Carroll Quigley
4448 GREENWICH PARKWAY,
N. W.WASHINGTON, D. C. 20007
Dear George Quigley,
Thank you for your
interesting letter of 20 Sept. You certainly know more about your branch
of the Quigley family than I know about mine; and yours came to this
country about 50 years before mine.
My great grandfather, Patrick Quigley, came to
Boston, Mass. in 1829 from Quigleys Point, County Donegal, Ireland,
which is far in the north, on the west side of Lough Foyle, far north of
Londonderry and about 12 miles from Moville. Quigley's Point is a rocky
peninsula which juts out into Lough Foyle and has a lighthouse just off the Point. It is an area which has many Viking and Scottish
influences and blood, and my family has always used some Scottish names
as well as Irish ones. Thus we have had several Andrews and Lawrences in
the family. Most of the family are rather heavy-boned, strong, blond,
with blue eyes, and rather roundish heads; I do not, because I look
like my mother's family, the Carrolls. Patrick Quigley was very strong
and very poor. He took a bar of iron onto the ship with him on his way
to America in 1829 and on one night stood in the stern of the ship and
made bets with many of the passengers that he could tie a knot in the
bar. When they had put up a good sum of money, he tied the knot and
collected the money. This he used to get a start in America. He settled
in Charlestown on the north side of the Boston Harbor where he had
several children, but I do not have the exact details, except that my
grandfather, Andrew Quigley, was born about 1830 and died about 1908 in
Boston. Andrew was not a very well educated man, but he married a
schoolteacher, Mary Caulfield, and made a good deal of money. In the
1850s there was a great deal of building going on in Boston and he
became a builder, but soon specalized in interior finishing, especially
plastering and ceilings. When he was 18 years old, he had 58 men working
for him. He later branched out into otheractivities, with his wife
keeping his accounts. He owned a number of houses, a brewery, and a
grocery store. We still own a house in Boston that he worked on about
1855. He had three sons and a daughther: Joseph; Lawrence; Catherine;
and William Francis, who was born in October 1880 and was my father. Of
course, Joseph never married, but continued in construction, especially
concrete roads in New England. Lawrence had three children: Catherine;
Alice; and Francis, but Lawrence died young and my father took care of
the children using his father's estate, which was also used to help
support others. In 1900, when my grandfather Andrew was 70 he was fairly
well off of drove the family to Church on Sundays in a carriage with
four horses, but most of that estate was spent by 1940. My father, the
youngest child, was everybody's darling, very steady, reliable and an
outstanding student. He graduated from highschool at age 17 and passed
the examination for (MIT) Massachusette Institute of Technology, where
he was admitted in 1898, but his mother died that year and he decided to
go to work, as he felt responsible for his family, including his father
and his widowed sister-in-law with her children. He became a fireman in
the Boston Fire Department where he ultimately becomes Chief in the late
1930s. Bill Quigley married on his 28th birthday, 28 October 1908, the
same year that his father died. His wife, my mother, was Mary Frances
Carroll, whose father, Edward Carroll, had been an employee in the
main postoffice of Halifax, Nova Scotia. This Edward Carroll had 12
children, of which three girls died in the same night from diphtheria;
the other nine survived, at least two into their ninties. My mother was
the ninth child, and when she was about ten, her father died of typhoid
fever leaving his wife with nine young children. She had a cousin,
Patrick Barry, who was general manager of the Jordan Marsh Company, the
largest department store in Boston, who brought all of the Carrolls to
Boston and gave them jobs in the store as soon as they were old enough
(about 14). That is how my mother got to Boston, about 1891, where she
married my father in 1908. They had four sons; John Andrew (1909);
Carroll (that is me, 1910); Francis (1912) and Arthur (1914). Of these
Francis did not marry and died in the old house about 10 years ago. John
is a medical doctor in New England and had ten children, so there are a
lot Quigley up there, for he has many grandchildren (he made about
$40,000 a year as a physician, by working very hard). My youngest
brother, Arthur, is a professor of electrical engineering at Notre Dame,
Indiana, and had three children (two girls and a boy, Joseph). I married
in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1937 and had two sons, both married but
with no children: Denis (1941) and Thomas (1945).
We were a very studious family, and at
one time my father had four sons in four different universities from
which we four earned nine academic degrees. You can see what I have done
if you look up my name in WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA.I have three
degrees from Harvard, have taught at Princeton and Harvard, and have
been Professor of History at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown
University here for thirty years. I write and advise the government a
good deal, have been consultant to all three of the Armed Services and
to the Select Congressional Committee which established NASA and began
the Space program in 1958.
We have other Quigley cousins still in Boston, including Lawrence Quigley
who was the mayor of Chelsea, Massachusetts, for many years and was
later Commandant of the Chelsea Naval Veterans Hospital. His son, John
Lawlor Quigley, is now Commandant of the same hospital, and another of
his sons, Andrew, has been in the State legistature for many years ( I should say in and out). You might
be interested to know that my father had an aunt who married an uncle of
Joe Kennedy in the last century, probably because the two families were
both in the liquor business. I knew Joe and both Jack and Bob slightly,
and have a protrait inscribed to me and signed by Jack when he became
president in 1961. Two weeks before Bob was killed I walked him and his
dog Freckles to his car, opened the door, and, as he got in, said, "For
God's sake be careful; there are a lot of other crazy people around
besides Oswald". He said, " I cant worry about that. I have to do my
work, and what is going to happen will happen."
Thank you for your letter. I found it very interesting. I am sorry
that I do not have
as accurate information as you have. I really should make an effort
to get it, but my father and mother both died in 1957, both aged 77,
and I am too far from Boston to look things up now. Best wishes to
you and all the Quigleys everywhere. Incidentally, you asked about
the name Quigley. You will not like this, but I have heard it comes
from an Irish word meaning " an untidy person", so we better not
talk about this.
Sincerely yours,
Carroll Quigley
Original Scan of Letter
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