James J. Joyce, Son of a Ship Caulker, Timothy Joyce

Josephine Bernadette's father, James J. Joyce, was born in Savannah, Georgia on October 31, 1857 and died on April 25, 1916 (according to his grave marker). He was the son of Timothy Joyce and Mary Keenan, both born in Ireland.

In 1860, James Joyce was 3 years old. The census of that year (posted at the Census Records page), reported that James' father, Timothy, worked as a ship caulker. According to an interesting educational website by the Maryland Historical Society,

Caulking is the process by which wooden ships are made watertight. To seal the cracks between the ship's wooden planks, caulkers use a caulking iron and mallet to stuff them with oakum (pieces of old rope) soaked in pitch (a dark, sticky substance like tar). When the wood gets wet, it swells, narrowing the cracks between the planks. The oakum also swells, ensuring that absolutely no water can leak through the cracks. Caulking requires a great degree of skill and experience to be done properly. 

Below is an image of workers caulking a ship.

Taken from Alamy.com

Below is a photo of a tool box and caulker's kit from Massachusetts whaling ship days. You can see the caulkers (depicted in the above image) sitting on similar boxes while doing their work. If you're interested in learning about the trade in more detail, go to the Whaling Museum website; there's a full description there.

Taken from New Bedford Whaling Museum site

 Leather seat with wood sides and bottom. Contains one caulking mallet, five caulking irons, one seam raker made from a race knife, one instrument (seam raker), and one spare mallet handle.

This was an important trade in the shipbuilding industry, as you can imagine. The Maryland history website talks about racial tensions that were developing in the early 1800s in Baltimore between black and white ship caulkers. According to the website, white caulkers resented the power black caulkers (some of whom were enslaved) seemed to possess. One result of this tension was that shipbuilders in the city began to hire more white caulkers, particularly immigrants. Perhaps Savannah was going through some of the same changes that resulted in immigrants such as Timothy Joyce, James Joyce's father, taking up the caulking trade.