Excerpts from the book,

The odyssey of Thomas Condon

By Robert D. Clark

Thomas Condon was born in County Cork, Ireland, on March 3, 1822, in the village of Ballynafauna, two miles west and south of a sizable town, Fermoy.  His father was John Condon, his mother, Mary Roche Condon.  Of Mary's immediate family we know nothing; of John's, only that his father, Michael, lived on a small fruit farm, and was known by the affectionate nickname "Bebe."…Bebe had his fruit farm but was, we must suppose, a tenant farmer who had managed to pay his rent and hold on to his two or three acres and a small cottage, but had not the land or the means to sublet and provide subsistence for all of his grown children.

John was born in 1792, the third son of his parents; Mary in 1800.  Thomas was their oldest son.  James was born in 1827, Edward Michael in 1829, both, like Thomas, in County Cork.  A sister, Mary, was born in New York, in 1836.

John Condon was a stonecutter.  He had taken slabs from the limestone quarry where he worked, built the walls of a little cottage for his family, and thatched it with straw.  More than likely it had only one room, with an earthen floor.  The windows, if any, were scarcely more than peepholes to be covered with a board at night or in times of storm; the furniture a hearth, a black kettle for boiling potatoes, a bed for which the light vegetation skimmed from the surface of a bog, "scragh," served as a mattress, a stool or two, and little else.  But beside the mud-stone cabins of the neighborhood and valley, it had, with its surface of limestone, a touch of elegance that became the name of Condon.  Thomas did not forget the limestone walls.  (pages 2-3).

According to one report, Mary Condon was a Catholic while John was not.  The Presbyterians, known as Dissenters, or Nonconformists, "called together" a congregation in Fermoy in 1818, and the Irish Evangelical Society in Dublin, organized to evangelize the south of Ireland, sent a Presbyterian missionary to Fermoy and other communities in 1826.  If John Condon was a convert to Presbyterianism, his place in a predominantly Catholic community may have been uncomfortable.  Certainly he suffered from, or his economic status was threatened by, the displacement of tenant farmers, the competition for jobs, the lowering of wages, and the disorders fostered by the secret societies.  By 1833 he and his family had decided to emigrate to the United States.

The cost of passage in steerage from Liverpool, the chief port of embarkation for Irish emigrants to Canada or the United States, was about three pounds, or fourteen dollars.  That was a considerable sum, equivalent to six months' wages.  But it was said, reliably, that a man could earn that much in New York in a month.  Emigration was worth the risk.  Once a man and his family had made up their minds to go, friends and relatives rallied to their support and contributed their pence to help pay their fare, gathered to bid them farewell, gave them hard-baked Irish cakes and perhaps a collection of potatoes for the voyage, and walked down the road with them to the traditional point of departure—a ford, a hill, or a crossroads.  Probably the Condons, like the men who spent their summers working in England, walked to Dublin, a hundred and forty miles, or a little more—ten days on foot—no great trial for a young man, but a considerable undertaking for a family.  They might have pulled a little cart carrying James and Edward Michael and their few belongings.  At Dublin they paid five shillings for each adult to cross to Liverpool to take the ship for America.

The family migrated to New York in 1833, when Tom was eleven years old.  The question of how and when immigrants arrived at New York City in those years is generally easy to determine.  The law required every captain to register his passengers by name and country of birth, and post bond to guarantee their ability to support themselves for two years.  But the record has nothing to say about John Condon and his wife and children.  Either it is lost, or the captain evaded the law.  The conditions under which the emigrants traveled, however, are well known.  Typical is the voyage of the ship Princess, which embarked at Liverpool in April, 1833, and landed in New York about three weeks later.  By strange coincidence, a Condon family was among the passengers, a mother, her daughter, and a son, Thomas, aged nine—not, however, John Condon's family.  The ship was about three weeks at sea.  The New York Evening Post reported one passenger first class, and 187 in steerage, but the captain listed 375 passengers, nearly two hundred of whom must have been crowded into the "orlop" deck, a hold below the steerage.  More than likely the quarters were only six feet high, with double tiers of beds.  The emigrants had to furnish and cook their own food, when they could get to the grate on the open deck, in pots they had brought with them.  Every morning the second or third mate required them to scrub the space about their berths, and every day when the deck was not awash, they were obliged to ventilate their bedding.  Typically, children ran about laughing, playing, balancing on rails, sliding down the hatchway, and likewise typically, some schoolmaster or schoolmistress aboard organized a school and drilled them in reading and writing and the geography of the new country.  Some among them may have dreaded the arrival in a strange land.  But many, and more than likely the Condons, had friends or relatives in America and could expect that some of their family or neighbors from County Cork would be eager to greet them.  (pages 6-8).