Series 12 - Michael O'Shaughnessy memoirs

295pp

The original memoir manuscripts are located in University of Galway Library Archives (P135/7/1).

The Michael O'Shaughnessy memoirs are a series of 3 memoirs written brtween 1894 and 1925 by Irish-American civil engineer Michael Maurice O'Shaugnessy (1864-1934). A native of Loughill, County Limerick, he briefly tried his hand at farming as a teenager before deciding to train as a civil engineer, attending Rockwell College, Queen's College, Cork, and Queen's College, Galway beginning in 1881, then graduated from the Royal University of Dublin in 1884. O'Shaughnessy pursued his career in California and ultimately became city engineer for the city of San Francisco during the early twentieth century, developing both the San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni) and the Hetch Hetchy water system.
Per Kerby A. Miller: 'O'Shaughnessy was not a typical or representative emigrant. He was university- educated, a highly skilled and successful engineer, and (despite a hint of temporary financial distress in the early 1880s) his Irish family was unusually affluent and well-educated-and surprisingly secular; unlike other memoirists, O'Shaughnessy's family and life stories are not framed by religious conventions.'
The series consists of: Kerby A. Miller's notes on Shaughnessy and his memoirs, Miller's transcript of the opening portion of O'Shaughnessy's first memoir, Engineering Experiences: From Honolulu to Hetch Hetchy (1894-ca. 1925), and photocopies of O'Shaughnessy's three memoirs photocopied from the original manuscripts (found at P135/7/1): Engineering Experiences, Memorandum on European Trip of M. M. O'Shaughnessy, City Engineer; San Francisco, 1925, and Reminiscences of Hawaii (February 1920).