Patrick was sixteen when he crossed the Atlantic working as a cabin boy in the autumn of 1850. Ballina had been one of the worst impacted areas in the whole of Ireland by the famine. When the Great Famine came, Edward was an overseer at the Ballina workhouse where many destitute and starving families congregated. His father Edward had worked on an Ordinance Survey of Ireland and then on the General Valuation, a census of its time. He came from a long line of civil engineers and surveyors in the county.

Joe Biden’s great great grandfather Patrick Blewitt was born in Ballina, county Mayo, in 1832. But he showed endurance in winning the 2020 Democratic nomination and in defeating Donald Trump in the Presidential election. His wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident in 1972 and his son Beau died from brain cancer in 2015 at the age of forty-six. In between he had a lengthy career in the US Senate and was the US Vice President under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017.ĭuring that time he suffered personal tragedies. And in 2021 he became the oldest US President to take the oath of office at the age of seventy-eight. In 1972 he became the sixth-youngest senator in US history after he was elected to the US Senate from Delaware at the age of twenty-nine. Joe Biden has had a long political career. And Joe Biden, when he was Vice President in 2017, had received a hero’s welcome when he visited the hometown in county Mayo of his ancestor Patrick Blewitt. Then there was his close affinity with his former hometown of Scranton where the Irish Blewitts of his family had come. Part of this was probably due to the fact that he is a practicing Catholic. However, he has always seen himself as more Irish than English. Joe has English ancestry on his father’s side and Irish on his mother’s. Joe’s younger sister Valerie released her autobiography that was entitled Growing Up Biden in April 2022. became a successful used car salesman and the family moved to New Castle county, Delaware. The family had gone through some hard times and were living at that time with Joe’s maternal grandparents. Joseph (Joe) Robinette Biden Jr, the 46th President of the United States, was born on November 20th, 1942 to Joseph and Jean Biden in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

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