Krista Luttrell

On December 9th, 1850, at St. Dominic’s Church in Portland, Maine, Patrick Burke and Bridget Kildea of Paris Cape stood before Rev. John O’Donnell and made their matrimonial vows. Their witnesses, Patrick Cunningham and Catherine Burke, the wife of Thomas Gantley, Portland residents, were likely close family members.¹

Paris Cape is in Paris, Maine, and during this period was one of several newly designated train sites in the state for the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, formed just a few years prior. South Paris was and still is a small community in hilly Oxford County, located approximately a few dozen miles north of the city of Portland. At the time of the 1850 U.S. census, the enumerator recorded dozens of Irish immigrants and their families in the community. A careful examination of the surnames suggests that many, but not all, of these people hailed from County Galway, and some of them may be from the Connemara region. Alridge, Clarity, Coffee, Connolly, Curran, Faherty, Flaherty, Folan, Geritty, Griffin, Kelly, Kildea, King, Leonard, Lynch, McDonough, and Naughton ²

The parish register entry is the only known reference to Patrick and Bridget, fixing them in a time and space: two young hearts bound together by their faith and living in a small railroad Irish immigrant enclave nestled in between the shadowy tall pines and vast farm fields of rural western Maine.

The two are not found in the 1850 or 1860 U.S. census schedules of Paris or Portland.³ Like many Irish railroad employees and their families of this period, they may have just arrived in America, escaping the ravages of the Great Hunger (An Gorta Mor),⁴ or had been living just outside the enumerator’s reach. Railroad work was plenty, but it was dangerous, demanding physical labor, and transient by nature: when the grading and track-laying finished in one town, surviving crews and their families packed up their few possessions and moved on to the next job site.

Patrick and Bridget may have joined this migratory flow, continuing northwesterly through remote parts of the state, and then through northern New Hampshire and Vermont, as the railroad connected with Montreal in Quebec. Their story, glimpsed only in the two-line entry of the parish registry, mirrors that of countless thousands of Irish immigrants whose names appear once or twice in the records and are now buried in the pages of America’s history.

For descendants and historical researchers alike, their marriage is more than a genealogical note. It is a reminder that behind some of the parish register entries and census lines were Irish immigrant lives in motion. Lives rolling forward on the cue of a train’s whistle and with a desperate hope for a better life in a new land.

I hope you enjoyed this story. If you have information about an Irish immigrant ancestor who worked as a laborer for the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, Grand Trunk Railroad or The Portland Company during the mid-19th century. I’d love to learn about them.

♥︎ Krista

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Notes

1. Parish register, St. Dominic’s Church, entry for marriage of Patrick Burke and Bridget Kildea, December 9, 1850, Diocese of Portland Archives, Portland, Maine. ↩︎
2. “1850 United States Federal Census, Paris, Oxford County, Maine,” Ancestry.com, accessed July 5, 2025, https://www.ancestry.com. ↩︎
3. “1860 United States Federal Census, Paris, Oxford, Maine,” Ancestry.com, accessed October 24, 2025, https://www.ancestry.com ↩︎
4. Miller, Kerby A, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford University Press, 1985. ↩︎