Daniel McAllen was a shoemaker born in Ireland around 1821 to James McAllen, a labourer. He emigrated first to England before the age of 20, and then to America at the age of 28, in 1848. His wife, Catherine O’Conner, was born around 1820 to a blacksmith named James and she also emigrated twice – first to England from Ireland before the age of 20, and then to America with her 2 daughters Margaret and Catherine in 1850 – reuniting with her husband in Orange, NJ.

Because Ireland and England were part of the same country at that time, there are no passenger manifests for travel between them, and that makes tracing their origins in Ireland and the date of their immigration to England difficult, if not impossible.

What I can tell you is that the name McAllen doesn’t originate in Ireland. It comes from Scotland. It arrived in Ireland, first in Donegal, in the 1400’s with a large migration of Gallowglas military families. The Gallowglas (derived from gall óglaigh or foreign warriors) were western Scottish clans, principally from Argyll and the western islands, that had intermarried with the Norse in the 10th century. They worked as professional mercenaries and were a staple of the infantry for Irish Chieftains who paid in cash, land and titles. Over time, the McAllen name became part of the fabric of Ireland.

We get our first glimpse of Daniel and Catherine from the record of their marriage at the parish church of St. Margaret’s Westminster on the 17th of May, 1841. St. Margaret’s is on the grounds of Westminster Abbey, on Parliament Square, and is also currently the Anglican parish church for the House of Commons.

Being Irish, I half expected to find them married in a Catholic ceremony and apparently so did the Westminster record keeper. He crossed out the word “Established” from the phrase “Established Church” – something you did for Catholic ceremonies – and then had to write in Church “of England” to clarify his mistake.

Mary McAllen witnessed the ceremony and is possibly the groom’s sister but I haven’t found any other trace of family. I can tell you that the groom and his witness Mary were both illiterate, and that the bride was able to at least sign her name.

You may be wondering how a simple shoemaker and his wife ended up in the swankiest neighborhood in London and the short answer is, it wasn’t swanky at the time. In fact, they lived at the edge of the most notorious slum in London – nicknamed The Devil’s Acre by Charles Dickens – and Westminster was the focus of urban reformers for the whole of the 19th century.

Population density in the Devil’s Acre was not measured in terms of persons per acre, but persons per room. The area had a high rate of mortality from diseases such as typhoid…Great Peter Street was mainly occupied by tradesmen, small shopkeepers, labourers, mechanics, and those with irregular or uncertain earnings. In Perkin’s Rent, Duck Lane and Old Pye Street 10 to 12 people frequently lived in one room and the houses were mostly occupied by what a contemporary described as “mendicants, hawkers, costermongers, lodging house keepers, thieves and abandoned females of irregular and intemperate habits”. Old Pye Street was lined with lodging houses and parts of Old Pye Street became known as “Irish rookery”. 

[SRC] Wikipedia

At the time of his marriage, Daniel was living at Blue Anchor Yard. It no longer exists but was located somewhere off a short street still called Petty France – petite france or small France – named for the French Huguenots that settled there centuries before. Catherine was living on a connecting road called Tothill Street, at #36.

Victoria Street and the upper class shops and apartments lining it were specifically built in 1851 for slum clearance – and 5000 people were displaced by them. Westminster Palace burned down in 1838, but the Houses of Parliament were not completed until 1868. The Westminster Bridge didn’t open until 1854 and Big Ben wasn’t completed until 1858.

So Daniel and Catherine McAllen had come and gone from Westminster before many of it’s identifying landmarks even existed.

A Second Migration

We know that 3 of Daniel & Catherine’s children were born in England – Margaret in the 2nd quarter of 1842, Catherine in the 2nd quarter of 1844, and James in March of 1846. James died when he was only 8 months old on the 19th of November and was buried in the Parish of St. Margaret’s Westminster.

We don’t know when Catherine and Daniel arrived in England but we know they were there by 1841 – and whatever their reason for coming, we can guess at their reason for going. A tidal wave of immigrants flooded England at the start of the Irish famine in 1845 and the opportunities England had to offer were harder and harder to come by. Added to that, the strain of new immigration increasingly fueled an existing prejudice against the Irish.

So in 1848, Daniel McAllen left his family behind and sailed to New York on the American Eagle, arriving there on March 31st, 1848. The above painting is the only one I could find of the American Eagle. She was a packet ship built in New York in 1846 by Jacob Westervelt & William Mackey to carry mail and passengers between New York and London.

Wind and weather dictated the journey, but a westbound passage averaged 35 days, and could take as long as 57. A fix amount of staples would be provided – oatmeal, rice, molasses, tea – but the passengers had to cook it themselves, and passengers in steerage had to provide their own bedding. They would eat, sleep and pass the day in the same interior space, which they often shared with cargo.

Daniel spent 2 years away from his wife and daughters in America, probably raising the money to bring them over. They finally sailed in 1850 on the Garland Grove, a ship built on the Isle of Wight in 1820 and used in the 1840s for the transportation of female convicts to Australia. They landed in New York on August 1, 1850 and appeared together in the 1850 census taken in Orange, New Jersey on the 10th of October.

A Shoemaker from Orange

On immigration. Daniel is listed as a ‘cordwainer’ – a shoemaker who makes shoes from new leather, especially cordovan leather. This is in contrast to a cobbler who in England was restricted to repairing existing shoes. Knowing Daniel’s profession helps us track his family more easily – year by year, rather than decade by decade with the census –  and, other than a brief stint in a hat factory in the 1870’s, he continued to work as a shoemaker up to the end of his life.

In 1851, Catherine and Daniel had a third daughter named Mary. She lived to be at least 9 years old but disappears from the record before the age of 19, and probably died as a teenager. They had 6 more children between 1853 and 1858 and the 4 immediately following Mary did not live long enough to be named – 2 girls, a boy and a child whose gender is unknown. Catherine gave birth twice in 1858 to two boys named Daniel. The first died at birth in February and the second, born in November, lived just 2 years.

We know they were in Orange in 1850, Ward 3 of Orange in 1860 and Ward 2 of Orange in 1870, but it’s not until the publication of City Directories that we get anything like an address. From at least 1874 until about 1887, the family lived at North Centre near Main. Daniel’s entries used the British spelling of Centre, the city of Orange did not.

In 1886, Daniel’s son-in-law Patrick Hassett died and on September 10th, 1887, his wife Catherine O’Connor passed away on Burnside St. of exhaustion and carcinoma of the liver. Both are buried at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Cemetery, Orange, NJ.

Daniel moved for a time to the home of his widowed daughter at 10 Burnside and in 1891 moved with her again to 78 Thompkins, also in Orange. After 1897, he lived on his own at at least 4 addresses in Newark, still plying his trade: 20 Fillmore (1897-8); 101 Chambers (1901); 18 Merchant (1903-4) and finally boarding for the last 2 years of his life at 205 13th Avenue, Newark.

He survived his wife by 23 years and was buried beside her at St. John’s Catholic Cemetery when he died on September 22, 1910.

Their eldest surviving child, Margaret married a man named Timothy O’Connell, probably just after the Civil War. By 1900, she was already a widow, having born 9 children, with only 3 surviving. It appears she also outlived her daughter Margaret by 2 years and was buried in Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in East Orange, NJ.

Their only other surviving child, Catherine, became a hat trimmer by the age of 16, and it’s probably through her profession that she met and married her husband Patrick Hassett, an immigrant born in County Clare Ireland, a Civil War veteran and a hatter, by trade.