Duffy's Cut: Catherine Burns is buried in Clonoe

A funeral mass and burial took place at St Patrick's Church in Clonoe, near Coalisland

A woman murdered in America 183 years ago has been buried in her native County Tyrone after her remains had lain in an unmarked grave.

Catherine Burns, 29, left Ireland for the US in 1832 to begin a new life, but within six weeks she was dead.

A funeral mass and burial took place at St Patrick's Church in Clonoe, near Coalisland.

She was one of 57 Irish migrants hired to build a stretch of railway in Pennsylvania known as Duffy's Cut.

Within six weeks of arriving in Philadelphia, all 57 workers - who hailed from counties Donegal, Tyrone and Londonderry - were dead.

It is thought some died from cholera, while others were murdered by local people who believed the immigrants were spreading the disease.

Most were buried anonymously in a mass grave near the shanty town where they lived and worked, but Catherine was among several workers buried separately.

Catherine Burns was 29 when she left Ireland for the US in 1832

Officials with the Philadelphia and Columbia railroad never notified the immigrants' families of their deaths.

Parish priest Father Benny Fee told the funeral: "Catherine is one of our own, she's no stranger, she has Tyrone blood in her veins, but we know so little about her.

"What we do know is that she knew suffering. She was married and already widowed at the tender age of 29 - before she was 30 she had loved and lost. We also know she knew poverty, she knew what it was to have nothing in her purse.

"She took the boat to the USA for no other reason than she had no choice - she could stay at home and starve, or she could gamble on taking a boat across the Atlantic and with a bit of luck catch the tail of the American dream.

"But as Christy Moore's song Duffy's Cut says so well, she was sailing into Hell and less than two months into her arrival in the new world, she and her 56 Irish companions in Duffy's Cut were dead and buried in unmarked graves."

Catherine Burns' coffin in St Patrick's Church

The remains are buried

This is the second repatriation of remains found at Duffy's Cut, now a wooded area behind suburban homes in the borough of Malvern, about 20 miles west of Philadelphia.

In 2013, 18-year-old John Ruddy was reburied at Ardara, County Donegal.

An investigation into what happened to the 57 Irish workers began in 2002, when Malvern's Immaculata University professor Bill Watson, his twin brother Frank, a Lutheran minister, and fellow Immaculata professor Earl Schandelmeier, began the Duffy's Cut archival and research project.

The trio accompanied Catherine on her journey home to County Tyrone and attended the wake and the funeral in Clonoe.

Fr Fee thanked them for the "courtesy and respect they have shown our Tyrone Catherine".

He added: "You have brought Catherine back from her exile to her native pastures. Now there's no fear, no terror for Catherine anymore."

After lying in an unmarked grave for nearly 200 years, Catherine Burns' remains were buried in her native Tyrone

A memorial stone to those who died at Duffy's Cut