Page 17 - Always Virginia

Always Virginia 5

to bring his unmarried younger brother, Bartholomew, Junior,
from Tipperary sailing on May 15 from Queenstown, Ireland, on
the immigrant ship, S. S. Helvetia, to New York in 1868. It is yet
to be discovered why the devoted brothers waited almost twenty
years after John’s arrival for Bartholomew, Junior, to immigrate
and become business partners.
In the S. S. Helvetia manifest, Bartholomew, Junior, was listed
as “Barth Day, Passenger 905, age 24 [he was actually 39], laborer.”
Because the Day family in Ireland was large, John T. Day, Senior,
the American patriarch, who was regarded as the family’s founding
Calhoun County chieftain of the Clan Ó Deághaidh, also assisted
the immigration to Hamburg of other Irish in-law families already
married to Day women in Ireland by the name of Kelly, Hughes,
O’Connell, and Corbett. He brought two of his own several sisters
over, and one, named Margaret, married Edmund Hughes, and
the other married a Corbett.
In fact, “Passenger 906” on the S. S. Helvetia was the cousin
of John T, Senior and Bartholomew, Junior, “Barth Corbett, 31,
laborer,” who left his father Edmund and his mother Mary Day
Corbett, the sister of John T., Senior, and Bartholomew, Junior,
behind in Tipperary. Another sister staying in Ireland married a
Kelly. With less than a dollar between them, they traveled from
New York to New Orleans by train and then by boat to Calhoun
County. The best existing example of how these immigrants lived
is the restored primitive village of Lincoln’s New Salem only one
hundred miles away. Batty Corbett’s story typifies the mid-nine-
teenth-century pioneer history of the Day brothers and cousins.
The 1891 book, A Portrait and Biographical Album of Pike and
Calhoun Counties profiled Bartholomew “Batty” Corbett, who
married Catherine Hughes of St. Louis, as it could have profiled
in parallel John T. Day, Senior, and Bartholomew Day, Junior,
who became a citizen on June 17, 1873. In its workaday details
the Album entry resembles the 1920s-1930s homespun details in
Virginia Day Fritscher’s memoir of her Day family life in this book.