Drawing What’s Not There

[By Fred Lynch in Providence, Rhode Island]

It’s not easy to draw what isn’t there anymore. That’s what tracing your immigrant ancestors can lead to. In this case, the house on the west side of Providence, Rhode Island where Irish-born Michael Lynch and his family lived in 1909 is gone. What’s left is a parking lot for the Grant Mill Condominium across the street. Grant Mill is mostly gone too. It used to be enormous—part of a group of mills creating Fruit of the Loom branded cotton products. I don’t think Michael worked there. I think he worked as a granite cutter at a quarry in a neighboring town then. He changed jobs frequently—the family moving from apartment to apartment—many of which were next to factories, like that of many of my ancestors. Factories or railroad tracks, usually. Providence was a busy, polluted industrial town then (at the turn of the last century)—such a contrast for Michael Lynch, who spent the first eighteen years of his life on a small patch of green land in rural western Ireland, on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic.