52 Ancestors – 52 Weeks

For week 17, Amy Johnson Crow challenged her Facebook members to write about “land.” Land is prevalent throughout my ancestry. My Roman Catholic ancestors came from Ireland and were identified in early family records as farmers or laborers. From Irish history we know that Irish Roman Catholics were not allowed to own land. However, many of them were tenant farmers, or “reduced farmers” as they were called in early Irish history. Land ownership was a precious commodity to those first settlers in North America.

Michael Carew, my third great grandfather (on my dad’s mother’s side of the family), his wife Ann Hogan Carew and their children family came from County Tipperary, Ireland to Canada in 1825. They came with Peter Robinson’s second group of Irish emigrants sent from Ireland to Canada, then known as British North America, by the British government. Each family who emigrated to North America was given 70 acres of land by the Brits. Those early emigrants believed that land ownership would bring economic independence which they never had in Ireland.

Michael Carew’s family settled in Ontario, Canada, where the original homestead remains owned by descendants of his family. By 1848 Michael’s family emigrated from Canada to the the state of Wisconsin and settled in the Township of Mukwa in Waupaca County. A community of Irish emigrants settled in this area as farmers and land owners.

The Carew’s were some of the earliest settlers of that area which had been opened for settlement by a treaty made between the United States government and the Menominee Indians in 1849. Wisconsin became the thirtieth state on May 29, 1848.

John H. Fitzgerald, my second great grandfather (on my dad’s father’s side of the family) came from Kilcoe, County Cork, Ireland to the United States before 1850. He and his wife, Anne Malloy Fitzgerald, lived in Canada until the fall of 1861 when they moved to the Town of Lebanon, Waupaca County, Wisconsin where he purchased 80 acres of land. Two of their sons, Edward and Robert, farmed after they grew to adulthood. Farming in those days included clearing the land, building homes and outbuildings and planting, growing and harvesting crops.

Robert Fitzgerald is my great grandfather. He purchased 80 acres of land in the Town of Lebanon just before his marriage to Mary Ellen Casey. They raised their family on that land.

Evidence of Robert’s land is documented in the U.S., Indexed County Land Ownership Map 1860-1918 for Waupaca County, Wisconsin. (I have a copy of this document but could not format it to display here.

John J. Fitzgerald, my dad, owned land in Waupaca County from 1947 to 1963. He farmed the land and raised livestock and crops.

The Fitzgerald family continued to own land in Waupaca County, Wisconsin until 2014. The piece of land that was owned the longest was a tract of fifty acres of land that my mother inherited from her uncle John Flannery in 1954. My mother lamented the fact that because she was married to my dad at the time she inherited the land, she could not have the land in her name. According to the law at the time, the land had to be put in my dad’s name.

Even after our family moved from Waupaca County my parents kept ownership of that fifty acres of land. Eventually, my sister and I took over the ownership of the land in 2002, after my mother passed away. My sister is married and my mother would have enjoyed knowing that the land was put in her name and not her husband’s name. We sold the land in 2014. I had mixed emotions about giving up the land that had been in our family for so long. The land, to this day, lies dormant.

There are no longer any members of the John H. and Anne Malloy Fitzgerald family who own land in Waupaca County.

I am not aware of any members of the Michael and Ann Hogan family owning land currently in Waupaca County.