My Other Museum Related Project- Part 1

Today’s entry deals with the other museum related project that I have been working on. This project is a continuation of the work I have done on my senior thesis, a requirement of my major. My thesis entitled “Alive With Meaning”: Piecing Together the Material Culture of Newport’s Irish, 1848-1898, in a very simple sense deals with the ceramic material culture of an Irish immigrant family living in Newport between those years. Had I only written about that, however, it would have been a very short paper, which it wasn’t. Length wise it was 124 pages long; 45 pages of it was a written thesis the rest were a mix of photos, a glossary, analysis tables making up numerous appendices.

The ceramics that I based much of my thesis on was from a property now owned by the Newport Restoration Foundation. The ceramics were discovered when the head gardener for the NRF went to plant a tree for the tenant of the house. What he stumbled upon was actually a trash pit consisting of large ceramic sherds, clay pipes, glass, faunal remains (animal bones thrown out after a meal), and small finds (buttons, buckles, beads etc.). In the Spring of 2007, my professor was contacted to look at the site and that July he and three students, including myself, recovered the remains of the trash pit.

The Irish immigrant family that my thesis focuses on is the Ronayne family. This was concluded through dating the ceramics and by running back the chain of title (the deed history) for the house. John Ronayne came to America in 1848 where he settled in Newport by 1851. Tax records for 1854 (which were published in 1855) show that he was in the bottom 20% of taxpayers in terms of monetary wealth. He worked as a teamster delivering coal from the nearby wharf to homes and businesses. He married Ellen Sullivan sometime between 1860 and 1870, she had been in Newport since at least 1832. Over time, John Ronayne gathered up enough money to buy numerous properties in Newport which he rented to others for an additional source of income. In 1891, two years before his death, tax records show that he was among the top 26% of taxpaying entities in Newport, certainly a dramatic rise for an immigrant from the Great Famine era. He never had any children so after he and his wife died, his property was split up among his siblings, nieces and nephews.

The ceramics recovered from the backyard of the Ronayne household give insight into the way that John Ronayne and his wife lived in Newport. Stay tuned for more on my thesis tomorrow when I will (briefly) describe the ceramics and what they might mean.