There are moments when you’re doing archival research when all of a sudden the pages in your hands come to life and it feels like you are reaching out and grasping the past from oblivion. By writing down the names of people long dead you are bringing them back to life.
Over the Summer I spent a week in the archives of Trinity College Dublin reading the letters of Jacob Harvey. Harvey was an Irish-born New York businessman who emigrated from Limerick when he was nineteen.
Trinity College has a collection of the letters sent to him from family and friends in Ireland, dating from 1816 to when Jacob moved to New York, to his death in 1848. The letters contain information about transatlantic business and charity and discussions of politics and commerce. However, they also contain personal vignettes that range from entertaining to tragic.
An early letter sent to Jacob from his brother Joseph two months after he emigrated contains big-brotherly advice and well wishes, and also an entertaining story about a ventriloquist and a woman selling fish. The ventriloquist ‘enquired if [a salmon the woman was selling was] fresh, to which she answered in the affirmation, saying that it was ‘caught the same morning’ she had scarcely said so, when to her indescribable surprise and distress a voice was heard distinctly as if proceeding from the fish ‘you lie, for I was killed yesterday’ - the poor terrified woman immediately threw down her load, cutting the salmon’s head off lest it should tell any more universal truths’.
Joseph was Jacob’s most frequent correspondent. I was saddened to read his last ever letter, in which he wrote that he was recovering from an illness. In fact this illness was to be his last, and his last letter is followed by a letter from Jacob’s other brother, William, describing with sorrow the death of their brother.
William was only five when Jacob left, and his early letters, written in a neat, childish hand, describe day trips, his school work and descriptions of local events. I watched William grow up through these letters. As a child he expresses his love of nature and interest in botany, sending Jacob samples of seaweed from the Irish coast and asking him to send samples from New York. He writes of his disinterest in becoming a lawyer, which is what his parents would like him to do. Indeed, in other letters older relatives express anxiety at William’s devotion to botany and nature and his lack of interest in all else.
They need not have worried as William grew up to become the Professor of Botany at the Royal Dublin Society in 1848 and an author of multiple books. His letters are peppered with delicate drawings of unusual plants. They also reveal a gentle, sensitive person with a fascination for the world around him, who I find hard to reconcile with the staid portraits of William we are left with.
The letters are also peppered with scandalous local gossip that again reminds you of the humanity of the letter-writers and the wider community in which they existed. For example, Jacob’s cousin Thomas Harvey Todhunter wrote to Jacob in May 1829 discussing the recent presidential election in the US and the passing of Catholic emancipation in Westminster. However, he also fills Jacob in on the local news, describing how one of their friends’ fathers embarrassed himself by marrying ‘a spruce young woman’ who transpired to have a husband still living. The bride was acquitted of bigamy arguing that she did not know her first husband was alive.
These stories and gossip, enmeshed within talk of politics and commerce turn these old
pieces of paper into people with rich lives full of loves, laughs and loss. All this proof of these richly lived lives would not have existed had not one member of the community decided to move across the ocean. But whilst Jacob Harvey was no longer physically living in Limerick, it was clear that he remained a member of that community for his entire life.