Series 2 - Margaret McGuinness Elliott memoir/Connolly letters/Alice McGuinness memoir

2 sub-series

Permission to publish supplied by the private donor. Private information about the donor and family has been redacted for rights or privacy protection.

This series contains the Margaret McGuinness Elliott memoir, the Alice McGuinness memoir, the Connolly letters, and related materials. Margaret McGuinness Elliott was born in 1887 in Ballymote, County Sligo and emigrated to New York in 1904. She wrote her memoir My Life - An Adventure between 1972 and 1974. Per Kerby A. Miller: 'Margaret's memoir provides very little information about her and her family's Irish background. Margaret's Catholicism, gender, and age at emigration were quite representative in 1904, although her New York City brother's former occupation as schoolteacher clearly suggests that her family enjoyed a higher-than-average socioeconomic status (perhaps strong farmer or shopkeeping) than average. No mention of the Irish language. Margaret's chain migration (her brother sent her the passage money or ticket) was highly representative. The accounts of her departure from home and of the voyage are good. However, Margaret's memoir provides no information as to her reasons for emigration or how her emigration reflected (positively or negatively) the dynamics of her family's economic circumstances or personal relationships. Alice's memoir hints at far more complications and turmoil. Margaret's account of meeting her brother at Ellis Island, and of going to live with his family in Upper Manhattan is very good. His brother seems to have a good job and his family seems to enjoy a comfortable petty bourgeois lifestyle-but that status was always precarious in early 20thC America.'
Alice McGuinness was the niece of Margaret McGuinness Elliott and wrote her own memoir around 1990. Alice was born in August 1905 in New York City to parents, Michael Martin McGuinness and Alice Connolly McGuinness, who emigrated separately from Ireland in 1893 and married in New York City, where they met, in 1902. Alice's childhood and early life in New York constitutes a large focus of her memoir. The last two pages appended to Alice's memoir were written by her sister Dorothy A. McGuinness, who showed an interest in writing more, but did not manage to do so. Also included are the Connolly letters, which Kerby A. Miller transcribes and inventories, stating that they supplement the Margaret McGuinness memoir. Per Miller: 'Most of the letters which are copied in full were written by [Alice McGuinness's] mother, Alice Martin Connolly. She was born about 1835 in Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan. Her father, Thomas Martin, was the landscape gardener at the Lough Fea estate of Lord Shirley (descended from the Earl of Essex), near Carrickmacross.'