Rituals of Migration: Italians and Irish on the Move, edited by Kevin Kenny & Maddalena Marinari (New York University Press, 2025)
An excerpt from Chapter One
Leaving for America: Rituals of Packing and Departure, by Bernadette Whelan
From the 1850s onward, the American letter was the main source of knowledge for most intending emigrants. Receiving, opening, and reading the letter was heavily ritualized in some places and almost ceremonial in nature. Family, friends, and neighbors would gather in the recipient’s home to attend the reading.
Letters exaggerated successes in America, concealed undoubted failures, and manipulated readers to leave or stay. Writing on January 20, 1859, from New York City, Mary Brown told her friend in County Wexford that “you will have to come to the country where there’s love and liberty.” Twenty year later, Denis Sullivan in St. Louis, Missouri, wrote that he would “cut my head off before I encourage a man to come to this country.”
Letters also detailed what to pack, wear, and carry; described conditions on board ship; and identified an address in America. Intending emigrants looked to them for advice and guidance on the journey.
Letters exaggerated successes in America, concealed undoubted failures, and manipulated readers to leave or stay
Possessions packed had practical purposes, but they also held a variety of emotional attachments. Kate Moran, who emigrated to the United States during the 1880s from Waterville, County Kerry, packed the first book that she learned to read at primary school and planned to use it to help her write letters home. Emigrants from County Donegal, among others, were known to pack musical instruments. Those who could afford luxuries brought a hairbrush, soap, ointment pot, and mirror. Clay pipes and marbles were packed to reduce boredom while on board, and perhaps a spinning top, rag doll, or homemade broom-handle doll for children to play with.
Oil on canvas.
National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin, Ireland
Packing rituals were always influenced by the culture of the sending-out society. Prayer books, penal crosses, prayer cards, religious pictures, rosary beads, or a St. Brigid’s cross, sometimes given to them by the local Roman Catholic parish priest, reminded migrants of their faith and gave them a sense of attachment to home and a feeling of safety during the journey and in America. These religious items represented the increasing prevalence of Roman Catholicism as a belief system and institution and its growing presence in people’s lives.
Yet parallel to organized religion within rural Ireland was a strong tradition of superstition and belief in otherworld powers. In the mainly rural sending-out counties, for example, “frog bread” was packed as a charm. Prepared by a neighbor or the family of the emigrant, it was made by killing, roasting, and crushing a frog and then mixing the powder with oaten meal to prepare the bread, which it was believed kept the emigrant immune from fever.
Yet parallel to organized religion within rural Ireland was a strong tradition of superstition and belief in otherworld powers
Another talisman carried was part of the caul, an inner membrane covering the fetus prior to birth, often borrowed from a neighbor. Believed to keep the wearer traveling by sea safe from drowning, it was posted back to the owners after safe arrival in the United States for use by the next emigrants.
Packing love charms was also popular. For example, pubic hair from a special girl or boy or siblings left behind might be secretly sewn into clothing. A small drop of menstrual fluid might be soaked into a piece of linen and then stitched into a male emigrant’s clothes. It was believed that his love would subsequently remain constant.
In every period, even the poorest emigrants carried some kind of luggage from the home country. Integral to the packing ritual was that each possession held a personal meaning, whether practical or spiritual or comfort-giving, and each was a reminder of home. The item was value-laden, symbolizing attachment to family and place but also personal agency, control, hope, and expectation of a better life abroad.
Depending on where one was leaving, the “American wake,” “live wake,” “suipéar” (supper), “spree,” “parting spree,” “old farewell supper,” “American bottle night,” “the bottle thing,” or “the bottle drink” became a ritual for the departee, whether male or female, and where the wake was used to describe the departure was a further example of respect for otherworld spirits.
Oil on canvas. Presented by the artist to the Crawford Art Gallery.
Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland.
In the week before leaving, the emigrant would call on friends and neighbors to say goodbye and invite them to his or her home for the wake. Preparing the house for the visitors was another ritual, usually performed by women who cleaned, baked cakes and biscuits, and cooked meats. If, as one source noted, there was “no food, no dance, no refreshments,” women would bring fresh eggs or butter, jam, tea, and bread, while men brought porter, stout, and poitín (distilled beverage). A collection of money might also be taken for a poor family to pay for the food and drink. As commerce expanded during the nineteenth century, hosts provided minerals (nonalcoholic drinks) for young people, bought at a shop on credit until money from America paid for it later. Money for the wake could also be included in the letter from America.
In the week before leaving, the emigrant would call on friends and neighbors to say goodbye and invite them to his or her home for the wake
The event usually started on the evening before departure and continued through the night until the physical departure of the emigrant. Young and old arrived at the house, gathering in the kitchen, which was cleared of furniture for dancing. Twice or three times women served food and drink, while the father conducted the ceremonies.
