Irish Canadian Famine Research
Irish Canadian Famine Research
Month: March, 2015
March 31, 2015
New York Times on Famine Irish in Montreal
“Saving the Famine Irish: the Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger.” April 1 2015 through March 18 2016. Mondays through Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Arnold Bernhard Library, 275 Mount Carmel Avenue; quinnipiac.edu.
March 26, 2015
New exhibition explores aid given to famine-time Irish immigrants in Montreal
New Exhibition on Famine Irish in Montreal
From Irish Central.com
Frances Mulraney
Letter of June 19, 1847 to Mother McMullen”
A new exhibition at Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University explores famine-time immigrants in Montreal and the selfless acts of those who helped them during the summer of 1847.
Opening on April 1, “Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger” delves into Montreal records to bring the story of the religious orders who came to the aid of Irish immigrants when they needed it most.
The exhibition is presented by Christine Kinealy, founding director of the Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute and a professor of history at Quinnipiac, in collaboration with Jason King, Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Moore Institute at Galway University, and the Arnold Bernhard Library.
The year-long exhibition looks at the thousands of Irish who left Ireland to escape the famine and immigrated to Canada. Upon arrival in Canada, however, the suffering of many famine Irish continued, as they remained among the poorest of the poor and some of them were stricken with typhus fever following the long voyage.
Grey Nuns Motherhouse. Photo by: Thomas1313/Wiki Commons
In acts of extreme kindness, a number of people in the English and French Canadian communities came to their aid and provided shelter and support for those ailing and dying. Leading the charge in helping the Montreal Irish were the Sisters of Charity, also known as the Grey Nuns.
“The story of the Grey Nuns, and of the other religious orders who helped the dying Irish immigrants, is one of kindness, compassion and true charity,” Kinealy said.
“Nonetheless, almost 6,000 Irish immigrants perished in the fever sheds of Montreal. They had fled from famine in Ireland only to die of fever in Canada. This is a remarkable story that deserves to be better known.”
Visitors to the exhibition can expect to see an 1848 painting, commissioned by the Bishop of Montreal, depicting the Grey Nuns in action as they tended to the poor, maps outlining the fever sheds where the sick were kept in isolation, records the Order kept on the children they attended when they had lost their families and a Grey Nun habit (a black and brown dress despite their name) among other items collected over the past six months.
A map taken from the exhibition. Title: “’The Terrible Epidemic of 1847” by National Federation Boxer, pub. John Lovell, Montreal
Another interesting item in the collection is a letter written by one of the sisters, telling a person that they had items of their father’s following his death and were attempting the return the items to his family. Speaking to IrishCentral, Christine Kinealy said that this shows the level of kindness and compassion shown by the nuns during these years. Putting themselves in danger of disease, they tended the sick and looked after newly-orphaned Irish children.
“These children left their homeland, embarked on a long voyage, arrived to Canada and then lost their parents. The Grey Nuns were then so kind to them – what would have happened to these children if it wasn’t for the Grey Nuns?”
“It’s important to remember that the nuns were also French-Canadian, they weren’t Irish. It just shows the general compassion they had to put their own lives in danger for others.”
The Grey Nuns were founded in 1738 by Marguerite d’Youville as a religious association to care for the poor. The congregation became an official religious institution meaning the nuns swear normal three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as well as an extra pledge to devote their lives to the service of suffering humanity. From the 1840s onwards, they expanded enormously to become a major provider of healthcare and other social services throughout Quebec, Western and Northern Canada, and the northern United States.
The Grey Nuns acts of kindness saved many children. Photo by: James Duncin/Wiki Commons
The exhibition will be available to the public from April 1, 2015 to March 18, 2016 in the Lender Special Collection Room in the university’s library. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. The exhibition will be officially launched at a private event on Tuesday, March 31, by the Canadian Consul General (New York); Quebec Delegate to New England (Boston); and the Irish Consul General (NYC).
March 23, 2015
Montreal Irish Memorial Park Foundation at St. Patrick’s Day Parade 2015
From Donovan King:
The Mayor Denis Coderre giving the thumbs up when I yelled “Support the Black Rock!”
