Riley of lands in Chicopee.  With a number of his countrymen, Riley located in this vicinity and gave the name of “Ireland Parish” to their settlement.  John Molooney and Daniel MacGuinnes were at Woburn in 1676, and Michael Bacon, “an Irishman”, of Woburn, fought in King Philip’s war in 1675.  John Joyce was at Lynn in 1637, and I find the names of Willyam Heally, William Reyle, William Barrett, and Roger Burke signed to a petition to the General Court of Massachusetts on August 17, 1664.  Such names as Maccarty, Gleason, Coggan, Lawler, Kelly, Hurley, MackQuade, and McCleary also appear on the Cambridge Church records down to 1690.  These are but desultory instances of the first comers among the Irish to Massachusetts, selected from a great mass of similar data.

In the early history of every town in Massachusetts, without exception, I find mention of Irish people, and while the majority came originally as “poor redemptioners”, yet, in course of time and despite Puritanical prejudices, not a few of them rose to positions of worth and independence.  Perhaps the most noted of these was Matthew Lyon of Vermont, known as “the Hampden of Congress,” who, on his arrival in New York in 1765, was sold as a “redemptioner” to pay his passage-money.  This distinguished American was a native of county Wicklow.  Other notable examples of Irish redemptioners who attained eminence in America were George Taylor, a native of Dublin, one of Pennsylvania’s signers of the Declaration of Independence; Charles Thompson, a native of county Tyrone, “the perennial Secretary of the Continental Congress”, and William Killen, who became chief justice and chancellor of Delaware.  Some of the descendants of the Irish redemptioners in Massachusetts are found among the prominent New Englanders of the past hundred years.  The Puritans of Massachusetts extended no welcoming hand to the Irish who had the temerity to come among them, yet, as an historical writer has truly said, “by one of those strange transformations which time occasionally works, it has come to pass that Massachusetts today contains more people of Irish blood in proportion to the total population than any other State in the Union.”

So great and so continuous was Irish immigration to Massachusetts during the early part of the eighteenth century that on Saint Patrick’s Day in the year 1737 a number of merchants, who described themselves as “of the Irish Nation residing in Boston,” formed the Charitable Irish Society, an organization which exists even to the present day.  It was provided that the officers should be “natives of Ireland or of Irish extraction,” and they announced that the Society was organized “in an affectionate and Compassionate concern for their countrymen in these Parts who may be reduced by Sickness, Shipwrack, Old Age, and other Infirmities and unforeseen Accidents.”  I have copied from the Town Books, as reproduced by the City of Boston, 1600 Irish names of persons who were married or had declared their intentions of marriage in Boston between the years 1710 and 1790, exclusive of 956 other Irish names which appear on the minutes between 1720 and 1775.