In this post: Discover how two teenagers from Listowel, County Kerry transformed themselves from steerage passengers to middle-class Brooklyn residents through literacy and determination.
@Genealogy Matters Storyteller Tuesday Challenge
This post is the fifth for Robin Stewart’s Genealogy Matters Your Sixteens – Storyteller Tuesday Challenge.
What They Carried: William Dowling and Ellen McAuliffe
My Father’s Mother’s Father’s Father and Mother
When fifteen-year-old Ellen McAuliffe stepped aboard a ship for America in August 1857, she joined thousands of Irish immigrants carrying hope across the Atlantic. She carried little in her hands but everything in her heart. Memories of Listowel in County Kerry, and hope for something better than post-Famine Ireland could offer.
She traveled lower deck, in steerage. But Ellen carried something that set her apart: she could read and write. By mid-century, Irish literacy rates had climbed to seventy-five percent, thanks to Ireland’s hedge schools and National Schools.1 This was the education Ellen clearly carried with her across the Atlantic.
Two months earlier, William Dowling, nineteen, had stepped off the sailing ship Emerald Isle at New York harbor. He carried the same hometown memories, the same determination, the same literacy that would help him rise from peddler to merchant. (See: “William Dowling: A Young Listowel Lad in New York“).
What neither of these Irish immigrants could have known as they faced their separate Atlantic crossings was that they would find each other again in New York. By 1864, they had married in Manhattan, carrying their shared Kerry roots into an American future.
Together, they built a life in Brooklyn that bore the weight of both ambition and domesticity. William carried the burden of upward mobility. He rose from peddler to clerk to business owner, establishing himself at 295-297 Grand Avenue in dry goods. Ellen carried seven children: John, William, Florence, Mary, Ellen, Thomas and Timothy. She kept house at 598 Vanderbilt Avenue, where remarkably, a copy of Shakespeare sat on the bureau (See: “When Shakespeare Couldn’t Save My Family’s Money“). Not an easy read, but evidence of how far these Listowel emigrants had carried their learning. Just steps from their Vanderbilt Avenue home stood St. Joseph’s Church on Pacific Street, founded in 1853 to serve Irish immigrant families like theirs, where they likely gathered with fellow Kerry emigrants for Mass.
But by summer 1875, Ellen carried something far heavier. For six months, she had been carrying tuberculosis in her lungs. The cough that wouldn’t stop, the weight falling away, the exhaustion that made even small household tasks monumental. She carried this knowledge through her final summer, through ordinary moments of motherhood, until September 21, 1875, when at just thirty-three years old, she could carry no more.
William was left to carry everything else. Grief. Six young children. The responsibility of both mother and father. Their Catholic faith anchored him through these years, carrying him forward even when the weight seemed unbearable. He carried these burdens for eighteen more years, until tuberculosis, that same thief that had taken Ellen, claimed him too on January 25, 1893.
They laid Ellen to rest at Holy Cross Cemetery in Flatbush in 1875. Eighteen years later, William joined her there. Six of their seven children would eventually be buried in that same consecrated ground, along with at least two grandchildren. Faith bound them together in death as it had in life.
What did William and Ellen Dowling carry? They carried the courage to cross an ocean as teenagers. They carried literacy when many of their fellow Irish immigrants had none. They carried faith and ambition and the determination to build something in a new land. Ellen carried life itself, seven children, until her body could bear no more. William carried on through eighteen years of widowhood when everything must have felt unbearably heavy.
And now, more than a century later, their descendants carry their legacy forward. Proof that what they carried across that ocean, through those difficult years, was worth the weight they bore.
YOUR TURN!
What burdens did your immigrant ancestors carry? Share your family’s story in the comments.
- “The Irish Girl and the American Letter: Irish immigrants in 19th Century America,” The Irish Story, November 17, 2018, accessed February 1, 2026, https://www.theirishstory.com/2018/11/17/the-irish-girl-and-the-american-letter-irish-immigrants-in-19th-century-america/. ↩︎
- “Map—Co-Cathedral Parking and Public Transportation,” digital image, Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph–St. Teresa of Avila (https://brooklyncocathedral.org/map-co-cathedral-parking-and-public-transportation : accessed 3 February 2026). ↩︎
- Brooklyn, New York “New York, New York City Deaths, 1866-1948,” database with images, MyHeritage (https://www.myheritage.com/research/record-20808-874314/ellen-dowling-in-new-york-city-deaths : accessed 6 Nov 2024), downloaded image, death certificate no. 9222, “Ellen Dowling,” 21 Sep 1875. ↩︎
- Jim Henderson, “File:Holy Cross Cemetery gate jeh.jpg,” digital image, created 6 February 2011, Creative Commons license, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Cross_Cemetery,_Brooklyn : accessed 3 February 2026). ↩︎
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