Page 36 - The Westerner Magazine Halloween 2018
P. 36
Whatever you call the supernatural but the fact they were murdered and
experience that I had, people believe then the incident was covered up is
they were calling to me from beyond the what makes me want to advocate for
grave for validation. Whatever Tom them. They had no one to save them at
Connor and I saw, and the file my the time, but now their story can be told.
brother had in his possession, tells me Verified. It’s been a battle every step of
this was meant to be. Those people the way.
never had an advocate—it needs to be
There’s similar stories from New York
us. Who else will it be?
to the canal in New Orleans – where
We’ve applied for state grants, but to there are 8,000 Irishmen buried. About
date have only received one. And that 20,000 estimated Irishmen died building
was with the help of a state senator who canals and railroads in the 1820s and
was instrumental in getting us the 1830s. Mostly all of them are
marker. We needed four thousand anonymous. It’s virtually impossible to
signatures to procure that marker. recover their names.
That’s what makes our project so
significant. We’ve got the ship’s list with
47 names and who they were, how old,
their hometown, so their story is going
to be told. My dream is that Ancestry
will create a family group for these
people. Then others from all over the
world can link up with them once again
and make the valid claim, “We are their
descendants!”
Getting the story out there is important
to me. In 2014, I was thrilled when the BB: What was the name of that ship
state added it to the existing history again?
curriculum. I can’t tell you how many
WW: The John Stamp. It left in April
people were against us. They said things
and arrived on June 23. Everyone
like, “Didn’t they deserve it?”
disembarked, down in Tinicum, and all
There is no reason those people should were in good health at the time. The
have been killed. Times were violent, problem was that cholera was already
