Two Brothers, One Vocation: The Lives of the Plunkett Priests

Two Brooklyn Priests and the Question the Records Can’t Answer

Most of the records genealogists rely on are institutional. They record what happened: a birth, a marriage, an ordination, a death. They do not record the conversation that preceded the decision, or the feeling that followed it. They give us the frame without the picture.

Week 19 of #52Ancestors asked us to sit with that. To name the question that the records raise but cannot answer.

This week, I am sitting with two of my great-granduncles: Reverend Bernard Plunkett (1851–1883) and Reverend Peter H. Plunkett (1856–1886), sons of my great-great-grandfather Peter Plunkett of Red Hook, Brooklyn. Both became priests. Both died young. The records give me ordination dates, death dates, and parish assignments. What they cannot give me is the why.

The Household They Came From

If you have been following this blog, you already know something about Peter Plunkett. I have written about his long journey from Irish immigrant to Brooklyn paper manufacturer, about the business he built on Van Brunt Street, and about the large family he and his first wife, Julia Smith, raised in the Red Hook waterfront neighborhood. (See “From Scraps to Success: Peter Plunkett’s Paper Business.“)

What I want to add here is texture. By the time Bernard and Peter H. were boys, their family had planted roots in one of the most densely Irish Catholic neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Red Hook was a place where the salt air off the harbor mixed with the sounds of dock work, where cobblestone streets rang with Irish accents, and where the parish church stood as central to daily life as anything else on the block.

The Church of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, founded in 1854 to serve Irish and German dock and factory workers just a few streets over, was almost certainly the family’s parish, given its short walking distance from Van Brunt Street. Bernard would later celebrate his first Mass there on Christmas morning 1877, with the church fully decorated and the pews crowded.

Peter and Julia raised a large Irish Catholic family in Red Hook: nine children before Julia’s death in 1875, including Bernard, Peter H., and my great-grandmother Mary. After Julia died, Peter remarried and had two more daughters. It was a crowded household rooted in parish life, immigrant ambition, and the rhythms of the Brooklyn waterfront.

Child	Birth Date	Death Date	Mother
Bernard Plunkett	10 Feb 1851	20 Nov 1883	Julia Smith
James Plunkett	10 Feb 1851	11 Jun 1915	Julia Smith
John W. Plunkett	10 Jun 1853	4 Mar 1933	Julia Smith
Peter H. Plunkett	4 May 1856	4 May 1886	Julia Smith
Bridget Plunkett	1858	3 Jul 1950	Julia Smith
Anne Plunkett	19 Aug 1860	9 Mar 1865	Julia Smith
Julia Plunkett	13 Dec 1868	4 Oct 1924	Julia Smith
Stephen G. Plunkett	26 Dec 1868	12 Apr 1927	Julia Smith
Mary A. Plunkett	19 Jun 1870	19 Mar 1945	Julia Smith
Margaret Plunkett	Nov 1881	—	Anna Smith
Letitia B. Plunkett	Oct 1884	30 Apr 1956	Anna Smith

That is the household. A father who worked his way up from junk dealer to paper manufacturer, a neighborhood saturated in Irish immigrant Catholic life, and a parish church close enough to walk to. Whatever drew two of those sons to the priesthood grew somewhere inside that world.

What the Records Show

The bare institutional facts are these.

Bernard Plunkett pursued an unusually intensive Catholic education. He began at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, then studied at St. Charles College in Ellicott City, Maryland, a minor seminary that drew students from across the U.S. and Canada, before continuing to Toronto and finally the Grand Seminary in Montreal. He received ordination there on 22 December 1877 for the Diocese of Brooklyn, one of forty-five new priests ordained that day at a ceremony of seventy-six candidates, and eight days later celebrated his first Mass at the Church of the Visitation on Christmas morning.

He served as assistant pastor at St. John’s Roman Catholic Church at Twenty-First Street and Fifth Avenue in South Brooklyn for roughly five years. He joined the Catholic Knights of America, won election as a delegate to the first State council, and served as State Director. He lectured at neighboring parishes, including St. Michael’s in South Brooklyn on St. Patrick’s Day 1882. Obituaries described him as respected not only by his parishioners but by non-Catholics who knew him personally.

