Thomas Armstrong

Thomas St George Armstrong was born on 29 November 1797 at Garrycastle, near Clara, Co. Offaly, according to the SILAS dictionary; the historian Patrick McKenna describes him and his brother John as merchants from near Athlone. SILAS says he reached Buenos Aires in 1817. The brothers worked in a merchant house in the city, and McKenna says Thomas was the only Irish Protestant merchant in Buenos Aires. He married Justa Villanueva, whose father had been alcalde of the city.

Armstrong matters to this story as a recruiter. In 1826 he visited Ireland, at the same time as John Thomond O'Brien, and recruited labourers from the Westmeath–Longford border, the district between Ballymahon, Ballymore and Mullingar. McKenna notes that an unusually high share of labouring-class emigrants came from the Ballymore Poor Law district, where members of the Armstrong family helped run the workhouse, but he could not prove a formal arrangement, and the workhouse records are lost. The chain he helped open was the main one: by McKenna's count about three-fifths of all the Irish who settled permanently in Argentina came from the Westmeath–Longford–Offaly district.

He also became the community's banker. He was banker to Fr Anthony Fahy and gave him the house in which the chaplain lived for most of his ministry. SILAS lists him as a director of the National Bank and of the Bank of Buenos Aires Province, founder of the Argentine Insurance Company in 1859 and a promoter of the Southern Railway in 1863; McKenna adds that he was a founder of the Buenos Aires stock exchange and a railway investor. He died in Buenos Aires on 9 June 1875.