To see how far Ireland has come in less than 100 years, you just have to look at the Irish pictures featured in a 1927 edition of the National Geographic – one of which tells a very interesting, yet sad, story about a Galway family.
Ninety years ago, photographer Clifton R. Adams, captured three generations of one family, at their farm in Lettergesh, Connemara.
The series of pictures were of a Free State Ireland, emerging from the horrors of the War of Independence and Civil War. While of immense historical value, they were printed in the magazine without names, and it seemed that the identity of these women was lost forever.
But, when the Irish Central website reproduced the photos last year, an interesting story emerged.
One of their readers, Tom Farrell, got in touch to say that his mother, Bridget Kane, was the 16 years old girl in the centre of the picture, along with his grandmother, Annie Mulkerns Kane, and great-grandmother, Bridget Coyne Kane.
Sadly, within a year, his mother had followed two sisters and an uncle to Boston, never to see her parents again.
He said that his mother, who assumed the name Betty – so that her Irish name would not work against her in the US – rarely spoke of the photo. And, it was after her death in 1975 that the original magazine was rediscovered at the bottom of a drawer.
One of seven children, Bridget was born in December 1910; all, but two sons, emigrated.
“She had just turned 16 a couple months before that [the picture] and the next year she left Ireland and she never saw her parents again. She did go back in 1972, but my grandparents had passed away. I think she missed my grandmother by a few years,” her son, Tom Farrell told Irish Central.
“It was 44 years. I look at this and I find it mind-boggling because I have a grandson. He just turned 16 and I’m a basket case that he’s going to be driving now. [At the same age] she crossed the ocean by herself. She didn’t have anybody else with her.”
For the full story, see this week’s Connacht Tribune.
