Series 1 - Tom Brick memoir

3 sub-series

A typed and spiral-bound edition of the manuscript was sent to Professor Kerby Miller by a private Brick family donor in 2008.

Materials pertaining to the memoir Memoirs of an Irish Immigrant to USA, Spring, 1902, by Thomas W. Brick (1881-1979). Tom Brick, also Ó Bric, was born near Ballyferriter, County Kerry in 1881 into an Irish-speaking family, and emigrated in 1902 to an Irish-speaking farm colony in the prairie of the American Midwest. Brick initially moved to Iowa and lived with his sister, and then to South Dakota to the Garryowen settlement area, where he also had aunts and uncles and other relatives. He would go on to live in other locations in the American Midwest, working various jobs until purchasing a confectionary in Vermillion, South Dakota and settling there. Per Kerby A. Miller: 'Coverage excellent, highly interesting, and quite representative in Brick's socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic characteristics. Very interesting that Brick devoted so much space to his accounts of the local evictions, the Land League agitation, and the four shipwrecks.' Brick died in 1979.