Edward D Noonan

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Edward D Noonan (1840–1920), a 2× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his Irish birth, parentage, emigration to Boston, marriage, and son. Notable: born in Ireland in 1840 on the eve of the Great Famine, later settling in Boston, Massachusetts among the great Irish-American immigrant community of the nineteenth century.

Edward D Noonan (1840–1920) was born on the tenth of August, 1840, in Ireland, the son of John Nunan Noonan (1804–1885) and Mary Noonan Wood, who had been born in 1796. His arrival into the world came in the years immediately preceding the Great Famine, that catastrophic period beginning in 1845 which would drive more than a million Irish men, women, and children across the Atlantic in search of survival and opportunity. Edward was among that generation whose lives were shaped, directly or indirectly, by those grievous years and by the steady current of Irish emigration which followed throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In time, Edward found his way to Boston, Massachusetts, a city which by the mid-1800s had become one of the principal harbors of Irish settlement in the New World. There the Irish community established parishes, benevolent societies, and tightly knit neighborhoods, transforming the civic and religious character of the city even as they faced no small measure of nativist resistance. It was in this milieu that Edward made his life.

He was united in marriage to Jane Catherine Woods, known affectionately as Genevieve. From their union came at least one recorded son, Edward Steven Noonan, born in 1879, who would live a long life until 1964 and carry the family name forward into the twentieth century.

Edward D Noonan died in Boston in 1920, having reached the venerable age of approximately eighty years. His passage from the fields of Ireland to the streets of an American port city traced the arc of a generation; his descendants would carry both the Noonan name and the imprint of that Irish-American inheritance into succeeding lines.

Edward was the compiler's great-great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.