Tag: New York

Molly Malone

Belfast’s Nuala with the Hula, New York’s Lady Liberty and now Dublin’s Molly Malone. Honestly, although I come from a seafaring family, I don’t have a girl in every port.

Molly’s statue which dates from 1988 originally stood in Dublin’s Grafton Street before being relocated to Suffolk Street in 2014. She is an attraction for many tourists visiting Dublin, including those tracing their Irish ancestry and family history. Her buxom nature is purely incidental! As with many Dublin statues, she has a nickname: The Tart with the Cart.

The Molly Malone song tells a tale of a 17th century fishmonger and hawker who traded from a cart on the streets of Dublin.  One story suggests she plied a different trade by night!!  Poor Molly caught the fever and died prematurely. She is immortalised in the song of her name, sometimes referred to as “Cockles and Mussels” or In “In Dublin’s Fair City”.

Liberty Lives

Nuala with the Hula is not alone

Sometime ago I posted Belfast’s Nuala with the Hula playing hoopla. Nuala has now found a kindred spirit: a moving Lady Liberty.

Like Nuala, New York’s Statue of Liberty has a long standing connection with genealogy. The statue is an icon of the United States and was a welcoming sight to many Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh and other European immigrants arriving from abroad. She is located on Ellis Island and was the gateway for over 12 million immigrants to the United States.

Statue of Liberty

The Ellis Island Foundation projects include a museum, The American Immigrant Wall of Honor and the American Family Immigration History Center. The Centre is a valuable resource  when researching family history

To find out more, click on the following link:

Ellis Island