Page 13 - Always Virginia

Always Virginia 1

DAY FAMILY ORIGIN STORY
1819-2019

by John Joseph (Jack) Fritscher, PhD.,
a Seanachie of Clan Ó Deághaidh,
at the 1920s desk of his grandfather
Bartholomew Day, III (1887-1954)
who gave it in 1948 to his mother
Virginia Day Fritscher (1919-2004)
who gave it to him in 2001

Farmers, Judges, Teachers, Wives,
Authors, Priests, Veterans, and Postmasters
The past is prologue and context is everything.

John Tyrrell Day, son of Bartholomew Day (aka Dey aka O’Dea
aka Ó’Deághaidh) and Margaret Tyrrell (aka Terrell), was born near
the town of Fethard in Tipperary in 1819 exactly one hundred years
before the birth of his grandniece, Virginia Claire Day Fritscher, in
Kampsville in 1919. He left the hard times of the Potato Famine
in Ireland in 1849 to join the California Gold Rush announced
in January 1848. He bought a ticket to sail across the Atlantic on
one of the coffin ships, on which by average one in five passengers
died, taking three weeks to reach New Orleans where many Irish
entered America. Before heading west, he traveled by steamboat
from New Orleans to St. Louis, paying five dollars for the six-day
trip up the Mississippi following Irish immigration patterns to
look for business opportunities. After wintering in St. Louis and
Hamburg, Illinois, where parcels of land were for sale, he joined a
wagon train that took nearly six months to make the 3000-mile trek
across the plains to San Francisco and the gold fields of California.