The Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary for the Protection of Irish Immigrant Girls

Maureen Murphy writes about the Mission girls.

At the time of the Mission’s Silver Jubilee in 1908, the Mission’s third director, Father Michael J. Henry, reported that they had seen nearly one third of the 307,823 Irish girls who passed through the Port of New York between 1883 and 1908. They found employment for 12,000. The photograph of the Irish immigrant girls in front of the Mission represents some of those 100,000 who passed through the Mission.

They are the faces of our mothers and grandmothers. The Mission’s ledger books hold the records of 60,000 arrivals; it is a priceless and unique archive of the immigration experience of Irish women. Some entries include comments. The most frequent is “seen to her,” and “seen to her” they did.

The data from 1,736 arrivals who went through the Mission between August 24, 1897 and August  31, 1898 provides a profile of the Irish immigrant girl who passed through the Mission during that year. She arrived in the spring aboard a White Star liner that she had boarded in Queenstown. The average age of arriving girls that year was nineteen and  a half. She certainly came from rural Ireland. Mayo, Galway, Cork, Kerry and Roscommon accounted for nearly half of the arrivals for whom we have a county of origin. Nearly ten percent traveled with a sister. Twenty-six percent of the girls were met by a female with the same surname; forty-two percent listed sponsors with the same surname. It was an immigration of siblings, of family reunification in Irish America.

The Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary never closed; it has continued as the Parish of Our Lady of the Rosary. Today it shares its site with the St. Elizabeth Seton Shrine at 8 State Street. Under the leadership of Father Peter Meehan, pastor of the parish, the current Watson House Preservation initiative seeks to provide funding for the completion of the building restoration project. There is a further effort to conserve and digitalize the Mission records. The final phase will be a museum and reading room for visitors and for those who wish to use the Mission archive for genealogical research, and who, like Irish-American historian John Ridge, might open a ledger and discover the names of their mothers or grandmothers among the girls assisted by the Mission. “With the archives I found and a few hours of leisure time I discovered sources of an unassuming story containing inspiration of love and service here on State Street,” says Meehan. “The genealogical, cultural, educational and spiritual potential of the
project is real.”
 

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