Ireland XO
Back to Message Board

Broderick (or Broder) - from Youghal to Pittsburgh by way of Wales

CorkYoughal (Cork)

I've just joined this parish group from Pittsburgh in the U.S., after reading a very nice article about IrelandXO in the Irish Times.

My greatgrandfather was John Broderick, born in Abergavenny, Wales, in 1842. According to his baptism record, and those of his siblings, the parents are John Broderick and Ellen Geary of Youghal. As a young adult, he emigrated from Wales, where he worked in the iron industry, to Pittsburgh, where he again worked in the iron industry. (John Sr. seems to have been and to have remained a farmer.)

In the NLI Catholic records for Youghal, I can find an 1834 marriage of John Broder and Ellen Geary, and 1835 and 1836 baptisms for their children Mary and Thomas. The next child Ann was born in Wales in 1839, and then John in 1842. The Wales censuses support this family configuration in1841, 1851 and 1861. The surname seems to be consistently Broder in Youghal and Broderick in Wales. Ellen's surname is recorded everywhere as Geary.

Besides the usual hopes of finding direct family lineage in the Youghal area, I'm also interested in what might have caused migration to Wales in the 1830s, and whether the apparent evolution of the surname makes sense in the context of the times.

Thanks for all insights and suggestions.

Jay Shock

Jay Shock

2 replies

Jay,

You ask why your ancestors might have left Ireland for Wales. I am sure they left Ireland for the same reasons that 2 million others did. To find work. Ireland has very few natural resources (no oil, coal, iron ore etc) and so did not benefit from the industrial revolution in the 1800s, the way Scotland, England, Wales the US, Canada & Australia did, which created hundreds of thousands of comparatively well-paid new jobs in new industries (coal mining, steel making, railways, ship building etc). So that was a big pull factor. There had also been a huge population explosion in Ireland going up from about 3 million people in 1750 to 8 million in 1830. There simply weren’t jobs for all those people. In much of Ireland the only employment was subsistence farming and labouring. Uncertain and not very well paid.

Wales was easy to get to from Cork and tens of thousands of Irish people moved there in the 1800s. Many stayed permanently, and some migrated again. (The term for it is stepped migration).

Can’t really help with the surname change but you do often find such changes when people move. Possibly Broderick was easier to understand in Wales than Broder, and the family just went along with that.

Elwyn, IrelandXO Volunteer ☘IrelandXO Volunteer

Thanks, Elwyn, for responding.  I was thinking in terms of an "event" such as an epidemic or some local economic event, but I had somehow been unaware of the explosive growth from 3 to 8 million.  Jay

Jay Shock

Reply

Reply
One image file up to 2 MB.