SWAMPSCOTT — When Anne Driscoll returned home after seven years in Ireland, an idea came to her.
“I spent seven years almost living in Ireland and so have experienced firsthand. You know, being a stranger in a strange land and trying to assimilate into a different culture or a different country,” Driscoll, an award-winning journalist and longtime Swampscott resident, said.
She returned when COVID-19 first struck.
“We all were spending a lot of time at home and it just got me thinking about the reverse,” Driscoll said. First of all, did Irish people settle in Swampscott, and how did they fare, how did they do assimilating here?”
This led her into doing a deep dive into the history of the Irish in Swampscott. Driscoll will be talking about her findings, which have been documented in a new publication called “The Irish in Swampscott: A Brief History,” on March 13 at 6 p.m. at the library. The program is being hosted by the Swampscott Recreation Department.
“Her research documents that Irish arrivals included wealthy titans of business like Maurice Curran, local fishermen like Lucky Williams, and the scores of unnamed domestics who worked on the great estates of Swampscott, among others,” a press release for the program said.
When she first started her research she said she wasn’t sure what she was going to find, but had “suspected” that Boston “was a gateway for many Irish immigrants.”
“They did spread out but I wasn’t sure if they’d landed in Swampscott or not,” Driscoll said. “I suspected that, knowing that we had a fair amount of big estates, maybe they ended up as domestics working there or as handymen and I just decided that I was curious and wanted to find out for myself.”
When she started digging, she said she was surprised by what she ended up finding. Some of her findings involved John Blaney, one of Swampscott’s earliest settlers.
“According to family histories and family sources, it turns out that he was in fact, Irish,” Driscoll said. “And it’s been reported that many of his descendants had a coat of arms that was an Irish coat of arms.”
The name Blaney may sound familiar to you from Blaney Street or Blaney Beach, which is now called Fisherman’s Beach.
“Many of those Blaney descendants had important roles in the town,” Driscoll said. “Betsy Blaney opened what was essentially the first rooming house and really ushered in Swampscott as a place to spend your vacation, and there were a number of Blaney descendants that were fishermen.”
At the program on March 13, she will talk about Blaney as well as others. She said that in her research she “talked about a lot of people who are sort of the laborers and kind of unsung heroes that were working and thriving in Swampscott.”
“There are also people notable because they were kind of titans of business,” Driscoll said.
She said her research is a “work in progress.”
“My hope is that I will hear lots of other stories that I don’t know about that can be included in this history,” Driscoll said. “That’s kind of the way history lives and grows, and so I don’t see this work as the be-all end-all.”
