The New York Irish History Roundtable will host a lecture by scholar, musician and master teacher Brendan Dolan about the Catkills Mountains.
But the venue itself, Our Lady of the Rosary Church, will also be up for discussion. The location at the southerly tip of Manhattan is well known to pilgrims as the one-time home of Mother Seton, the first native-born U.S. citizen to be canonized. Less famous is its later use as an immigrant center and settlement house for thousands of Irish women during the Ellis Island period.
The parish has registers of names of the new arrivals who received assistance in one way or another.
Once the Irish did settle, they quickly made the Catskills their summer refuge, but particularly in and around the towns of Leeds, South Cairo and East Durham. Dolan illustrated lecture will feature samples of Irish music heard in the region.
“We have about 400 members and are a totally volunteer organization,” said the Roundtable’s Jim Garrity. The typical member tends to be American-born, often with deep, sometimes multigenerational roots in the city. Some of Garrity’s own Irish family lived in the Greenpoint and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn. His Italian forbears, who were more recent newcomers, lived in Long Island City in Queens. “The Irish ex-pats keep their culture,” he said. “But the younger Irish Americans don’t seem to be as into their identity anymore.”
Apart from scholarship on the subject of the New York Irish, Garrity said the organization has a particular interest in genealogy and family history.
The symposium, which is free, will start at 7-8 State St. (between Whitehall and Pearl Streets) at 10 a.m. and finish at 4 p.m. Dolan’s talk will at 12:30. For more information about the event or the Roundtable itself, email Garrity at jimgarrity@gmail.com or roundtable@irishnyhistory.org or visit http://irishnyhistory.org.