Series 1 - Murphy brothers letters

2 sub-series

Kerby A. Miller created his transcripts of the Murphy brothers' letters from copies of the original letters held in PRONI [reference number D3558/1].

Materials pertaining to 19 letters written by emigrant brothers Robert and William Murphy, mainly to their family in County Antrim, between 1865 and 1901. William Murphy, a native of County Antrim, served with the Union Army during the American Civil War; both he and Robert later returned to Ireland.
Per Kerby A. Miller:
‘The letters of some mid-nineteenth century emigrants suggest that the effects of the Great Famine scarred them psychologically and adversely affected their adjustment to American life. Such may have been the case of William Murphy, a skilled or semiskilled construction worker who never settled physically or psychologically in the United States. Often home-sick, burdened by guilt, and frequently depressed, Murphy was unable to form close attachments to persons or places to replace the relationships which had been tragically sundered in his formative years. Many Famine emigrants may have shared similar problems, but Murphy was unusual in his ability to articulate a sense of anomie or spiritual exile which others felt but could not express so eloquently. Murphy was the son of a shoemaker, Alexander Murphy (born 1806), and his wife, Anne (born 1807). Married in 1832, by 1851 the Murphys had at least eight children, three older and four younger than William, who was born in 1841. In his childhood Murphy and his family lived in the townland of Rory's Glen, in Kilwaughter Parish, County Antrim, near the seaport and manufacturing town of Larne, just north of Belfast. Nearly three-quarters of the parish's inhabitants were Presbyterians, as were the Murphys, and most of the remainder were Catholics. Prior to the mid-1820s Kilwaughter, like Larne itself, was a center of cotton manufacturing, but the industrial depression of that decade bankrupted the local mills, and by 1841 a majority of the parish's families were engaged exclusively in agriculture… … the slim documentary evidence and hints in his own letters suggest that the security of William Murphy's childhood crumbled dramatically during and shortly after the Great Famine.
Murphy himself emigrated ca. 1862-63, in his early twenties, apparently alone and probably in a manner which justified some of his American relations in accusing him of deserting his orphaned and only surviving sister -- to whom he wrote his later letters, often in an exculpatory vein. We do not know Murphy's motives for emigrating, but it may be credible to speculate that his traumatic early experiences, the losses of community (twice) and family, and perhaps a drinking problem drove him to leave Ireland in search of a security and identity lost forever in Ireland. Sadly, however, his letters suggest that those same traumas made it impossible for him to form close or permanent associations in America -- or even to identify with anyplace or anyone except the scenes and the few relatives he had left behind. Indeed, the fragmentation and fatalism of his personality, the latter perhaps conditioned by his church's predestinarian outlook, may have been exacerbated by his participation in the carnage of the American Civil War, which he describes in his first surviving letter, written from one of Pittsburgh's industrial suburbs.’
In addition to transcripts and some reproductions of the Murphy brothers letters, the series includes extensive information on the Murphy and Ritchie families in Ulster, New York, Ontario, and Pennsylvania compiled by Kerby A. Miller, Laney Weston, Norma Grainger, and Bruce D. Boling, and Miller and Boling's article on William Murphy entitled ‘The Famine's Scars: William Murphy's Ulster and American Odyssey’.