We tend to picture immigration as a single crossing: the ship, the harbor, the first American address. Then the family simply is here. But the real story of my Plunketts and Dowlings happened after they landed. It unfolded block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, within a single borough. Trace it on a map, and you get a story told through Brooklyn neighborhoods, with no ocean crossing in it at all.
Week 35 of #52Ancestors asks for “a spot on the map.” I could not settle on one. My Irish ancestors gave me four.
Vinegar Hill, the first foothold
The Plunketts appear in Vinegar Hill by 1850. It made sense for them to begin there. The streets below the Navy Yard were packed with Irish Catholic families, close to the docks and the work, and close to others like themselves. A newly arrived family did not so much choose a neighborhood as fall into one that already spoke their language. Their parish was St. James, and I wrote about how I pinned down that connection in Week 33 post. See: “Brooklyn Parish Records and the Promise of a Breakthrough“
Red Hook, where they put down roots
By the late 1850s, the Plunketts had moved south to Red Hook. They remained there for the better part of half a century, at least through 1903, when Peter Plunkett died.
This is the neighborhood I know best because Peter built a life there that I can actually document. He ran a paper business on Van Brunt Street and raised a large family just a few streets from the water. I traced that story in “From Scraps to Success: Peter Plunkett’s Paper Business.”
Red Hook was salt air, dock work, and cobblestone. The Church of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, founded in 1854 for the Irish and German families who worked the piers, stood at the center of daily life.2 Two of Peter’s sons became priests, and Bernard celebrated his first Mass at Visitation on Christmas morning in 1877. I told that story in “Two Brothers, One Vocation: The Lives of the Plunkett Priests.”
Prospect Heights, the climb
The Dowlings tell a different neighborhood story. From the 1860s through the 1890s, they lived up on the hill in Prospect Heights. William Dowling was part of the emigration from Listowel and worked his way up through the dry-goods trade, from peddler on Grand Avenue to proprietor of his own store at 295 to 297 Grand Avenue. I followed that journey in “Hidden in Plain Sight: The City Directory Advantage.”
Prospect Heights represented a step up from the crowded waterfront neighborhoods, and the family’s parish there was the Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph.
Kensington, and the house that held
Then, in 1905, the two families became one, and so did their place on the map. Thomas Dowling married Mary Plunkett, and they settled in Kensington, in a duplex that would shelter the family for generations.3
I have written often about that house because it is where the migration finally stops. Eight census records spanning forty-five years show the same address holding aunts, in-laws, tenants, and grandchildren, absorbing every crisis the twentieth century threw at it. I laid out the full story in “One Address, Eight Census Records, 45 Years of Family Survival.” Their parish was Immaculate Heart of Mary. The house is still in the family today.
Four neighborhoods, one family, and a great deal of moving that never involved a ship. They landed in Vinegar Hill, spent their longest stretch in Red Hook, climbed to Prospect Heights, and finally settled in Kensington. Line those places up on a map, and you can see almost the entire family story in the space between them. That is what four Brooklyn neighborhoods can show you when you follow a single family across one borough.
That is why I keep looking at the map.
For me, these Brooklyn neighborhoods have lived mostly on paper. On September 8, I fly to Brooklyn for ten days, and I plan to stand in each of these places myself. I have read the census pages and followed their addresses across the map. What I have not yet felt is what it is like to walk from the waterfront up to the hill, or to knock on the door of a house my family has held for more than a century.
Reading a map is not the same as standing on the corner. I will let you know what the corners have to say.
YOUR TURN!
Have your people stayed put in one neighborhood, or did they move across a city the way mine did? Tell me in the comments, and follow along for what I find on the trip.
- 1850 U.S. census, Kings County, New York, population schedule, Brooklyn Ward 5, page 21 (penned), dwelling 474, family 1017, Peter Plunket; imaged in “1850 United States Federal Census,” Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/8054: accessed 6 September 2026). ↩︎
- “Red Hook’s Visitation Church: 165 Years of Neighborhood Service,” Brownstoner (https://www.brownstoner.com/ : accessed 12 January 2026). ↩︎
- The specific street and house number are omitted to protect family still living there. ↩︎
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