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The Queenstown Locket

This unique memento can be yours.  Get it for yourself or as a gift for a friend or relative of Irish ancestry.  This silver coloured locket contains a real, genuine sliver of brick from Queenstown Railway Station in Co.Cork, Ireland, a place from which so many of our forefathers passed through on the way to the U.S. (CLICK HERE FOR INFORMATION ON HOW TO OBTAIN THIS DELIGHTFUL AND NOSTALGIC HEIRLOOM).
They were hard times. Work was scarce and hunger and want widespread. Children languished at home as father's and mother's besought work from any quarter. Husbands worked from dawn 'till dusk in rain lashed fields or in hot factories whose dust filled air scarred their lungs. Women hired themselves out as skivvies to the rich.  And these were the lucky ones.  The unfit and the unlucky starved


But the more adventurous and spirited had a dream in their souls.  A dream of freedom. Their own land languished under foreign domination but the eternal longing of the Celt for liberty could not be extinguished.  While freedom was denied them in the land of their birth a great nation was emerging just over the western horizon.  Old stories were remembered; stories they had overheard as children when their elders had smoked and talked by the fireside in the long dark winter nights as they wind whistled through the rafters like the song of the banshee herself.  They were stories as old as Ireland; whispers and rumours of fabulous lands far away over the western sea; stories of Tir na nOg and of Hy-brasil - lands of youth and lands of plenty.  It was said that sometimes, if one had exceptonally good eyesight and if the day itself was clear and bright enough, and if one stood on a high hill on the western seabord - on a hill like Mount Brandon or on the Cliffs of Moher - one might see, glimmering palely on the horizon - one of these lands.

And as these men and women grew to adulthood, it was easy to replace the dream of Hy-Brasil with the dream of Americay. How the fire of freedom must have burned in the hearts of our forefathers! How great the desire for liberty was in their brave souls! They foresook home and kith and kin to pursue this great goal.  They travelled with little money across wild and savage seas, locked in the holds of hulks and coffin ships.  They braved robbery, disease and above all, that sickness of the heart which is unusually common to the Irish; the curse of homesickness.


And these people were our forefathers.  We are proud of them and we are proud of the nation they helped create.  Into the great melting pot of America they added that seasoning of Irish fighing spirit coupled with a love for democracy and for freedom.  And in that spirit of pride we have created a unique memento - The Queenstown Locket.

 brick taken from old buildings at the Queenstown (now Cobh) railway station in Co.Cork.

For many of our forefathers this was the last sight they had of Ireland.  This red brick might be the last Irish wall against which they rested shoulders bowed both with grief and with hope, before they boarded the ship which would take them to the  U.S. Perhaps their next stop might be Ellis Island at which those same shoulders might rest, fatigued from the journey, against an American brick wall.

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