Land of hope and dreams – untangling the puzzle of Bruce Springsteen’s Irish ancestry

Springsteen has family roots in Co Mayo, just a few miles from those of US president Joe Biden.

Springsteen’s great-great-grandfather Richard McNicholas emigrated from Kiltimagh after the Great Famine to begin a new life in the United States.

Ireland has a special place in the musician’s heart and he speaks affectionately about his Irish relatives including the McNicholas family.

He spoke about his Irish granny McNicholas at the Slane concert in 1985. The family are named in the song American Land, and in his autobiography Born To Run he mentions his Nana McNicholas. Springsteen gives them a shout-out at his Irish concerts along with the Farrells, O’Hagans, and Sullivans.

When I heard Springsteen had a McNicholas granny – having that surname myself – I was curious to find out which branch of this popular south Mayo family name his ancestors hailed from.

Over the past year small pieces of the puzzle came from online sources, but finding which area of the county Richard McNicholas emigrated from proved to be more difficult.

This part of the puzzle would eventually be solved by older emigrants from Kiltimagh who had moved to the US in the last century. Crucially, they remembered that Springsteen’s ancestors had come from the townland of Treenagleragh, on Sliabh Cairn, a hillside near Kiltimagh.

This was the missing link, but I needed a professional to verify the story. There are two official genealogy centres in Mayo – the South Mayo Family Research Centre in Ballinrobe and the North Mayo Heritage Centre, at Enniscoe House near Crossmolina, which President Biden visited to find out about his Mayo ancestors.

Official records for the areas of Bohola and Kiltimagh, the area where the McNicholas clan originated, are held in the South Mayo Family Research Centre in Ballinrobe.

The centre holds a variety of records including church records, civil records, land records, 1901 and 1911 census, and gravestone inscriptions from the region. ​

It was there I met historian and manager Ger Delaney who sifted through historical records of all kinds until he discovered a Richard McNicholas of Treenagleragh, Kiltimagh who had sailed to the United States after the famine.

Records revealed that in the winter of 1848 three McNicholas families were among 33 families, amounting to 145 people, who were evicted from their homes by Lord Lucan. A letter from the local priest to an Irish newspaper gives a desperate picture of the suffering this caused to the evicted families.

While there is no proof that Richard McNicholas was from one of the evicted families, the timing of his subsequent departure from Liverpool to the United States makes it highly likely.

A shipping record shows that Richard McNicholas, a labourer aged 20, and a “spinster” by the name of Ann McNicholas (21), possibly his sister, sailed from Liverpool to Baltimore, Maryland on February 1, 1851, arriving there six weeks later on March 17. ​

Newspapers from the time also confirm that Richard had lost communication with his brother James McNicholas, who lived in Michigan. James had placed an advert in the Boston Pilotnewspaper in 1867 searching for his brother Richard McNicholas of Treenagleragh, Kiltimagh.

“In those days not everyone was literate and communications were poor at the time, so this was a common practice for tracing lost relatives among the Irish community. The newspaper was read and circulated across the eastern part of North America and it would have passed word of mouth to Richard that his brother James was looking for him,” Ger Delaney explained.

Richard settled in Old Bridge, Monmouth, New Jersey and his son John McNicholas married Jennie Farrell, daughter of Ann Geraghty, one of Springsteen’s better known Irish ancestors. Jennie was mother to Alice McNicholas, who married Fred Springsteen. Their son Douglas is Bruce’s father.

Alice helped raise Bruce in the town of Freehold, New Jersey and, while he calls Alice his “Irish granny”, she was born in the USA.