I remember my paternal grandmother's, Bridget (Meade) Quealy, Irish accent and Irish expressions and stories of Ireland and I came to learn later about the difficulties and hardships confronting my grandmother and her Meade family in Ireland at a time when Britain still ruled that country very harshly. I wanted, for many years, to discover all that I could about why she left a beloved homeland, along with so many others, and about the struggles of the family she left behind. I set out to find that story and it is written here:
Peter Meade leased a small ten-acre farm in Miltown Malbay, County Clare, Ireland as a tenant farmer beginning in 1885. Peter and Ellen (Murtagh) Meade raised a large family of fourteen children, including my grandmother, on that farm during a turbulent, violent and difficult time in Ireland.
Many millions of Irish had, sadly, found it necessary to leave their homes and their homeland as oppression, penal laws, famine, rack-rents, anti-Catholicism and more beset them for centuries. Bridget found herself now numbered among them by 1909, departing her home, her family, her native land and sailing on the SS Saxonia from Queenstown, Ireland, in that sorrowful year. The big ship left its' berth on June 2, steering a true and steady course for America, but for many aboard-for Bridget Meade-steering, as well, toward an unclear and an uncertain future. Bridget Meade is listed on the passenger manifest of the SS Saxonia as having departed from Queenstown, though it is sure that she departed from the "Harbor of Tears."
A young Bridget Meade arrived-alone-in Boston on June 10, 1909, no doubt anxious and unsure about what awaited her in this distant and unfamiliar land. She was far from all that she had known, far from all that she had cherished and still quite unwelcome in this new place which had very little regard for poor and Catholic Irish immigrants. "The worst misfortune which ever happened to the United States" said Mr. Arthur Crew Inman of Boston's old Brahmin society "...is the Irish". Her life had changed utterly. She was then twenty years old.
Bridget's family remained in Miltown Malbay and, realizing his life-long aspiration, Bridget's father, Peter Meade, purchased the small farm in Miltown Malbay in 1916 with a loan from The National Bank, "...just as the Trouble was coming" Ellen Meade wrote some years later. Trouble, indeed.
The Irish War of Independence came harshly to Miltown Malbay. Though Bridget Meade was now far and safely removed from its' dangers, residents of the small town in the West of Clare where she had lived until only a few years prior would soon suffer its' scourge. Bridget's family-the Meade family- would come to know particular hardship and sorrow.