The McPeck's Journey

Long islander John Monaco has spent the past number of years researching his family history, that especially of his great, great, grandmother Jane McPeck, who he believes sailed from Londonderry to New York on the ‘Patrick Henry’ in the middle of the nineteenth century. The fruit of his research is the newly-published, ‘The McPeck Journey: An Irish Family from Derry to New York,’ which is a partly fictional work inspired by his forebears’ brave migration into the unknown nearly two centuries ago. The author, who lives in Nesconset, New York, had little enough to go on, being sure only that his great, great grandfather, Dennis McPeck (possibly McPeak/e originally), was born in Ireland in 1809 and eventually found his way onto the New York City census in 1887, as ‘Denis’ He knew also, that his great, great grandmother Jane McPeck, was born in 1814 or 1815 in Ireland and wound her way onto the US census as ‘Jano.’ She died in New York City in 1879. Whilst he had plenty of information from his side of the pond he had greater difficulty pinpointing his ancestors’ exact provenance in Ireland. However, the New York Emigrant Bank records eventually revealed an account for Jane, wife of “De