Assisted Emigration and the Story of Brigid Egan A Lecture by Clare Curtin Sunday, February 28, 2010, at 3 p.m. at Molloy College, Hempstead Av., Rockville Center, New York. The lecture will be held in Kellenberg Hall . (Long Island RR to Rockville Center. Short Taxi ride to College.) Clare Curtin will present an illustrated lecture that examines the finer details of an emigration process not widely known to the general public. The British ship Scythia arrived in New York Harbor on May 18, 1888, carrying over 1,000 passengers who disembarked on the docks of lower Manhattan. Among them were 100 teenage girls and young women who were listed alphabetically at the end of the ship’s manifest. Among those passengers was seventeen year-old Brigid Egan, the future grandmother of Clare Curtin, the speaker. The girls were part of some prearranged assisted-emigration scheme but the exact origins were unknown....Who were the sponsors and what were their motives? Seeking answers to these questions led our presenter on a quest spanning ten years. Family history was explored, historians interviewed, and archives researched in New York, County Clare, Dublin and Belfast. While telling us more about assisted emigration in the context of the historical period, Clare Curtin will follow the path of teenager Brigid Egan, through photographs and documentation, beginning at her tenant farmhouse in Cahermurphy, Kilmihil, County Clare and ending with her ownership of a brownstone residence in Greenwich Village. via Jim Garrity