THE GRIBBINS OF NEW YORK

As I pointed out in my blog on the American Gribbins, they are strongly represented on the East Coast, particularly in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. This is very likely because most of them have ancestors who arrived in New York from Ireland or Britain during the nineteenth century. However, for those interested in getting some sense of who their ancestors were, it’s often frustrating to find nothing in the records but a name, a date and an address. The good news is that documents are coming to light all the time which put some flesh on the bones of this bare skeleton. One of these is the records of the New York Emigrant Savings Bank.

This was a bank set up in 1850 by the Irish Emigrant Society. It was supported by the powerful Archbishop John Hughes, a native of County Tyrone, and its specific purpose was to serve the needs of the Irish community in New York (although it also had many non-Irish clients). The records of the bank were donated to the New York Public Library and are a valuable genealogical resource because of the notes taken each time an account was opened. The clerks included details about when the prospective client had arrived in New York (even giving the name of the ship), where he or she was from, what their occupation was, and even about other family members. This, then, can prove vital for distinguishing between two potential ancestors with the same name. It also adds a real richness to the picture we have of our ancestors.

It would appear that nine Gribbins opened accounts with the bank during the 1850s. The first is Patrick Gribbin, a sash and blind maker from County Down. This is unsurprising, since the vast majority of Gribbins in the nineteenth century were to be found in the counties of Antrim, Down, Armagh or Derry. There were a number of sash and blind factories in New York at this time and they specialized in building window frames, but often diversified into doors and other timber fixtures. Did Patrick learn his trade in Ireland or in New York? Some of the writing in the register is illegible and I see no date for his arrival in New York. It is clear that he opened the account in 1851 and continued depositing until at least 1853. At a certain point the account is taken over by a Margaret or Maria Brady. Was this perhaps a sister? In any case, he opened a separate account in 1852 and by 1853 he had saved $152.90, the equivalent of between $3,500 and $6,000 today. Patrick lived at 83 Avenue B in the East Village, a very desirable location now, but in Patrick’s time many of the emigrants would have been living in tenements.

Robert Gribbin was a tailor from Belfast, County Antrim and he was living on Cherry Street, which is lower down on the East Side from Patrick, very close to the water and near where the Brooklyn Bridge was built in the 1860s. The notes for Robert are more legible and give us more of a sense of who he was. He arrived in New York in 1852 on a ship called the Guy Mannering, a ship which made many trips across the Atlantic filled with Irish emigrants. He was married to Sarah McVey, who was from Moyallen, a townland about thirty miles from Belfast. The register also records the names of his parents (John and Mary), the fact that he has a brother, John, in New York, and two sisters in Ireland. At one point the ledger seems to state that Robert and his wife both had access to the account. They saved throughout 1852 and 1853, but seem to have opened a new account in 1853 and their balance in 1854 was $60.42. As a tailor, it’s possible that Robert found employment with Brooks Brothers gents clothing store on Cherry Street, now famous as the oldest clothing company in the US.

This description of 1850’s East Side New York is taken from Valentine’s Manual of 1921 – but it does not tell the whole story. In his book, How The Other Half Lives (1890), Jacob Riis recounts how the immigrants were herded into shoddy tenements:

Riis reported that the properties “fell into the hands of real estate agents and boarding house keepers… and in the old garden where the stolid Dutch burgher grew his tulips or early cabbages, a rear house was built, generally of wood, two stories high at first. Presently it was carried up another story, and another. Where two families had lived ten moved in.”

James Gribbon opened an account with the bank in 1856. He was a native of Portadown in County Armagh, not too far from where Sarah McVey was born. As was true of most emigrant communities, the Irish often lived in the same part of town and socialised among themselves. Apart from anything else, there was safety in numbers at a time when anti-Irish feeling in New York was rife; Protestant American “Nativist” discrimination against Irish Catholics reached a peak in the mid-1850s when the “Know-Nothing” movement tried to oust Catholics from public office.

James lived first in the Bowery and then in Henry Street, only a couple of blocks from Robert and Sarah, so it’s easy to imagine that Robert, Sarah and James knew each other and, if they did, probably reminisced about the old country; Sarah and James would surely have shared memories of the countryside they both knew, since Portadown was only four miles from Moyallan. Another thing which would have made them compatible is the fact that Robert and James were not labourers, like the vast majority of the men who arrived on the emigrant ships.

James arrived in New York in 1848, four years earlier than Robert. Ironically, it was often the more able Irish who left Ireland, those who had more determination and drive, and also those who had a small bit of money, for many of the Irish poor simply could never have afforded a ticket to America. James names his father as Francis Gribbon, and it’s possible that this Portadown Francis is the same one who appears in a list of Armagh Freeholders in 1832. If they are the same person, then it’s likely that James’s father was able to gift him the cost of the fare, since freeholders were farmers whose property was more substantial than average.

We’re not finished with James, however, for he seems to have opened another account with the bank at a later date, as did Mary Gribben, who seems to be his wife, as they both live at 136 Henry Street. The records for these two accounts tell us nothing about how much they saved, but the notes give us some additional information. Mary was born in County Meath in the year 1836 and her maiden name was Muldoon. She arrived in New York in 1854, so James most likely met her after her arrival. We also learn that James was born in 1834, which means that he was only fourteen when he arrived from Ireland, which begs the question, did he arrive with the rest of his family – did Francis, his father, manage to raise the money to take them all to the US?

(Note also that the spelling of their name changes from Gribbon to Gribben).

Another James Gribbon appears in the ledgers, but this man is different in that he was born in Bristol, England. Like his namesake, he is a clerk, but he lives in Brooklyn, not the Lower East Side like the others. It’s almost certain that this James Gribbon had Ulster ancestors, but if he grew up in England he may well not have felt at home among the Irish emigrant community. He was married to May Catterick and they had two children.

Other Gribbins appear on the records, but only in the index, so they are nothing but a name. There is a Rose Gribben and a Charlotte Gribbin, a Sarah Gribbon and a Mary Gribbon, but these last two may be the Sarah and Mary we’ve already met. One other Patrick Gribbin appears, but my feeling is that this is a mistake; the online records include him among the Gribbins, but I suspect he is in fact a Griffin. A close look at the name as written on the actual ledger seems to confirm this: the first “f” looks like a “b” because it’s above the line, but the second is more clearly an “f”. In addition, he is not an Ulsterman, but is from Cork, and in all my research into the Gribbins I have never found one with any connection to County Cork.

Perhaps the above information will be of use to a Gribbin family somewhere in making valuable connections to their forebears, adding another piece to the jigsaw. But that aside, these records do vouchsafe us a glimpse into a world that has disappeared now. Cormac Ó Gráda, the Irish economic historian, gave a fascinating talk about all this in April 2023 (Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society) and showed how the records point up interesting patterns. For example, they debunk the myth that the Irish were  shiftless wanderers or pathetic victims. On the contrary, most of them settled in the New York area and stayed there. Oscar Handlin’s picture of immigrant families as exploited, downtrodden and broken is contradicted by the evidence of the ESB’s records; it looks very much as if the Irish in New York stayed together and led relatively stable, secure lives. Also interesting, is the links the records establish between specific Irish counties and occupations. A remarkable number of the Irish tinkers in New York were from Killybegs, for example. And all the charcoal carriers were from County Tyrone!

A new book (to be published in March 2024), Plentiful Country: the Great Famine and the Making of Irish New York, by Tyler Anbinder makes use of the ESB records to bring all this to life.