such as St. Josephs in Ballyphehane on the south side and the newly opened Carr’s Hole, later Carr’s Hill (now renamed All Saint’s Famine Graveyard), located outside the city on the Carrigaline Road.

Thousands were buried in these mass graves, some ten thousand alone in St Joseph’s during the first nine months of ‘Black 47’. These famine mounds can be seen to this day. The newspaper accounts of the shocking state of the Carr’s Hill cemetery in 1847 tell of packs of wild dogs rooting up the remains of the deceased. Thousands of labourers and their families filled the infamous workhouses, known as death houses, Many died of infectious diseases, such as cholera, typhus and relapsing fever, as well as small pox and tuberculosis.

The countryside reeked of death and smelled of sulphuric acid from the rotting fields of potatoes. Whole families perished in freezing cabins across the countryside, their bodies loaded onto horse drawn carts for burial in communal graves late at night. Such was the fear and hopelessness, that many of those tiny cabins where families died, remained untouched as stark monuments and reminders of the tragedy for many decades, until they just collapsed and disappeared. No one would go near them for generations. Rotten potato drills and ridges remain in rural Ireland to this day on land abandoned over 180 years ago. The horror of the Famine remains ever present.  

Medical doctors such as Dr. Popham who operated from the North Infirmary in Shandon, ( the present day Maldron Hotel) did their best and published reports, detailing the extent of the problem. Medics clearly blamed the endemic poverty which caused hunger, deficient clothes and inadequate accommodation, for the spread of fever epidemics which were exacerbated by dysentery and cholera. The Poor Law Guardians, responsible for the workhouses were slow in challenging the bureaucratic ethos and culture of the Poor Relief Commissioners and law makers far removed from the people.   

  

Likewise a trip to the Heritage Centre in the Cork Harbour town of Cobh (originally Cove, later called Queenstown, and now Cobh) will show one, the conditions faced by emigrants on the coffin ships, during their journeys. This Centre lies close to the very embarkation jetties, from where almost three million Irish people emigrated in the 150 years after 1815.

The Famine forced hundreds of thousands to take to these coffin ships and travel to the cities of Britain and America. In turn, with their remittances, arriving back from those who had emigrated earlier, it led to a larger permanent and ongoing exodus of the Irish from their country for the next century and more. 

The most plausible estimate of the Irish Famine’s demographic toll between 1846 and 1852 is of over one million dead and over one and half million emigrants. Estimates put the population of the county of Cork at 854,000 in 1841, by 1851 it was back to around 650,000. The population of Cork City increased slightly to 85,000 as a result mainly of the huge influx from the rural areas.

The emigrants suffered appalling deprivations before, during and after their journeys. At least 20,000 people from Cork emigrated in 1847. Thousands also died of fever in cities such as Liverpool, London and Glasgow. Many went to Canada, especially in “Black 47” when some 80,000 Irish arrived in Quebec. It is estimated that as many as one in five emigrants died either at sea or in the fever sheds along the St. Lawrence River, especially at the quarantine station at Grosse Ile, where thousands died of typhus.

Typhus was also known as “ship fever”, it was also referred to as “gaol fever” and was thought originally to be caused by foul air (miasma). However, it was in fact spread by human body lice, which is the result of poor hygiene. The export of humans was entirely unregulated at the time and the hygiene conditions on board many of the vessels was not a priority for the owners. 

In just one corner of this small island at Grosse Ile, over 5,000 people are buried in mass graves testament to the absolute horror experienced by many poor Irish emigrants.

1.4 The Harris Family… the story of the Irish Diaspora.

It is likely that the Harris men, travelled about 1847, probably from Cove near the mouth of Cork Harbour on one of the 441 ships which departed from Ireland and overcrowded British cities, where many Irish had gathered as the initial step on their journey to enter Canada via the St Lawrence River. Cork and Limerick were the direct routes to Quebec, Canada and thirty three ships left Cork (Cove) during the sailing season of 1847.

