As I mentioned in my last blog post (see “Brooklyn Parish Records and the Promise of a Breakthrough“) I fly to Brooklyn on September 8. I have a research plan, a list of repositories, and my paternal ancestors’ graves to visit. But if I am honest, none of that is the real reason I keep going back.
The real reason is harder to put on an itinerary. It is a long-lasting pull, five generations deep. It is the pull of family and connection.
My paternal Irish families arrived in Brooklyn in the 1850s. Their descendants are still here. My great-great-grandfather Peter Plunkett came over from Ireland and built his life in Red Hook, close to the harbor, the docks, and a vibrant Irish community. The Dowlings put down roots too, first near Prospect Heights and then in Kensington by about 1905, in the house where members of the family still live today.
The borough was the constant
Brooklyn held us. Not one parish or one street, but the borough itself. My people moved around inside it, from Red Hook to Kensington and from one neighborhood to the next, but the family stayed in Brooklyn for a century and a half.
For generations, their lives were here: the parish, the corner shops, and the familiar blocks where everyone knew each other. I am part of that. I was born in Brooklyn, and I was baptized there with my aunt standing as my godmother. All these years later, she is still in the neighborhood, and I am still coming back to it.
The same few streets, the same stories
Brooklyn is big. My family’s Brooklyn is small.
It is a handful of neighborhoods, really: Red Hook, Prospect Heights, and Kensington. The same addresses appear from one census to the next. The same streets turn up in family stories and in the records I search when I visit.
When I go home to Brooklyn, I can stand on a corner my great-great-grandparents knew and feel as though I am arriving late to a conversation that started long before I did.
The people change. Many of the addresses do not.
What I am going back to do
The churches I wrote about in my last post are only part of my family’s long-lasting relationship with Brooklyn.
I am staying in my aunt’s house for the entire trip, September 8 through 17, and in between visits to the repositories, I will be going through its contents with her. It is the closest thing my family has to an archive. There are albums, papers, and objects that have survived more than a hundred years of family life under one roof. What I find there is for another post, but that is where a good deal of my trip will be centered.
There is a morning at Holy Cross Cemetery in East Flatbush, where generations of my Plunketts and Dowlings have been buried since the 1850s, and a Sunday drive out to Long Island to stand at my grandparents’ graves.
And there is one full day I have been looking forward to: the old deed books in Jamaica, Queens. I am after three separate records: the deeds for the Van Brunt Street parcels Peter Plunkett bought in the 1850s and 1860s, the deed that sold those parcels off, and the deed for the Kensington house the family bought in 1905. Finding the deeds to the Kensington house will be especially exciting, since I believe it will show that the women in my family held the property, not the men. I have always believed that I come from very strong female lines, and this will be one more example of that. Most people find deed books dry. I find a family putting down roots, written into a ledger.
Why I go back
That is why I go back. Not for one house, one record, or one grave, but for the long-lasting connection among all of them. The ticket is booked. My aunt is expecting me. Brooklyn is waiting for me!
Your Turn!
How far back does your family stay in one place? I would love to hear where your roots run deepest.
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