Area’s Irish magnets
Which county claims the most Emerald Isle ancestors? Rensselaer at 25.2 percent
Learn which local county claims the most Emerald Isle ancestors.
When the region’s Irish-americans celebrate St. Patrick’s Day they crowd into city streets for the annual parade.
But these days the vast majority of sons and daughters of Erin are no longer on the urban streets where immigrants set out to find a new beginning.
It was the turn of the Colonie Irish to lead the 69th annual parade. Their hometown now has the largest concentration of Irish-americans in the Capital Region, outstripping Albany, which has hung on in second place as its iconic Irish Democratic political machine that defined the city has faded.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all. If you look around the region, there’s a lot of Irish. A lot of them ended up in Colonie,” said Denise Sheehan, co-grand marshal of the 2019 St. Patrick’s Day Parade and a leader of the Colonie Irish.
Colonie’s Irish-americans number 19,747 compared to the 14,552 in Albany, according to the U.S. Bureau’s 2013-2017 American Community Survey’s tally of how Americans identify their ancestry.
The Capital Region has among the highest concentrations of Irish-americans in the U.S. Across the country, 32.6 million, or 10.14 percent of Americans, identify as having Irish ancestry, as do 2.27 million or 11.5 percent of New Yorkers. Locally, every county exceeds these margins.
Among the 62 counties, Rensselaer County, at 25.2 percent, leads the way. Close behind is Saratoga County’s 23.5 percent.
Albany County is at 20.9 percent, while Schenectady County has 16.9 percent. Plymouth County, Mass., at 31.1 percent
reports the highest percentage of people claiming Irish ancestry nationally.
The state’s two towns with the most residents claiming Irish heritage are Brunswick at 35 percent and its eastern neighbor Grafton, just a fraction behind at
34.6 percent. The city of Albany is at just 14.8 percent, one of four local communities with less than 15 percent.
It’s not surprising that James Connolly, a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, lived for a short time in Troy where the Irish provided the backbone of the area’s industrialization. In some neighborhoods the Irish presence can still be seen.
“There are a lot of Irish people around here,” East Greenbush Supervisor Jack Conway says about his Hampton Manor neighborhood where about 47 percent of those in the town claim Irish ancestry, according to the Census Bureau.
“Irish people and Irish towns always have a great sense of history,” said Conway, who wrote his doctoral dissertation about politics and development in the city of Kilkenny, Ireland, a community the same size as East Greenbush.
Residents in Hampton Manor are attuned to their history. It was one of the region’s first suburban developments to advertise in the early 20th century to draw residents from Albany.
The Capital Region’s Irish migration to the suburbs follows the pattern seen in New York City, where the percentage of those of Irish descent is in the single digits in four of the five boroughs, and other metropolitan regions around the county, said Elizabeth Stack, executive director of the Irish American Heritage Museum at 370 Broadway in Albany.
In a way the move to the suburbs is a return to Irish roots, Stack said. When Irish immigrants arrived in the 19th century, “it was into the urban areas from rural areas” and had to adjust to crowded city life in this country, Stack said.
Wealth acquired as generations of Irishamericans have worked and obtained education have broken the ties they’d established in their surroundings here, Stack said. Irish Catholics identified themselves by their parishes in the Capital Region. And, their neighbors were most likely recently from Ireland or their grandparents or parents had been.
“The concern is now that the links with Ireland may be more tenuous,” Stack said.
The Irish American Heritage Museum strengths the ties through an active membership, Stack said. The museum has also found that suburban parents see one of the best ways to keep the Irish roots strong is by exposing their children to traditional music and dance lessons, she said.