Richard senior and junior can be found living and boarding with a local family in Burlington in Vermont in the US Census of 1850. Many Irish emigrants used entry to Canada as a backdoor to the USA and moved onward soon after they were cleared to proceed in Canada. The borders were relatively open. In her autobiography, Mary speaking of her father states that “as soon as he had become an American citizen he sent for his family”.

The Harris family were described as labourers, it appears they got contract work, building the railroads and later moved onto Toronto, then a town of about 20,000, most likely following the new railroad connections and finding a large Irish Catholic population already in place, decided to stay there probably to await the arrival of the remainder of their family, including Mary.

Ellen and the children then left Ireland around 1852 and eventually arrived in Toronto where they settled within the local Irish community. By the mid-1850s, they lived in a modest rented house and garden at 210 Bathurst Street of the growing city, part of the large working class Irish community.

In June 2007, the then President of Ireland, Mary McAleese opened Ireland Park on the shores of Lake Ontario at Eireann Quay. By coincidence this famine memorial made of blocks of Kilkenny limestone, is located at the foot of Bathurst Street and Rees’ Wharf, where thousands of Irish immigrants first landed. It features five live sized bronze statues of gaunt emaciated Irish figures known as the Arrival. The Departure monument on Dublin’s Custom House Quay is a companion sculpture.

Two Catholic religious orders, the Loreto nuns and the Christian Brothers had established schools in the City and the Harris family received a decent education along with other Irish Catholic children. Toronto was then a city riven with sectarian tension as the city had a large population of pre-famine Northern Irish Protestants who had emigrated from the 1790s onward and who controlled municipal civil affairs through the Orange Order by the mid-19^th Century.

The girls went to St Mary’s school, while Mary’s “baby brother” William was taught by the Brothers and continued to St. Michael’s Seminary, from where he was eventually ordained as a priest in 1870. He became Dean of St Catherine’s, travelled extensively and wrote many books about Catholicism over the next 40 years before passing away in 1923. Richard senior, after a life of work died in 1869, aged about 67. No record has to date been found of Ellen’s death.

1.5 Mary Harris in Canada and America. 

Mary had a regular family life in Toronto, and by the age of 20 had decided to become a teacher. Through her family’s Catholic Church connections, she qualified to attend Toronto Normal School for a while, before securing a teaching post in August 1859 at St Mary’s Convent School at Monroe in Michigan, near Lake Erie. By then, she had left her family home in Toronto, and there is no further record of her ever making contact again with her family. We may never know what the cause of this apparent family rupture was.

Mary did not like the school and she claimed to prefer “sowing to bossing little children”, so rather than going back to Toronto she soon departed Michigan and travelled to Chicago, where she worked briefly as a seamstress and then onwards to Memphis in Tennessee. She was listed as “absent” in the Canadian census for the Harris household in 1861.

Mary Harris had also learned the art of dress making and had become a very skilled and competent seamstress, an occupation that enabled her to retain her independence and survive economically wherever she travelled when times were tough.

She rarely mentions Cork again or indeed her life in Ireland. In fact Mary seems to have deliberately obscured her origins in Cork giving 1830 as the year of her birth, which lead to confusion for many decades as to her true age and her origins.

If she wished to forget and obliterate her Cork life, and later her Canadian life and later still her early American life, it is perfectly understandable as many emigrants did. It does seem as if she wanted to ignore almost completely her childhood as Mary Harris, her family and the tragedy of Mary Jones and its influence on her later life and work.  The Autobiography of Mother Jones would eventually be her story of her new persona.

• Chapter 1: Mary Harris
• Chapter 2: Mary Jones
• Chapter 3: Surviving and Becoming Mother Jones
• Chapter 4: The Arrival of Mother Jones
• Chapter 5: Mother Jones: the Declining Years
• Chapter 6: Mother Jones Remembered and Celebrated
• Chapter 7: Mother Jones Some Observations
• Chapter 8: About Mother Jones