He died on 20 November 1883, at his father’s home at 418 Van Brunt Street, of haematemesis and asthenia. He was thirty-two years old and was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery on 23 November 1883.

Unlike his brother Bernard, Peter H. appears to have taken a more local path into the priesthood. After attending Brooklyn public schools and entering the seminary, he was already studying the deaf-and-dumb alphabet by 1878 so Bishop John Loughlin could place him in ministry to deaf children.

The 1880 federal census places him at 122 North Paca Street in Baltimore, a neighborhood near St. Mary’s Seminary, as a twenty-four-year-old student, and the Memorial Volume of St. Mary’s Seminary centenary confirms his ordination in 1881.⁷ Archbishop James Gibbons ordained him on 11 June 1881 at the Baltimore cathedral, among a class that included “P.H. Plunkett, Brooklyn.”⁸

He took up the assistant pastorate at St. Paul’s Church on Court Street in Brooklyn and taught at a Roman Catholic school for deaf mutes. In March 1884, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported his appointment as pastor of the Church of Our Lady of Loretto in Hempstead, Long Island, a meaningful advancement.

It did not last.

By the mid-1880s his health had deteriorated from pulmonary trouble, and Bishop Loughlin transferred him to a mission outside the city hoping a change of air might help. It did not. He returned to his father’s home on Van Brunt Street and died there on 4 May 1886, his thirtieth birthday. He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery, the same cemetery where his brother Bernard had been laid three years before.

The funeral notice for Peter H. invited “the reverend clergy and his and the friends of his father” to attend the funeral. Bernard was already gone. Peter the father attended a second priestly son’s funeral.

The Question the Records Cannot Answer

What drew both of them to the priesthood?

I can offer context. What I cannot do is offer an answer.

What follows is not a claim about this particular family’s motives but an application of patterns historians of Irish-American Catholicism have documented in families like theirs.

After the Great Famine, Catholic practice in Ireland intensified dramatically, and that culture traveled with emigrants to communities across the English-speaking world. By the time Bernard and Peter H. were boys in Red Hook, the parish was not merely a place of worship. It was the center of social life, the location of the school, and the anchor of Irish identity in an adopted country.

The priest was one of the most educated and authoritative figures an Irish immigrant family personally knew. In a dockside Brooklyn neighborhood, the distance between the family home and the parish rectory was modest. Personal acquaintance with the local clergy was almost certain.

For a family like the Plunketts, the priesthood offered a working-class first-generation family one of the most reliable channels into the educated professional class. Seminary tuition was typically subsidized by the bishop in exchange for a service commitment, placing an advanced theological and classical education within reach of families who could not have afforded a comparable secular one. Sending two sons to the seminary was simultaneously a religious offering and a profoundly respectable form of upward mobility.

Historians of Irish-American family life have documented that mothers often organized and sustained a son’s discernment toward the priesthood, and that the cultivation of a priestly vocation expressed both the family’s piety and the mother’s moral leadership.

Julia Smith was the mother in this household. She died in May 1875, when Bernard was twenty-four and already well into his seminary formation, and when Peter H. was nineteen.

What she understood about her sons’ choices, what she hoped for, what she asked for, the records do not say.

None of this tells me what happened at the kitchen table on Van Brunt Street. Was it one brother’s example that moved the other? A particular priest’s influence at the Church of the Visitation? A mother’s quiet ambition, planted early? A conviction that grew quietly inside one young man, beyond anything the records could capture?

I do not know. The records cannot tell me. That is the nature of Week 19.

The Second Silence: Two Early Deaths in the Clergy

Both men died young. Bernard at thirty-two. Peter H. at thirty, on his birthday. Three years apart, both buried at Holy Cross Cemetery. Bernard’s death certificate records haematemesis – vomiting of blood, and asthenia, severe physical weakness. Peter H.’s obituaries describe pulmonary trouble. Whatever illness drove those symptoms, the certificates and obituaries do not say; however, several diseases, including tuberculosis, could cause these types of symptoms.

Peter Plunkett the father outlived both of them. He died in 1903 at his home on Van Brunt Street, still listed in the directories as a manufacturer. He had buried a daughter in childhood, Anne, who died in 1865, and then two ordained sons, three years apart, while he was in his sixties and seventies.

