When Terence2 arrived in New York in 1832, the city was in the process of becoming the teeming melting pot it was later famous for, and there was already a substantial Irish population.  A half million Irish immigrated to America in the pre-famine era following the War of 1812.  This was the city portrayed in Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York, and Terence1’s time and place there coincided exactly with the events described.  He would have been a witness to the rise of the gangs, and he died within a few months of the Draft Riots of 1863.  The addresses we have for him are within a stone’s throw of the notorious Five Points[1]. 

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Named for the points created by the intersection of Mulberry, Anthony (now Worth), Cross (now Park), Orange (now Baxter), and Little Water (extinct) streets, the neighbourhood was known as a centre of vice and debauchery throughout the nineteenth century.  Outsiders found Five Points threatening and fodder for lurid prose. 

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Describing a visit in 1842, Charles Dickens wrote:

"This is the place: these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking every where with dirt and filth.  Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruit here as elsewhere.  The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the wide world over.  Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old.  See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of these pigs live here.  Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting?"

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He was married in 1837 to Mary Keagan and had one child, a daughter Ellen3 born on April 5, 1848 but she died on December 7, 1852 aged 4½.   There may have been other children that didn’t survive, but Ellen3 is the only one mentioned when he opened three accounts, numbered 817 to 819, with the Emigrant Savings Bank on June 30, 1851.  One was in his own name, and the others were in trust for his wife and his daughter respectively.  His address was given as 36 Mott St., Manhattan. 

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