Montreal Irish Memorial Park Foundation
March 15, 2015
Walk for Tragic Ship
Sligo Champion
Paul Deering 07/03/2015
On 4th April, Rose Marie Stanley with her husband Terry will lead a Famine Trail Commemoration Walk from Cross, Keash to Sligo Port. Rose Marie is a fifth generation descendent of Patrick and Sarah Kaveney, who with their six children did this same walk on the 4th April 1847, when as famine victims they left Ireland in the hope of a better life in Canada.
Mullaghmore and Cliffoney Historical Society in conjunction with descendents of different branches of the Kaveney family and other walking groups are undertaking this walk in memory of Patrick and Sarah and their six children, and all those who sailed with them to Canada on the ill fated Carricks in April 1847. The walk is 21 miles long and will start at the old Kaveney homestead in Cross at 9am and will proceed through Ballymote, Colloney, Ballysodare, and on to Sligo Port where they will arrive about 4pm. A short ceremony will take place at the pontoon beside the Custom and Ballast Quays, from where the Carricks set sail on its final journey.
Patrick and Sarah Kaveney were tenants of Lord Palmerston and became the first batch of his Assisted Emigrants to leave Sligo in 1847 for Quebec. Patrick and Sarah left on the 5th April 1847. At Sligo Port they were joined by 28 other families, a total of 173 emigrants, all former Palmerston tenants.
Some 17 of the families came from the Ballymote estate, 5 more came from Ennismurray, and 6 came from Ahamlish. Just over three weeks after leaving Sligo these emigrants entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence and were in sight of the Canadian coast when the Carricks was caught in a snow storm and crashed into the notorious Cap des Rosiers. Only 48 passengers survived. Patrick and Sarah with their son Martin survived; their five daughters were drowned.
They set up home in Jersey Cove and had four more children In 1855 Patrick died in a snow storm as he attended St. Patrick Day celebrations.
Rechristened Kavanagh in Canada, Patrick and Sarah set about establishing their new lives and local families helped them out until they could fend for themselves. They set up their new home in Jersey Cove, the Gaspe, had four more children and in 1855 Patrick died in a snow storm as he attended St. Patrick Day celebrations. Now 168 years after arriving in the Gaspe, family branches have spread out across Canada, but they still retain the family base in Jersey Cove. Most family branches are French speakers although some remain English speakers. Down the generations the family retained knowledge of, and came in search of, their Sligo roots. But only in recent years were they able to re-establish those roots and reconnect with long lost relatives who will join Rose Marie and Terry on the upcoming walk.
A monument, erected by the parish of St. Patrick’s Montreal, stands in the Gaspe in memory of those who drowned with the sinking of the Carricks. In May 2011 long lost remains were found in what appears to have been a mass grave near where the tragedy occurred. Investigations are underway to determine if these remains are those of Carricks victims.
March 15, 2015
19th-century Toronto Irish immigrants a lesson in upward mobility
Toronto Star,
By: Eric Andrew-Gee Staff Reporter, Published on Sat Mar 14 2015
In the 19th century, Toronto was overwhelmingly British and Protestant, a bastion of WASP burghers for whom Queen and Empire were watchwords and ethnic uniformity was a given.
And then there were the Irish.
Catholics from the Emerald Isle were the city’s original immigrant underclass, and faced frank, bitter discrimination for decades. Sectarian tension once ran so high that Toronto came to be known as “the Belfast of Canada.”
Yet by the time of the First World War, the Irish had largely blended in to the city’s mainstream.
In a Toronto where marginalization of ethnic minorities remains a live issue, the integration of its Irish population in the 19th century may provide lessons, and some hope, for healing the city’s divides.
Interviews with historians, contemporary newspaper accounts, and the academic literature on the period paint a dire portrait of Victorian Toronto’s intolerance and inequality.
While the city had long been home to a smattering of Irish immigrants, the summer of 1847 saw a deluge: 38,000 between June and October, driven across the Atlantic by a potato blight that was starving the country.
The city was “absolutely overwhelmed,” said Mark McGowan, a professor of Irish Canadian history at the University of Toronto.
Just about 2,000 of those “faminities” wound up staying in the city — the rest spread across southern Ontario and farther afield — but in a city of about 30,000, the Irish influx was huge. By 1851, a quarter of the city’s population was Irish Catholic.
