Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all! I thought it would be appropriate to make the 1000th photo a tribute to our Irish Heritage.
This is T’s great-great-grandmother and grandfather, Mary Donoghue Carr and James Riley Carr. Mary was born in Ireland in 1839 and emigrated on a “sailboat” [sic] in 1845. The family came to Wisconsin where the men worked in the mines. Mary and James were married c. 1861 and ultimately homesteaded in Fertile, Iowa.
I also have Irish emigrants on my father’s side, Welsh on my mother’s side. Unfortunately the records of their arrival in the US begin in 1870 and are lost to any times before that.
What an amazing and hard life these people had! Yet by all accounts, they were cheerful, hard-working and successful.
A tip o’ the hat for the Irish today. And if you’re not Irish, well…you are today. 
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