Reaching out on behalf of my North Mayo anccestors

I have been researching families from North Mayo for quite some time. My grandfather, Patrick Lamond, was baptized on January 12, 1862. He arrived in the US in June of 1879. It appears that he was living with a Lammond relative, William, in Palmyra, Wayne County, Pennsylvania. He had given his age in 1879 as 24 although he was actually 17. There is another Patrick Lamond who arrived a few years later whose age matched up with my grandfather's. I am thinking that he became homesick and returned to Ireland. In the 1870's Palmyra was a wilderness dotted with small isolated farms. He was either traveling with or joined by a brother James. James was just 14 when he died of pneumonia in 1884. He had been working in the Pine Brook mine in Scranton below ground which was a work violation since he was supposed to be sixteen. In 1888, John, the second oldest and Mary arrived. John lived with my grandfather in the home of James and Catherine Ruane Ruddy on Phelps Street in the Pine Brook section of Scranton. Catherine was the sister of Patrick's mother Anne Ruane Lammond. John worked in the mines but then switched to factory work . He married Mary McAndrew and had two sons, James and John. After their parents died in the 1940's. They moved away and no one knows where they ended up. Mary became a domestic in Philadelphia and married a somewhat well-off man, Patrick Grifferty. I exchange occasional cards with her great-granddaughter. Uncle Willie and Uncle Mikie arrived in 1892. Willie, was also living with the Ruddy's and was killed in a mine cave-in in 1900. Mikie was here for a few weeks when he got into a dispute of a political nature with a man named Dougherty. He beat Dougherty so badly that he prevailed upon my grandfather to give him the money to take the train to Philadelphia. He never came back here but I did speak to one  of his grandsons some years ago. He lived into the 1950's. A daughter Catherine died in Tooreen, the townland in which the family lived in at the time, and is shown in available records. The cause was pneumonia. Another daughter, Margaret, married Thomas Gallagher and by the 1901 Irish census, was living with him, her parents and brother Thomas in Rathnamaugh. The last of that generation, Martin, married Annie Smith in England and moved to Yorkshire where he worked in the quarries.John Lammond died in 1914 and Ann, in 1924. Considering the events and tragedies of 19th century Ireland, they were truly remarkable.

Lammond, as it is spelled today in Ireland, was Lamin and Lamen on the Griffith's evaluation and the tithe applotment books. I don't believe that they were native to Mayo. The name is Scottish and Uncle John always gave his ethnicity as Scottish on the US census. They were Catholics and I have suspected that they were among the thousands who fled Ulster after the Battle of the Diamond. Someone gave me a record showing Patrick Lamond living in the Barony of Dungannon in 1662 but he had disappeared afterward. One researcher tells me that this family was part of the Scots gallowglasses who were recruited by the independent kings of Ireland to fight off Cromwell. It is said that they were will the O'Donnell in Kinsale. It is also noted that Scots who arrived prior to the Plantation of Ulster were Catholics and did not intermarry with the Presbyterian Scots. Because of the dearth of records, I don't suppose I will ever know their origins but they were not native to Crossmolina or Mayo at all. There are several lists of refugees from Ulster, but they are incomplete and while the names of people that they tended to live by and iintermarry with do appear on the lists, These include Mullins, Haran and Campbell.

In telling this story, I hope I am "reaching out."