A Mayo father’s plea for passage to America for his daughters—MISRYOUM
A letter from Andrew Staunton in 1922 asked a Boston cousin to send money so two daughters could emigrate—followed by promises, a voyage, and decades of aftermath.
A discovery of two long-kept letters from 1922 has brought one family’s emigration story back into focus, and it reads like a mix of urgency and hope.
The letters, penned by Andrew Staunton in Co.. Mayo and answered by his cousin Michael Ruane in Boston, show what emigration meant for many families in Ireland when economic life was grinding down households.. For readers today, the story lands with special force because it captures the raw decision a father faced: keep children at home in a small, struggling cottage, or try to get them to America where work might exist.. In Andrew’s case, the focus was on Sara and Mary—two of his daughters—because he believed sending one would allow others to follow..
Misryoum has the full account of how Andrew wrote on January 25, 1922, during a turbulent moment in Irish history, when the aftermath of the Irish War of Independence was still shaping daily life.. In his letter, he described a family stretched thin: he was a subsistence farmer, father of 14, with children aged from 4 to 26 living in a two-bedroom home in Feenone, near Louisburgh.. What weighed on him wasn’t distant politics—it was the immediate pressure of feeding a large family.. He turned to Michael Ruane, a cousin born in Mayo who had risen to become a lawyer in Boston, and asked for passage money for the girls.
Andrew’s request was blunt in its practicality.. He hoped his cousin would send a passage for “one or two of the girls,” explaining that he couldn’t keep them all at home.. The eldest, Sara, was described as the most anxious to go.. Mary was named as well.. He added a sense of urgency to the correspondence, warning that if no help came, he would have to look for other ways to arrange the journey.. The letter also carried tenderness—he enquired after other family members and asked after personal matters—before returning to the core plea.
Ruane’s replies, dated February 18 and May 3, 1922, shifted from emotional reassurance to the mechanics of travel.. He told Andrew that Sara’s passage would be forthcoming, but he cautioned against everyone leaving sooner than June, pointing to unsettled economic conditions in America at the time.. When the second letter arrived, it included details about the steamship contract ticket—leaving from Queenstown on June 15 and tied to the Cunard line—along with careful instructions for what Sara should bring and how her brother should help her get to the departure point.
Misryoum’s account also follows what happened next, and it underlines how emigration wasn’t a single moment but a chain of steps.. Sara traveled to Queenstown (then Cobh), with her brother Patrick accompanying her.. The journey involved moving by pony and trap to Westport, then taking connecting trains.. Three years later, Mary followed, beginning the broader Staunton migration that would extend for decades.
To understand why these letters mattered, it helps to remember what “passage money” represented in 1922.. It wasn’t just a ticket.. It was the ability to cross an ocean in an era when news traveled slowly, journeys were risky, and families couldn’t easily recover if something went wrong.. For Andrew, a father who could count children rather than savings, the idea of sending one daughter first was also a survival strategy—get one person across, then use family ties to make the next crossings possible.. The documents preserve that logic in plain language, without pretending the choice was easy.
The long aftermath shows both reward and devastation.. By 1932, the Stauntons had grown in the Greater Boston area, with Sara, Mary, and others joined by brothers and sisters over the years.. Several brothers sailed after Sara, including Anthony and Thomas, and more sisters followed too.. But the family’s early years in America were marked by grief as much as rebuilding.. Death reached into the household quickly: Catherine Charlotte died in 1932 while giving birth to twins, and her twin sister did not survive.. Annie later died from tuberculosis at age 26.. Tragedy was not confined to one side of the Atlantic.
On the Mayo side, Andrew and Alice endured their own losses while Ireland slid toward a new kind of turmoil.. The account describes how some of their children became involved in the Irish struggle—training volunteers, serving as couriers, and taking an active role—while the family continued to navigate the presence of the Black and Tans and the RIC.. Andrew’s later years in Thallabawn were tied to the shifting landscape of land and power, including the return of land previously held by British landlords and the wider debate around partition and the Irish Free State.
In later years, even when hardship continued, the family’s story also bends toward endurance.. Misryoum’s account describes a growing lineage and annual summers in Thallabawn, where cousins gathered as a large group of children—laughing, running, carefree—an echo of what Andrew and Alice once hoped their descendants could find.. The same narrative arc includes later losses too, including the death of a child many decades afterwards, when sepsis went unrecognized and untreated.
What these letters ultimately leave behind is a portrait of how family bonds can stretch across distance, and how one father’s decision reached far beyond 1922.. Andrew’s plea for passage money set motion in place: correspondence, arrangements, a steamer departure in June, and the eventual arrival of daughters in East Boston.. A century later, that chain can still be read as both heartbreak and a reminder—quiet but unmistakable—that people kept choosing to reach outward when staying put offered too little.