The speaker on Wednesday 5th November 2025 was club member, Mr Kenneth Collins, who brought to the meeting a local history topic, entitled “A Fateful Migration”. While perusing newspaper columns from the mid-nineteenth century his attention fell on a death notice. Elizabeth Andrews, 22 November 1836, late of Omagh, lost in sinking of the ship BRISTOL, with 2nd son and three daughters”. Patient research uncovered the fact that Mrs Andrews had a shop in Omagh and when her husband David died she decided to sell and emigrate to the USA, to join her eldest son who had emigrated earlier.
Their journey began by taking a horse drawn open coach from Omagh to Derry where they took a paddle steamer to Liverpool and from where in October 1836 she and her children boarded the BRISTOL, a ship bound for New York. By all accounts the 35-day voyage across the Atlantic was uneventful, but fatefully no pilots were available to take the ship on the final leg of its voyage from Long Island 20 miles up the to the New York docks. While waiting a severe storm blew up which drove the ship aground and Mrs Andrews, her 2nd son and three daughters were among 100 fellow passengers who perished, despite the best efforts of local fishermen to rescue those on board.
Kenneth’s talk included how the story was uncovered, contemporary accounts of conditions on the old Trans-Atlantic emigrant sailing ships and photographs of the memorial erected in Rockville cemetery not far from Rockaway beach where the BRISTOL foundered. His talk prompted much discussion and earned him a well-deserved round of applause.