An Irish Family’s Transatlantic Correspondence — New York to Blackrock, 1906–1907

The Correspondence

New York family news sent home to Blackrock.

The three cards were all sent from New York to the same address and survive as a coherent group. The Flatiron card is particularly revealing: it begins “Dear Cis”, thanks the recipient for a long letter after roughly six weeks without family news, refers to a marriage, and is signed “Yr. affec. bro. Jack”. The Waldorf-Astoria card, also signed “Jack”, records an evening performance in the hotel’s roof garden with “Uncle J.” and mentions sending further cards to friends and relations.

The Union Square card carries a brief affectionate dedication to a “Dear Niece” and is dated 9 June 1907. Its signature is not fully legible and is therefore left unattributed in this catalogue record.

The Power Family

“Cis” and “Jack”: a plausible sibling identification.

Genealogical research on the Power family of Blackrock records stockbroker Francis Richard Power and his wife Mary Irwin, with children including John Irwin Power, born in 1883, and Cecelia Mary Power, born in 1885. John was recorded as a clerk with the Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford Railway in 1901; Cecelia was living with her widowed mother at Montpelier Place in 1911.

That family structure makes the wording on the Flatiron card unusually suggestive: “Cis” is a familiar diminutive for Cecelia, while “Jack” is a common familiar form of John, and the card explicitly describes Jack as the recipient’s brother. The identification of the pair as Cecelia Mary Power and John Irwin Power is therefore plausible and supported by the surviving evidence, but is presented as a research attribution rather than an absolute identification.

The other two cards use the forms “Miss Mary Power” and “Miss M. Power”. Because the precise identity of those addressees cannot be established from the cards alone, this catalogue record does not force them into the same identification.

2 Montpelier Place

A Blackrock address with a documented Fenian history.

Montpelier Place is a small group of nineteenth-century houses off Stradbrook Road. Official architectural-heritage documentation records numbers 1–5 as part of an Architectural Conservation Area and states that the houses were built before 1843.

Number 2 has a separate place in Irish literary and political history. The Fenian writer and Irish Republican Brotherhood figure Charles J. Kickham (1828–1882) died there on 22 August 1882. Contemporary and later accounts associate the house with James O’Connor, in whose home Kickham had been living.

These postcards date more than two decades after Kickham’s death. No direct Kickham provenance is claimed. Their significance is different: they document the later social life of the same historic Blackrock address and place the Power family there through everyday transatlantic correspondence.

The New York Views

Three landmarks from the postcard boom of the early twentieth century.

The Flatiron Building, completed only a few years before the card was mailed, had already become one of New York’s most recognisable modern landmarks. The Waldorf-Astoria card depicts the original Fifth Avenue hotel, opened in the 1890s and demolished in 1929 before the Empire State Building rose on the site. The Union Square card captures a busy public space at Fourth Avenue during the same period.

The cards retain the early American “undivided back” convention in which the reverse was reserved for the address and the message was written on the picture side. The New York State Library dates this format broadly to 1901–1907, matching the postmarks and inscription dates in the present group.