Michael J. O'Brien  (1869 - 1960)

Irish- American Historian

Michael J. Obrien was born in 1889 in Fermoy, County Cork, Ireland. He received his education in the local Christian Brothers School.  While still a teenager he took a job as a clerk in the Office of the Crown Prosecutor in Fermoy where he passed on a letter from Lord Salisbury, the British Prime Minister directing the prosecutor to try and secure the conviction of two prominent members of the Land League.  The letter reached Charles Stewart Parnell who used it to embarrass the government in the house of Commons.  Suspicion fell on the Fermoy Office and Michael fearing arrest fled to England where he was able to secure transport on a vessel to the United States.    

O’Brien arrived in New York City on July 4, 1889 at the age of nineteen, and soon was able to find employment with the Western Union Telegraph Company for which he would work for over forty years.    At the turn of the century O’Brien began to use his leisure time in what would become his lifelong work, that of researching the contributions of the Irish to early American history.  Two articles he wrote for the Gaelic American newspaper “The Irishmen in Colonial Days and Irish Schoolmasters in the Colonies” established his reputation for extensive and meticulous research.  

In 1912, his books, articles and lectures helped secure for him the position of historiographer of the American Irish Historical Association. He would hold this position for over thirty years, in which he would write and document the contributions and accomplishments of the Irish to America, which he strongly felt was slighted and overlooked.  Some of his many published lectures, books, and articles especially in the American Irish Historical Society Journal include:

Irish Colonists in New York; Irish Firsts in American History; A Hidden Phase of American History: Ireland’s Part in America’s Struggle for Liberty; George Washington’s Association with the Irish; Hercules Mulligan, Confidential Correspondent of George Washington; Pioneer Irish in New England; Timothy Murphy, Hero of the American Revolution; and Irish Settlers in America. 

In several of his works, especially A Hidden Phase of American History, O’Brien attached what he saw as the “myth of the Scotch-Irish.”  He strongly believed that if a person was born in Ireland, he was Irish and if born in Scotland he was Scottish, nor did it matter if one was Protestant and one Catholic.  

Michael O’Brien died in November, 1960 at the age of 90 and is buried in St John Cemetery in Queens New York.   His papers, including unpublished articles and research are housed in the Ryan Library at Iona University in New Rochelle, New York.  His legacy is that of establishing the rightful place of the Irish race in early American history.

Contributed by John B. Haltigan

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Sources: Brother Harry M. Dunkak, The Papers of an Unheralded Irish American Historian, Journal of Irish Studies, published by the Irish American Cultural Institute, Summer, 1987.

The Avondhu Newspaper, (Northeast Cork, West Waterford, South limerick, South Tipperary), April 26, 1990, Michael Barry, The forgotten Fermoy historian of the American Irish