Stories handed down from generation to generation were told, embellished with accounts of previous emigrants and how America was the land of plenty. Singing and dancing, polka sets, jigs, reels, and music played on fiddles and melodeons added to the façade of merriment. Even though Catholic authorities frowned on drinking alcohol at wakes, liquor flowed, intensifying emotions. Usually, an older woman noted for her talents would start keening, delivering a long, mournful tribute in a shrill, high-pitched voice resembling a continuous cry, and eventually others joined in.
As the time for departure arrived, the exhausted emigrant embraced grieving parents, kissed their mother, and promised to write and send back money. Knowing they would not see aged parents and neighbors again was heart-ending. Sarah Doherty from Malin in north Donegal recalled from her own “bottle night” that “it was as if you were going out to be buried.” Harriet Martineau’s description of a wake in 1852 near Castlebar, County Mayo, resonated with her:
The last embraces were terrible to see; but worse were the kissings and the claspings of the hands during the long minutes that remained. When we saw the wringing of hands and heard the wailings, we became aware, for the first time perhaps, of the full dignity of that civilization which induces control over the expression of emotions … the pain and the passion: and the shrill united cry when the car moved on rings in our ears and long will ring when we hear of emigration.
Prior to leaving, the emigrant might perform another ritual by taking a shovel out to some secluded spot on the land and mounting it in the ground, putting a stick standing beside it and a small heap of stones. Later, when the emigrant had left, the missing spade was found with “God be with the days! Mary or Tom” scribbled on it, bringing them to the mind of the finder. The words “Done by Mary” might be written on a piece of paper and put into the neck of the bottle with the end protruding and then concealed in rafters to be found afterward. Elsewhere, names were written on a stone followed by “iad uilig imight go Meirceá” (all have gone to America). Prior to leaving home in Scartaglen, County Kerry, to join their children in America, Tom Kerin and Nell Cournane left the door of their cottage wide open. Others brought fire embers to neighbors to keep alight for their return.
Contemporary image.
With kind permission of EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Ireland
The final stage in the American wake ritual was known as the “convoy” or the “American funeral.” Remoteness and poverty might mean the emigrant left home on foot, on a cart drawn by a horse or mule, or in a sidecar. Neighbors, friends, and family set off on foot or in other carts after the leaver—a custom so associated with America in west Kerry that it was known as “convoying the Yankee.”
After arriving at the edge of the home place— perhaps the “Rock of the Weeping Tears” in west Clare, the “Bridge of Tears” in north Donegal, “Golden’s Height” in west Kerry, the “ford (later bridge) at Muing na Bó” (the swamp of the cow) river in northwest Mayo, or a crossroads— older members of the procession said their last goodbye. They gave full vent to their sorrow in a loud and prolonged keen and stood on the road until a bend hid the emigrant.
The purpose of the convoy was to ensure that the emigrant’s final hours at home were as cheerful as possible and would bring luck to the departee
Younger members of the convoy continued to the nearest town, where dancing, singing, smoking, and drinking resumed until the arrival of the mail cart, sailing vessel, or the train that most could afford by the 1880s. At Patrickswell railway station in County Limerick, the station master called out “change here for America,” again setting off “sorrowful partings and the bitter crying and leave-takings.”
The purpose of the convoy was to ensure that the emigrant’s final hours at home were as cheerful as possible and would bring luck to the departee. Biddy Argue left her “spree” in Bailieboro, County Cavan, before the final departure and never saw her mother again. Others “stole away” to avoid the wake and convoy ordeals, and some admitted that they would not have attended if they had known it was going to be “so hard to go.” Sarah Doherty recalled the singing going down to Moville port in Donegal, but when she got on the ship the crying started.
The arrival of the era of air travel did not end the American wake. From 1945 onward, Shannon Airport, a transatlantic hub in Ireland, became the site of many such scenes. Emigrants on board ships often took their “last look back”— amharc déanach, as it was known in the Blasket Islands, or “last view” elsewhere— between County Donegal and Tory Island off the northern coast; or at Fastnet Rock, “the teardrop of Ireland,” off the southern coast; or in the later period at the departure gate at the airport.
This is an excerpt from Rituals of Migration: Italians and Irish on the Move, edited by Kevin Kenny and Maddalena Marinari (New York University Press, 2025). A full bibliography for this chapter is included in the book.
Bernadette Whelan is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of numerous books on Irish-US relations including, most recently, De Valera and Roosevelt: Irish and American Diplomacy in Times of Crisis, 1932–1939 (2021), which was awarded the American Conference of Irish Studies Lawrence J. McCaffrey Prize for Books on Irish America, and, with Mary O’Dowd and Gerardine Meaney, Reading the Irish Woman: Studies in Cultural Encounters and Exchange, 1714–1960 (2013). Her latest book, Irish First Ladies and First Gentlemen, 1919– 2011, was published in 2024. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and co-editor of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, published biannually by the Royal Irish Academy, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, and the National Archives of Ireland.
