Michael J. O'brien McCarthys in Early American History

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Although many Irish families were settled in America in Colonial and Revolutionary times, and a vast number of Irish names appear in the official records of the country, the contemporary references to these people in American historical works are lamentably scarce and superficial. Much of the matter necessary for a history of their settlements and of their fortunes in the new country is irrecoverably lost, and, with the exception of some desultory references to Irish families in the work of local town historians, in most cases about the only information that can now be gleaned after the lapse of so many years is that contained in the dry official records of the time. While searching for other historical material relating to the early Irish in America, I have picked up some of the lost threads connecting the descendants of the old Irish family of MacCarthy with the Colonial and Revolutionary history of America and have thought they would be of sufficient interest to publish, so that some member of the family in the United States may be induced to take up the subject in earnest and bring out the full story of the many persons of this name who settled in the Western Hemisphere during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.