The virulent anti-Catholicism of many Protestant Torontonians compounded the difficulties of accommodating so many newcomers. Long a feature of British nationalism, hostility toward Roman Catholics was accentuated in the 1850s and 1860s by Irish republicanism and Fenian unrest in the British Isles and North America.
Colin McConnell/Toronto Star
Some malnourished Irish died of typhus and other diseases on the way to Toronto. Those who survived often found themselves unwelcome and discriminated against, despised for their poverty but refused when they sought jobs.
In Toronto, the anti-Catholic mood was deepened by lingering resentment over the grafting together of Anglo-Protestant Upper Canada and French Catholic Lower Canada in 1840.
George Brown, a leading Grit politician and founder of the Globe newspaper, channeled this sentiment in frequent broadsides against the city’s Irish immigrants.
“Irish beggars are to be met everywhere, and they are ignorant and vicious as they are poor,” read one particularly notorious column from the time. “They are lazy, improvident and unthankful; they fill our poorhouses and our prisons.”
Brown’s vitriol contained a disquieting kernel of fact: many of the Irish who came to Toronto were desperately poor, especially as the famine dragged on.
A Globe report from the early 1860s portrayed the new immigrant sections of town as filthy warrens, full of “miserable hovels which in themselves are better fitted for pig-styes and cow-pens than residences for human beings.”
The city was soon dotted with Irish Catholic enclaves. Corktown, named after Ireland’s County Cork, was one such neighbourhood. Nearby Cabbagetown held a higher concentration of Irish Protestants, sparking occasional turf skirmishes.
Writing of his Toronto childhood, Cabbagetown native and Globe and Mail columnist John McAree remembered the animosity that bristled between the rival territories.
“Though the distance from our store to Corktown was less than half a mile, we had no contact with it,” he wrote in his 1953 memoir, Cabbagetown Store, “except on such special occasions as the 12th of July, or a rehearsal for when our Orange Lodge would march into enemy territory, looking for the trouble it generally provoked.”
The Orange Order, a Protestant fraternal organization founded in Northern Ireland at the end of the 18th century, held inordinate political power in Victorian Toronto. Between 1845 and 1900, all but three of the city’s mayors were members of the Order.
July 12 marked the annual commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne, a crucial 1690 military victory for William of Orange over the Catholic James II, which ensured Protestant supremacy in Ireland.
It was one of Toronto’s sectarian holidays that periodically turned violent. By one count, Orangemen and Irish Catholics did battle 22 times between 1867 and 1892, often on July 12 or St. Patrick’s Day.
But occasional outbursts of communal violence may not have been as harmful as the steady day-to-day onslaught of discrimination the Irish faced. Access to government jobs in the police and fire services was often controlled by Orangemen, foreclosing the route to middle-class prosperity taken by so many Irish Catholics in Boston and New York.
Private companies were known to maintain informal anti-Irish hiring practices, too. Having a southern Irish accent would have been an impediment to landing a job on the Eaton’s shop floor, McGowan said.
Colin McConnell/Toronto Star
The statues in Ireland Park hidden away at the foot of Bathurst and Queens Quay represent the struggles of Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine around 1847.
So how did the Irish emerge from a climate of poverty, hostility and violence that too often defined their lives in Toronto? A range of factors contributed, of course, some hard to replicate in modern-day Toronto, but others more readily at hand.
It surely helped that the Irish spoke English, allowing them to sidestep the language barrier that would slow the integration of later generations of newcomers.
Physical mobility was another Irish advantage. Corktown and neighbourhoods like it may have served as landing pads for the new immigrants, but they rarely stayed in one place for long.
“By the 1890s, they’re everywhere,” said McGowan, himself descended from famine refugees. “If you went to an American city, there would be these long-standing Irish enclaves. You don’t have that here.” This geographic dispersal helped bring Catholics and Protestants into closer contact, driving mutual understanding and even encouraging intermarriage. “Cupid was probably more important than denomination at a certain point,” McGowan said.
At the same time, immigrants from other parts of the world began trickling into Toronto, loosening the Irish monopoly on the fears and resentments of the WASP majority.
“From the 1880s, Toronto started getting immigrants who were even more scary from the majority perspective,” said Allan Levine, author of Toronto: Biography of a City.
