One would scarcely expect to find an Irishman in the old Dutch
settlement of Beverwyck as early as 1645. Yet such is the case, for
"Jan Andriessen, de Iersman van Dublingh"--(John Anderson, the
Irishman from Dublin)--is mentioned as the owner of considerable
landed property in the neighborhood of Albany and Catskill, and in
every mention of this ancient pioneer he is referred to as "the
Irishman." At Albany, between 1666 and 1690, we find people named
Connell, Daly, Larkin, Shaw, Hogan, and Finn, all Irishmen, and in
Jonathan Pearson's "Genealogies of the First Settlers of the Ancient
County of Albany" and in his "Genealogies of the First Settlers of
the Patent and City of Schenectady", I find 135 distinctive Irish
names. These were mostly merchants, farmers, artisans, millers, and
backwoodsmen, the pioneers, who, with their Dutch neighbors, blazed
the trail of civilization through that section, rolled back the
savage redman, and marked along the banks of the Hudson and Mohawk
rivers the sites of future towns and cities. In the rate lists of
Long Island between 1638 and 1675, I find Kelly, Dalton, Whelan,
Condon, Barry, Powers, Quin, Kane, Sweeney, Murphy, Reilly, as well
as Norman-Irish and Anglo-Irish names that are common to Irish
nomenclature. Hugh O'Neale was a prominent resident of Newtown, L.I.,
in 1655. In a "Report to the Lord President," dated September 6,
1687, Governor Dongan recommended "that natives of Ireland be sent to
colonize here where they may live and be very happy." Numbers of them
evidently accepted the invitation, for many Irishmen are mentioned in
the public documents of the Province during the succeeding twenty
years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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