Series 33 - McCleer & Birney family letters

11pp

Three copies of Kerby A. Miller's notes on the McCleer and Birney families, subjects of Robert Edward Stack's 1972 Saint Louis University doctoral dissertation 'The McCleers and the Birneys - Irish Immigrant Families Into Michigan and the California Gold Fields, 1820-1893.'
Per Miller: ‘Both the McCleers and the Birneys were Ulster Catholic families. James McCleer and his family lived in Cookstown, County Tyrone; McCleer had been born in 1791, and had been a farmer and part-time weaver. The immediate reason for his emigration seems to have been his legal difficulties stemming from his practice of illicit distillation of whiskey to supplement his income, declining with the vicissitudes of the linen industry… … In any case, James McCleer fled Ireland without his family in 1828, aboard a timber ship bound for Canada. He walked down the coast of New Brunswick into Maine. Through connections with a close friend, James Kelly, McCleer obtained work as a weaver in a carpet mill in Tariffville, Connecticut, 10 miles north of Hartford. Not until 1832 did McCleer scrape together enough money to bring his wife and six children to America; part of the money was borrowed from Kelly, betrothed to his eldest daughter. All family members old enough worked thenceforth in the carpet mill.
The background of the Birney family is less clear. Timothy Birney and his wife, Jane Carroll, both evidently from Ulster, were married in Albany in 1820. Timothy may have been a weaver in Bennington, Vermont. In 1833-4, the Birney family moved north into Upper Canada, but by 1835-36, the family moved along the chain of Great Lakes into Ohio, and reached Michigan and settled in Unadilla Township near the McCleers in 1839-40.’