IA.Ancestors.qxd
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Page 58
Faces
F
or those of us who enjoy the personal side of history, the following photographs and stories from our readers offer a glimpse into the lives of the Irish in America in the 1800s. They are miners, homesteaders, a widow who provides for her six daughters by running a boarding house for oil workers, a railway worker, and a soldier who fought in the Civil War. These then are the photographs of the survivors, the ancestors who immigrated during the great starvation, who help us now to put a face on that great calamity, of which there are no photographs from Ireland. They are the so-called “Famine Irish,” who took those first brave steps into the unknown in search of a better life. They found, more often than not, a hardscrabble existence, but they persevered, and put down firm foundations for future generations to build on. They are not forgotten. – Patricia Harty
Photographs compiled by Anne Thompson 58 IRISH AMERICA JUNE / JULY 2010
Famine
Catherine
Catherine was 10 years old when the blight first hit the potato crop in 1845. She survived, married a man from a neighboring village and they left for America in the 1860s. N EAL M ORAN WRITES ABOUT HIS GREAT-GRANDMOTHER. Catherine Flannely, born in Porturlin, County Mayo, around 1835, married Anthony Moran from the nearby village of Baralty. They immigrated together in the 1860s, settling in a small coal-mining town near