“Number one, Catholic Irish immigration peters out, so there are fewer paddies with cloth caps and accents in the downtown area,” said William Jenkins, a professor of North American Irish history at York University, and himself the proud owner of a lilting Irish accent. “People basically just forget about the Irish.”
In the meantime, the community was working doggedly to improve its lot. Mutual aid societies, church parishes, sports teams, card parties, and temperance leagues created a thick support net for Catholics trying to climb the social ladder or simply to avoid destitution.
“They created their own infrastructure,” said Levine. “They looked after themselves.”
This network could be surprisingly thorough, covering expenses that even the modern welfare state neglects; the Bona Mors Society, for example, helped defray the costs of Irish Catholic funerals in Toronto.
The most important of the civil society institutions was Catholic schooling. Since the 1840s, the Upper Canada government had extended funding to separate Catholic schools, an arrangement enshrined in the British North America Act of 1867.
Meanwhile, Catholic kids could get excellent post-secondary instruction at St. Michael’s College, which only formally federated with the University of Toronto in 1910.
All that education led gradually to professional, middle-class jobs. “The generation of maids gives way to a generation of lower-level clerks, firemen, skilled tradesmen,” said Jenkins.
Eventually those clerks became barristers and bureaucrats. As McGowan pointed out, James J. Foy, a Catholic lawyer and alumnus of St. Michael’s College, became a leading Tory politician and right-hand man to premier James Whitney at the turn of the 20th century.
By the 1910s, McGowan notes, the Orange Order and the Catholic Holy Name Society were able to hold marches through Toronto without incident.
Of course, that was six decades after the first significant wave of Irish immigration to Toronto. One of the sharpest weapons against Irish marginalization was time itself.
“If you’re looking at the famine Irish, by the 1890s, you’re looking at a community that’s been here for 40 years,” McGowan said.
Through the accumulation of hard, impoverished decades, the Irish not only made themselves part of Toronto’s social fabric, they expanded the idea of what that society could be.
The Irish conception of their place in Toronto “wasn’t the imperial nationalism of WASP Canadian identity,” said Jenkins — it was more liberal, more ecumenical, less British.
“These Irish Catholics formulated their own idea of what it meant to be Canadian.”
19th c. Irish Toronto by the numbers
38,000
The number of Irish famine refugees who arrived in Toronto during the summer of 1847
863
Irish immigrants who died of typhus in the “fever sheds” at King and John Sts. that year
25 per cent
Proportion of Toronto’s population that was Irish Catholic by 1851
22
Times the Protestant Orange Order and the city’s Irish Catholics fought in the streets between 1867 and 1892, by one count
March 12, 2015
Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute to open Grey Nuns exhibition on April 1
Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger Exhibition opens April 1.
March 11, 2015 – Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University will open a new exhibition, “Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger,” on Wednesday, April 1 in the Arnold Bernhard Library on the Mount Carmel Campus, 275 Mount Carmel Ave.
The exhibition tells the story of the religious orders in Montreal whose members gave selflessly to Irish immigrants during the summer of 1847 – their time of greatest need.
Christine Kinealy, founding director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac and a professor of history, is presenting the exhibition in collaboration with Jason King, Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Moore Institute at Galway University, and the Arnold Bernhard Library.
Many thousands of people fled from Ireland during the Great Hunger and immigrated to Canada. Famine immigrants to Montreal were not only among the poorest of the poor, but many of them arrived already sick with typhus fever. Despite this, a number of people in the English and French Canadian communities provided the ailing and the dying with shelter and support. In the forefront of this compassionate movement were the Sisters of Charity, also known as the Grey Nuns.
“The story of the Grey Nuns, and of the other religious orders who helped the dying Irish immigrants, is one of kindness, compassion and true charity,” Kinealy said. “Nonetheless, almost 6,000 Irish immigrants perished in the fever sheds of Montreal. They had fled from famine in Ireland only to die of fever in Canada. This is a remarkable story that deserves to be better known.”
The year-long exhibition will be housed in the Lender Special Collection Room in the University’s library and will be open to the public from April 1, 2015 to March 18, 2016. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.
The exhibition will be officially launched at a private event on Tuesday, March 31, by the Canadian Consul General (New York); Quebec Delegate to New England (Boston); and the Irish Consul General (NYC). For more information, call (203) 582-2634.
