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THE STORIES OF Irish people who fled the famine are being told in a new exhibition in Dublin over the summer.
It looks at how the famine gripped the country and how workhouses, emigration or starvation became the only options for hundreds of thousands of Irish people.
Between 1845 and 1851, around 1.2 million people left Ireland and it continued at a high level after the famine with five million people emigrating by 1910.
Florence Burke
Florence Burke was 19 when he and his younger brother John fled the famine in Cork in 1848 and landed in Staten Island in New York.
He lived in the rough Five Points area of New York before moving to West Springfield, Massachusetts where he got married and had a family while working as a tenant farmer.
In exchange for a portion of farmland for his family, he enlisted in the Union Army during the 1864 American Civil War as a ‘substitute’ for a wealthy man who was drafted.
Six months later, aged 35, he died in a battle in Petersburg, Virginia.
The exhibition described how, “He made the ultimate sacrifice but benefited his wife and children and the next generation of Burke’s.”
His son’s children went to colleges such as Brown and Boston University and all became professionals working as judges, dentists and for the government.
His great-great granddaughter Ellen Alden discovered an old letter box with letters and photographs of Burke in her attic in Andover Massachusetts four years ago.
The letters were addressed to his wife, also called Ellen, whilst he was serving in the Union Army. Alden went on to write a book about her ancestry.
Gerard McCarthy has produced the exhibition himself over the past six months, including a 15 minute video as part of it.
McCarthy worked as a computer programmer and in sales but started working on his passion, which is history, during the centenary of the 1916 Rising. He produced a small film and went around schools in Ireland showcasing it.
He told TheJournal.ie that for this exhibition people were happy to give him stuff for free and people sent him information about their Irish ancestors.
The exhibition, which is on the top floor of St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, is open from 29 May – 30 September.
It’s a great story though…
‘His great-great granddaughter Ellen Alden discovered an old letter box with letters and photographs of Burke in her ATTACK in Andover Massachusetts four years ago’ ;-) lol
@Pateen Johncruck: did you read the story or just look for grammar and spelling errors. Because if all you have to say is that lol at you;)
@prop joe: You evidently didn’t read my other comment, so let’s just lol @ each other!
Famine? What Famine? A single crop, the potato crop, failed. There were millions of hens, pigs, goats, sheep, cows, fish in the rivers and sea and an abundance of many other crops in the fields such as barley, wheat, rye etc, etc, all over Ireland while people starved to death. Sadly and inexcusably, these were kept exclusivley for export and to feed the British landlords who ensured none of these went to the Irish people. Famine? What famine? It was genocide.
@Ed Burke: Yet another Journal reader who’s just looked up the famine on Wikipedia. Yes, potatoes failed. Yes, other crops didn’t. But how were the poor to obtain those crops? Ireland was actually a net importer of food during the famine. Any accusations of genocide are just nationalist propaganda.
He may well have joined up in 1864, but the Civil War was from 1861 to 1865.
Why are we still insisting on calling it a famine?
Potato blight.
Genocide
Damn those illegal economic migrants!
@Rui Firmino: actually America is the only western country who had been excepting immigrants for the last few hundred years. Irish, Italian and other European immigrants just couldn’t walk in they had to be processed to legally enter the country. The bosses want freedom of movement to push down pay. Now they are wondering why Trump was elected and Brexit happened.
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