A truly excellent book on this topic is The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith. It is so readable it was made a Book of the Month Club selection, but it is nevertheless a scholarly and authoritative study. Do read it if you can - it is still available in a Penguin version. It was originally published in 1962.
There is also a lot of information on the web. One excellent one is "The Great Hunger Foundation" site.
Here is the link: Great Hunger Foundation
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Thomas Stanton, another of Grandpa Rufus's uncles, said he came to America in 1846. This was in the second year of the Great Hunger (1845-49) during which Ireland lost at least a quarter, and maybe as much as a third, of her population - to death and emigration. It's too easy to say that, it's too easy to say, "Oh, yes, my people came over during the Potato Famine," and too difficult to imagine the horror behind the words. Two million (at least) people, dead or disappeared. It changed Ireland and the Irish forever. Before the Hunger, the Irish marriage age was the youngest in Europe; afterwards it was the oldest. Before the Hunger, the family land was divided among all the children; afterwards it went to one child (who waited to marry until the parents died) and the others were expected to emigrate. Before the Hunger, the people clung steadfastly to their language and customs; afterwards they spoke English and some of them at least became "West Britons."
. . . Survivors of the Famine developed a new outlook about their economic well-being. No longer satisfied with the precarious existence endured by their pre-Famine forebears, those who remained on the land consciously sought to improve their material status. As one . . . noted, "it had passed into an article of religion . . . that the whole business of life was to succeed, no matter by what means." (Janet Nolan, Ourselves alone : women's emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920. (Lexington, Ky. : University Press of Kentucky, c1989), p. 19.)
We call it the Great Hunger - or the Potato Famine - because it was only the potato crop which failed. There was food in Ireland - and it continued to be exported while the people starved.
There had been crop failures before, the earliest recorded in 1728 in fact, but never on this scale, if only because never before had so many people been so entirely dependent upon the potato. During the first half of the 19th century, the population in Ireland exploded, from 5 million in 1800 to at least 8.2 million and possibly 9 million in 1841. In an ultimately vicious circle, the potato made this population growth possible, and the population growth made dependence on the potato absolute. The potato has been called a nearly perfect food, and combined with a little bit of milk, or even buttermilk, it made healthy children. The children, grown, needed land of their own - there was very little work to be had, agricultural or otherwise, so a person HAD to have land to survive. The land was divided into smaller and smaller bits.
The potato, provided it did not fail, enabled great quantities of food to be produced at a trifling cost from a small plot of ground. Sub-division could never have taken place without the potato: an acre and a half would provide a family of five or six with food for twelve months, while to grow the equivalent grain required an acreage four to six times as large . . . . (Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger (New York: Signet, 1964), p. 30)
By 1841, in Connacht as a whole, 64% of the land holdings were less than 5 acres. In Mayo, 90% of the people were dependent upon the potato. Any crop failure was bad; five years of crop failure was an unmitigated disaster. The disaster was compounded by the widespread belief in laissez-faire: government should not interfere with the operations of the marketplace (and giving starving people food was such an interference). Despite this, some relief was provided, but often with conditions attached that were meant to be punitive: if you gave up and went to the poorhouse, for example, you would be separated from the rest of your family. The poorhouses were in any case overwhelmed, often unable to provide enough food for their inmates, and they were also notorious breeding grounds for disease.
The British government felt that the Irish landlords, who had taken so much money out of Ireland for so many years (an estimated 6 million pounds in 1842 alone), should bear the major burden of the relief effort. Instead, many landlords chose to evict their tenants, forgoing rents in order to avoid taxes. Some of them went so far as to charter ships, to take their tenants to America and get them off the relief rolls forever. Lord Palmerston, two times Prime Minister of Great Britain, was one of the worst of these: he sent 2,000 of his tenants to Canada in 1847. Hundreds of them died and most of the rest had to be supported by Canadian taxpayers. ["They were so ill and so poorly prepared for the voyage that the chief surgeon at the quarantine station reported '. . . many are almost in a state of nudity; 99 percent of the passengers on this ship must become a public charge immediately.'" (Edward Laxton, The Famine Ships: the Irish Exodus to America (Henry Holt: New York, 1996), p. 77) ]
Conditions became worse in 1848 and 1849, with various reports at the time recording dead bodies everywhere. The catastrophe was particularly bad in County Mayo, where nearly ninety per cent of the population were dependent on the potato. By 1848, Mayo was a county of total misery and despair, with any attempts at alleviating measures in complete disarray. People were dying and emigrating in their thousands. We will never know how many died in the county during those terrible years. The 'official' statistics for the county show that the population dropped from 388,887 in 1841 to 274,499 in 1851, but it is accepted that the actual figure in 1841 was far higher than the official census return. It can safely be said that over 100,000 died in Mayo from the famine epidemic . . . ( Bernard O'Hara and Nollaig Ómuraíl,. "County Mayo: An Outline History" (Part 4 1800 -1900) : The Great Famine. Found on the Internet at Mayo on the Move, <http://www.mayo-ireland.ie/Mayo/History/H4to16.htm> 9 Aug 2003)
One observer reported that there was an eerie silence over all the countryside.
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It is safe to assume that the Great Hunger had something to do with our people coming to the U.S.
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