– See more at: http://www.quinnipiac.edu/news-and-events/irelands-great-hunger-institute-to-open-grey-nuns-exhibition-on-april-1/#sthash.cUETwxXi.dpuf
March 8, 2015
Jacob Ellgood’s Eyewitness Testimony of Montreal’s Famine Irish Fever Sheds in 1848
Source:
The Montreal Standard
Old Home Numbers
Sept. 13-20 1909
Jacob Ellegood’s Testimony about Famine Irish Fever Sheds in 1848 and Father Patrick Dowd:
Montreal in the decades after the Irish Famine Migration:
March 2, 2015
Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger (new exhibit: opens April 1st)
Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger
New exhibition to open April 1
This spring, Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute will open the exhibition “Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger,” which tells the story of the religious orders in Montreal whose members gave selflessly to Irish immigrants during their time of greatest need.
Christine Kinealy, PhD, founding director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute, is presenting this exhibition in collaboration with Jason King, PhD, Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Moore Institute at Galway University, and the Arnold Bernhard Library.
Many fled from Ireland during the Great Hunger and immigrated to Canada. Famine immigrants to Montreal were not only among the poorest of the poor, but also many of them arrived sick with typhus fever. Despite this, a number of people in the English and French Canadian communities provided the ailing and the dying with shelter and support. In the forefront of this compassionate movement were the Sisters of Charity, also known as the Grey Nuns.
The exhibition will be housed in the Lender Special Collection Room in Quinnipiac University’s Arnold Bernhard Library and will be open to the public starting April 1, 2015. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. Please call 203-582-2634 for hours during the academic intercessions.
March 1, 2015
What happened to Thomas Treacy?
Toronto Star.
Remnants of Toronto’s History
Our readers tell us about heirlooms, photos and other mementoes that evoke the city’s past.
By: LESLIE SCRIVENER STAFF REPORTER, Published on Sun Mar 11 2007
In the summer of 1847, a seven-year-old orphan, Brigit Ann Treacy, arrived in Toronto half-starved, but carrying a small treasure – a gold-painted cream jug which was her sole keepsake from her home in Ireland. Passage on the famine ship Jane Black had been perilous; there was little food or water. Brigit Ann had been so hungry she’d chewed on her leather shoelaces.
She was travelling with her aunt, Peggy Ryan Clancy. There was to have been a third passenger, her younger brother, Thomas, but he disappeared in the chaos of boarding ship on the docks at Limerick. It’s not known what became of him.
Aunt and niece settled in Whitby, where Peggy worked as a cook. Brigit Ann grew to be a beautiful young woman who one year was named the “belle of Whitby,” her great-granddaughter Terry Smith recalls. Smith, a former Ontario deputy-minister of culture, has inherited the creamer, which she keeps in her grandmother’s china cabinet. She runs a company, Philanthropic Partnerships Inc., which matches donors with charities, and is the only famine descendent on the board of the Ireland Park Foundation, which is creating a park scheduled to open at Bathurst Quay in June.
Brigit Ann was one of the 38,000 Irish immigrants who landed in Toronto in 1847, having fled the Irish potato famine, which killed one million people over six years. Many arrived at the docks sick with typhus; 1,110 died by the end of 1847.
The story of her great-grandmother’s arrival and survival, told through generations in her family, is also the story of the settlement of Canada, Smith says. Brigit Ann married Michael John McTague, another Irish immigrant, and had four children, including Norah, Smith’s grandmother, who raised nine children. Smith has traced more than 200 of Brigit Ann’s descendants in Canada and the U.S.
“This little jug reminds us all where we came from and the struggle our ancestors took to make a new life here,” she wrote in a note to the Star.
Last fall Smith and her sister Sheila Kirk found Brigit Ann’s tombstone in St. Michael’s cemetery near Yonge St. and St. Clair Ave. She died in 1924, when she was 84. Brigit Ann’s aunt, Peggy, lived to be 103.
Smith’s thoughts went back to the 1847 crossing. “It gave us a sense of peace,” Smith says, “to find the site where this woman was buried, once a frightened little girl arriving in a new land with only a gold creamer jug in her hand.’
But there are still unknown elements in this story. Smith still wants to find out what happened to Brigit Ann’s brother, the little boy who was lost or left behind at the docks.
Irish Canadian Famine Research 