A Canadian Named Bridget

Despite being dead for nearly 120 years, Brigit Finerty has been many things to me over the course of my life.

She was the namesake for a doll I nearly loved to death, my mother’s obsession, a Canadian who was supposed to be Irish, the reason I landed on a PBS show about genealogy, and not least of all, my second great-grandmother.

As a doll, she was initially unwelcome. Scorned, even.

My closest friend and her sister had American Girl dolls right when the frenzy was beginning to build and when it was just Samantha, Kirsten, and Molly. (The world hadn’t heard of Kit, Josefina or Grace yet.) I wanted an American Girl doll even more than I wanted a shot at swimming in Scrooge McDuck’s coin swimming pool.  

But I didn’t get the Kirsten doll from American Girl, I got a doll from Kmart that my mom named Bridget.  Because of course she did. She was already fully imbibing on the “We’re so Irish, it’s unreal” Kool-Aid and had spent countless hours on the telephone jotting furious notes from her mother, Peg, about any memories Peg might have had of her grandmother--Bridget Finerty.

I hated Bridget. She wasn’t Molly. She wasn’t Kirsten. She wasn’t Samantha. But my mother did attempt to sweeten the deal and bought her some fancy 18-inch dresses, picked up a small, nearly-beaten-to-death brown leather suitcase and declared Bridget an Irish immigrant and even composed the doll a tragic backstory full of famines, treachery, and fresh starts.

When I was 17, Bridget was back in my life again. Her ghost rode along in a rented minivan along the coast of Maine as my mother, my grandmother and I headed to the Calais library to prove Bridget’s Irishness. To prove our Irishness. 

Except, Bridget wasn’t Irish. She was Canadian and my mother was silent nearly the entire ride home. I’m not sure Debra ever forgave her great-grandmother for the crime of being more Canadian than Irish.

But here’s the thing—I didn’t know it yet, but my mother was playing the long game. 

Bridget the doll wasn’t just a consolation prize; she was a breadcrumb leading me to a much bigger story. One that spanned continents, crossed oceans, and somehow wound its way down to me.

By the time I was a teenager, I had absorbed enough of my mother’s obsession to feel a begrudging curiosity. Bridget Finerty—the real one—wasn’t just some Irish ancestor tucked away in our family tree. 

She was a survivor, and despite not being as Irish as my mother had hoped, her life still bore the marks of displacement, resilience, and the quiet determination that defined so many in her time. The most basic research into the mill towns of northern Maine in the 1860s will tell you that food was about survival, memory, and sacrifice—and I wonder how much of that carried forward to the generations that followed her.

She was born in 1849 nearly a year after her parents, Patrick and Annie, fled Ireland’s poorest county in the thick of the Great Potato Famine and two years after the death of an infant sister in 1847.  Patrick and Annie landed in Canada, but by the time Bridget was nine, the family had relocated to America.

In Calais, Maine, the Finerty family, which eventually grew to 11, worked in the hydro-powered textile mills that were popping up along the St. Croix River.  The work was grueling—long hours in deafening mills, the air thick with cotton dust, fingers raw from endless spinning and weaving. Wages were meager, and entire families, including children, often labored side by side just to make ends meet. Yet, like so many others drawn to the promise of industry, they endured, trading the uncertainties of rural life for the steady, if unrelenting, rhythm of factory work.

Some ancestors in the tree have plenty of details but offer no real connection to me, but Bridget is the opposite. There is a very real connection with very real memories, but little to no details. 

Snippets of Bridget’s life are scarce, sadly, but there’s one truth that’s pretty universally acknowledged throughout most of my family tree (on both sides)--she was poor. Not the poor that I claim on those weeks I can’t go to TJ Maxx and blow $150. She was “struggling to eat and pay for housing” for the majority of her life, even after marrying and leaving her family home.

Loss and grief must have been a constant in Bridget’s life if the birth and death records of Calais, Maine tell a trusted story.

In 1872, when Bridget was just 23 years old, three of her four brothers all died within six months of each other. It was a great mystery that my own mother fought hard to untangle and this puzzle even landed me on “Genealogy Roadshow” on PBS to seek help from a professional genealogist. (That’s a story for another time!)

Two brothers, Patrick and James, both ventured south to the boomtown of Boston. Patrick was a firefighter, James was a merchant marine. It was rumored a third brother, Edward, also made the trek.

Patrick was 24, James was 22, and Edward just 19. By December of 1872, all three were dead within weeks of each other and nobody knew why.

Research eventually told us that smallpox had a resurgence in Boston in 1872. James died first, after a two-week illness and a forced quarantine with other smallpox patients on Gallups Island. Six days later, Patrick was also dead of the disease, though he was buried in Holy Cross cemetery outside of town.

Nobody ever knew what became of Edward, dead at 19. In fact, his name is on the family gravestone in Calais, ME with 1872 listed as the year of his burial with no other clues. Did he make it south and the family lost touch? Did he remain behind in Maine and fell victim to some other disaster? 

The past certainly keeps its secrets sometimes.

Like her own mother, Bridget also lost children of her own. Mary, born in 1876, died two weeks after her 11th birthday in 1887 of an unknown sickness. Later, in 1904 just four years before Bridget herself died, her daughter Catherine (called Kate by the ones who loved her), died at just 22 years-old from pulmonary tuberculosis.

While this blog is primarily focused on food and foodways and our cultural heritage of shared mealtimes, some stories require a beginning. And for my family, Bridget, in many ways, was our beginning.

Bridget was a doll, a name whispered about but largely unknown; a daughter, a sister, a mill worker, and eventually a wife and mother. 

Census documents say she had five of her own children, one of whom grew to get married, relocate to the Boston area with her new husband in 1915 and eventually have my grandmother in 1924, so while real details are scarce about Bridget Finnerty, one fact remains: she lived and so did her daughter, Josephine, and that’s one hell of a start.