The records tell me when each of those deaths occurred. They do not tell me what they cost him, or how the household carried on after 1886 when the second son was gone.

The records are good at sequence. They are not good at weight.

The Takeaway

Genealogy can place a man in a seminary and a grave. It can document his ordination, his parish assignments, the fraternal orders he joined, and the first Mass he celebrated on Christmas morning in a crowded church. What it cannot do is enter the decision that put him there, or the conversation that preceded it, or the quiet ambition of a mother who died before her younger son was ordained. In my research notes, that gap lives as an open question at the end of a proof summary, not as an invented answer.

The question I would ask, if I could: What did it feel like to choose this, and who helped you see it as a choice that was yours to make?

---

Your Turn: Has your research ever revealed a pattern in your family, two siblings who made the same unexpected choice, or a path that more than one family member followed without any obvious explanation in the records? What question would you most want to ask that ancestor?

---

1. “About Brooklyn People,” item mentioning Bernard Plunkett, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York), 16 December 1877, p. 2, col. 5; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/image/50379855/?match=1&terms=Bernard%20Plunkett : accessed 18 May 2026). ↩︎
2. “At the Church of the Visitation,” item mentioning Rev. Bernard A. Plunkett, Brooklyn Eagle (Brooklyn, New York), 27 December 1877, p. 3, col. 1; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/image/50379955/ : accessed 18 May 2026). ↩︎
3. “Catholic Ordinations in Canada,” item mentioning Rev. Bernard A. Plunkett and Peter H. Plunkett, Brooklyn Eagle (Brooklyn, New York), 24 December 1877, p. 4, col. 8; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/image/50379940 : accessed 18 May 2026). ↩︎
4. “Obituary” death notice of Rev. Bernard A. Plunkett, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York), 21 November 1883, p. 2, col. 5; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/image/50399772/ : accessed 18 May 2026). ↩︎
5. Department of Health of the City of Brooklyn, Certificate of Death no. 12447 (1883), Rev. Bernard A. Plunkett, died 20 November 1883, 418 Van Brunt St., Brooklyn, Kings County, New York; Holy Cross Cemetery burial 23 November 1883; digital image, “Plunkett, Bernard A.,” certificate 12447, The New York City Municipal Archives, Historical Vital Records (https://a860-historicalvitalrecords.nyc.gov/view/3195219 : accessed 18 May 2026). ↩︎
6. “Necrological,” death notice, American Register (Paris, France), 22 May 1886, page 7, column 5, imaged, Findmypast (https://www.findmypast.com/image-viewer?issue=BL%2F0003338%2F18860522&page=7&article=101&stringtohighlight=peter+h.+plunkett+brooklyn : accessed 24 May 2026). ↩︎
7. 1880 U.S. census, Baltimore (Independent City), Maryland, population schedule, Baltimore, Enumeration District 206, p. 28 (penned), dwelling 204, family number if shown on the image, 122 North Paca Street, Peter Plunkett, white, single, age 24, student, b. New York, parents b. Ireland; digital image, Ancestry, “1880 United States Federal Census” (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/6742/records/27346714 : accessed 23 May 2026). ↩︎
8. Memorial Volume of the Centenary of St. Mary’s Seminary of St. Sulpice, Baltimore, Md.: 1791–1891 (Baltimore: John Murphy & Co., 1891), 65, entry for P. H. Plunkett indicating ordination in 1881; digital images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2207/records/1369044 : accessed 23 May 2026). ↩︎
9. “Death notice of Peter H. Plunkett,” New York Times (New York, New York), 5 May 1886, p. 5, col. 3; digital image, OldNews (https://www.oldnews.com/en/record?lang=en&record_id=record-11024-198057333&page_id=5 : accessed 23 May 2026). ↩︎
10. “Personals,” item mentioning Peter H. Plunkett, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York), 16 March 1884, p. 2, col. 6; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/article/brooklyn-eagle/12135598/ : accessed 23 May 2026). ↩︎
11. “Died,” item for Peter Plunkett, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York), 6 May 1886, p. 3, col. 1; digital clipping, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/article/brooklyn-eagle/12135167/ : accessed 23 May 2026). ↩︎