| He had first believed he was born in Ohio, but his mother, Mary Meenagh Sheridan, later told him he had been born in Albany; later still she told the Sheridan Monument Association that he had been born at sea during the voyage from their home in County Cavan, Ireland. The other strong possibility is that he was actually born in Co. Cavan before they began the trip over. That is what the people of Cavan believe and it may be true. Being born in Ireland was a liability during the dark days of the anti-Irish Know Nothing Party in the U.S. His mother's numerous changes in the story of his birth would seem unnecessary if he had actually been born here. Irish birth could account for the lack of any record or witnesses of his birth in any United States location, however. But whether he was born on the Ol' Sod or somewhere over here, two things are certain: his ancestry was Irish, and he is considered one of the three greatest Union commanders of the American Civil War, along with Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. |
From PH Sheridan's memoirs, "My parents, John and Mary Sheridan, came to America in 1830, having been induced by the representations of my father's uncle, Thomas Gainor, then living in Albany, N. Y., to try their fortunes in the New World: They were born and reared in the County Cavan, Ireland, where from early manhood my father had tilled a leasehold on the estate of Cherrymoult; and the sale of this leasehold provided him with means to seek a new home across the sea. My parents were blood relations—cousins in the second degree—my mother, whose maiden name was Minor, having descended from a collateral branch of my father's family. Before leaving Ireland they had two children, and on the 6th of March, 1831, the year after their arrival in this country, I was born, in Albany, N. Y., the third child in a family which eventually increased to six—four boys and two girls.
The prospects for gaining a livelihood in Albany did not meet the expectations which my parents had been led to entertain, so in 1832 they removed to the West, to establish themselves in the village of Somerset, in Perry County, Ohio, which section, in the earliest days of the State; had been colonized from Pennsylvania and Maryland. At this period the great public works of the Northwest—the canals and macadamized roads, a result of clamor for internal improvements—were in course of construction, and my father turned his attention to them, believing that they offered opportunities for a successful occupation. Encouraged by a civil engineer named Bassett, who had taken a fancy to him, he put in bids for a small contract on the Cumberland Road, known as the "National Road," which was then being extended west from the Ohio River. A little success in this first enterprise led him to take up contracting as a business, which he followed on various canals and macadamized roads then building in different parts of the State of Ohio, with some good fortune for awhile, but in 1853 what little means he had saved were swallowed up —in bankruptcy, caused by the failure of the Sciota and Hocking Valley Railroad Company, for which he was fulfilling a contract at the time, and this disaster left him finally only a small farm, just outside the village of Somerset, where he dwelt until his death in 1875." |
John Philip Sheridan
Mary Manah (Meenagh)
Birth