An act of stunning disloyalty

Since contemporaries seem to have applied the term crimp to anyone who became involved in manipulating the sailor labour market, most nineteenth-century boarding-house-keepers qualified as crimps. Of all the boarding-house-keepers in Saint John late in the century, only one was regarded by sailors’s home reformers to be a respectable, law-abiding citizen rather than a disreputable crimp. (Jack in Port by Judith Fingard p197)

Our story begins in a cemetery in Upham, New Brunswick. Amy and I had gone there with my mother and father because my mother very much wanted to show it to us. The cemetery was not maintained terribly well and could easily have been mistaken for a hayfield. I remember finding a lot of blueberries growing along the perimeter where the hayfield disappeared into forest. I called my mother’s attention to this because it was the sort of thing she had taught me to delight in when we were children. That day, she didn’t.

My mother was dying. I can’t remember whether she’d actually told us yet but she knew and there were enough hints that we had figured it out long before she told us. She’d had a successful fight with the cancer some twenty years previously but it had come out of remission and this time it would kill her. And she was determined, in her final days, to pass on to us the most valuable lessons she felt she had to give. And she did: she faced a long and difficult death with inspiring courage and patience. But the incredible joy she had taught me as a boy when she showed me how to pick berries was no longer part of the lesson. The people buried in the cemetery in Upham were.

"I never knew I was related to people like this,” is what she said. She was proud to have discovered this connection. Later, I got to thinking about approaching that statement from the other end of the telescope. If these were people she was proud of being descended from and she had never know about them, what sort of people had she previously known she was descended from and why wasn’t she so proud of them?

Well, I've done some digging and I know that we are descended from famine Irish who most likely came to Saint John from County Cork in the empty hold of a lumber ship making a return trip from the British Isles. Of their early days in Saint John we know nothing and probably never will.  They first show up in historical documents as keeping a boarding house in Saint John New Brunswick’s Sailortown. As the quote above, from Judith Fingard’s Jack in Port: sailortowns of eastern Canada indicates, the odds against their being entirely respectable are pretty high. Even in the unlikely event that they did keep the only respectable boarding house in Sailortown, my ancestors lived in one very rough part of town and they were surrounded by thieves, pimps, prostitutes, rough bars and, sailors ashore. This is a fascinating world and learning as much as I can about it and exactly what part my Costigan ancestors played in it is irresistible to me. Well, it might be if I was even remotely inclined to try resisting but I’m not. My attitude towards all this is roughly that of Lloyd Osborne:

One stormy, rain-lashed afternoon, Stevenson came upon his twelve-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, drawing a fanciful map of a make-believe island to pass the hours. Stevenson scribbled some place-names and wrote “Treasure Island” in an upper corner. The map seemed to call for more elaboration, so he set about composing a story to go with it, reading it aloud in the evenings over the following two weeks. The dull parts were edited out by Lloyd, who, like any sensible twelve-year-old, was interested only in untimely deaths, the discovery of duplicity, or both. (And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis)

My interests are a bit wider than young Lloyd’s, although I do share his enthusiasm for discovery of duplicity mixed with untimely death. There was plenty of both in Sailortown and I plan to find as much of them as I can. I do intend to stick by his strict rationing of dull stuff, except to the extent that some dull stuff might give context such that the exciting stuff is even more exciting. Unlike Lloyd and his Uncle Robert Louis Stevenson, I do not intend to write fiction, not on purpose anyway.

Whatever I uncover, there can be no doubt that my mother would have preferred that this aspect of family history be left alone. She is far from unusual in this. The Irish in North America generally would rather not know just how rough their forebears were. I'm sure I could give all sorts of reasons for pursuing this research anyway but they all boil down to one thing: I'm doing this because I want to.